Day 1: Oh weird, there's an uncanny valley for shoes! Inspired by the 5 pairs of black shoes in very similar styles spanning the last couple of decades ... the 20 year old pair were almost, but not quite, back in fashion.

Day 2: Woah, how many pairs of black socks does one woman need ... particularly a woman who hasn't worn black socks in over 5 years ... and So what sort of idiot ladders a pair of tights then washes them & puts them back in the drawer?? This was an easy day, if it had holes in it went in the bin.

Day 3: Hey, when did the Ugly Fairy visit those jumpers? Seriously, those were some of my favourite jumpers, over 10 years ago, how come they look so appalling now? But on the flip side, the other thought was So why were these in the "unlikely to wear" drawer? as I discovered a couple of perfectly good t-shirts, amongst other things.

Day 4: Ooooh, that still fits, can't fling it now can I? and My god, the Ugly Fairy went to town on these blouses! So I still have some dresses I'm unlikely to wear (tho some might do nicely as tunic tops these days), but on the flip side I finally had enough space to hang up a bunch of tops (some of which I'd forgotten I owned).

Day 5: So, how'm I going to organise this lot, I'll just clean this necklace while I think ... *time passes* ... wonder when I last cleaned it, if I ever did? ... *time passes* ... you know, this is really fiddly, wish I hadn't started ... *time passes* OK, I'm going to go sit down while I do this and help J with the crossword ... *time passes* It's a silver chain choker, about half a cm wide, and once I'd started cleaning round every link I kinda had to carry on. Took ages tho, but I did get it clean and all the jewellery organised in the end. Pretty much none of that is being got rid of, either - there is some stuff I'll likely never wear, but generally there's some sentimental value to it like who it was a present from (for example my Grandma).

In the end, I managed to get rid of 4 bin bags worth of utterly unwearable stuff (generally structurally unsound), and about half as much again to go to charity (structurally sound, just I won't wear it). Also, I now know I have 57 t-shirts with band logos on, pretty much all bought at gigs. That seems a little OTT, but I bet I still buy a shirt at the merch desk of the next gig I go to ;)

And all my clothes fit in the available space, and we can see the top of the dressing table again. Not bad :)

Finally got Day 2 photos of our Paris trip sorted out & uploaded to flickr & captioned! :) We spent that day mostly in the Louvre, so here are many photos from there. (Day 1 is here, if you missed it.) Hopefully it won't take another 3 months to sort out Day 3 of the photos! ;)

I decided to stick with manual data-entry rather than scanning & OCRing it (which grahamb had suggested), partly coz scanning everything on a flatbed scanner that lives under my desk wouldn't be terribly much better for my back than typing stuff in ;) Partly coz I haven't got the scanner set up yet (bought a new all-in-one printer just before Christmas when I saw one on offer, to do the Christmas card labels, only bothered to set up the printer so far). And so I'd have to figure that out (probably just works in Win7 tho), and then sort out OCRing it, and then check it handled the 4 different handwriting styles (and the mess that sometimes was made of the data entry). And that all seemed like a lot more work than just typing numbers in (and if I do it a little at a time, it'll not be that bad). And so I typed up the rest of 1986 yesterday :)

More work on the script, too - got it to get rid of the linebreaks (thanks marnanel :) ), got it to handle 0 and empty fields differently (thanks jarel, who also figured out why some of the empty fields were empty & some were undefined :) ). And got it to draw some proof of concept Max/Min graphs, of which this is a representative sample:



Obvious flaws - needs scale marking, it's too small, colour choice sucks. But hey, it's a graph! ;) J had to help me figure out some stuff, and I really seriously need to tidy up & abstract the code that draws it coz it's full of numbers (which I found easier to follow at the time but later it's going to be an incomprehensible mess and changing anything is tedious). It's progress though and once I figure out one set of graphs there's several subsets of the data that I can represent with not much more work.

In lieu of content have a picture of the cat from back in November - the green thing is a pyramid. Well, a carpet covered bit of cardboard which was roughly pyramid shaped with a door (hole) in one side. Worth the ~£1.90 we paid for it, but not worth the original £10 that Focus were trying to sell it for.

The cat squashed it flat pretty quickly, he didn't really fit in it after all. But every so often he does this mad run-round-the-house-like-a-nut thing, and that time he ended up half in his pyramid. I don't think he quite knew where he was, how he got there, or what to do next. So I took a photo ;)

The second episode of Jerusalem: The Making of a Holy City covered the period from ~600AD to ~1300AD, called Invasion Invasion Invasion it mostly show-cased people behaving badly in the name of either Christianity or Islam. The programme opened with a brief history of the beginning of Islam & the significance of Jerusalem to the Muslims (it is the place where Muhammed ascended to heaven on the Night Journey). The city was conquered by the Muslims early in their history, and they ruled there for about 400 years or so with varying degrees of peace & tolerance. And then we were on to the invasions - some of which were bloodless, some of which lead to a certain degree of tolerance, but given this time period covers the crusades it shouldn't be a surprise that some of the invasions were very bloody indeed. Mostly the city buildings were left intact, tho often re-purposed to the current ruler's religion (Queen Melisande had royal appartments in the al-Aqsa mosque, for instance) - until the Tartars came along at the end of this time period & destroyed the buildings as well as slaughtered the inhabitants.

Our second programme of the evening was the second episode of Frozen Planet - this time covering springtime at the poles. Lots of neat scenes of various penguin species being penguiny :) Particularly amusing was the male Adele penguins building nests and one of the penguins stealing rocks off another penguin's nests. The bit that really stuck in my mind, tho, was the sequence about the moth caterpillar that freezes every winter (literally freezes) then thaws out each spring to start eating again. Eventually after 14 years the caterpillar thaws out one last time to spin itself a cocoon, turn into a moth and then die after a few days. Which was something I'd never heard of before, and it's kinda neat - tho I am left wondering how many caterpillars die during the freeze-thaw process.

I'm having one of my periodic attempts to get myself organised (it's that new year thing again, although these do happen at non-arbitrary-date-changes too ;) ) - sometimes it works, sometimes it fizzles out after a week or two, we'll see what happens this time. Habits I'm trying to kick start again include learning the bass guitar (via Rock Band 3 - I can almost play the bass part to Imagine & the bass part to I Love Rock N' Roll now), doing a little more exercise (actually via a couple of rounds a day (or so) of the sword fighting challenge mode in Sports Champions on the PS3 - it's a Move game & it does actually involve a fair bit of exertion), doing a bit more tidying up as a general thing (the goal is that 15 minutes of tidying happens every day, and then that'll over-take the downward slide which necessitates a major tidy-up every few weeks - I keep the house clean, but I'm not good at keeping it tidy ;) ). As well as starting some projects back up.

I'm also trying to make sure I actually use my shiny new phone (given I spent money on it rather than get the not quite as good one that I could get for free on my contract :) ). So I got some apps that hopefully will help the organisation process. I looked at a few to-do list apps before settling on Task List - which works almost the way I want my to-do list to work, it handles both repeating and non-repeating tasks easily and would let me set up dateless ones too (although I'd prefer those to also display on the "Due today" view as for me a dateless task is a floating one that's always due today, until it gets done). I think the biggest "quirk"/annoyance of the app for me is that if you have a repeating task that you decide not to do today (like if I'm out of the house all day so the housework isn't getting done) then you have to remember to check it off as done anyway otherwise it'll go into the overdue tasks (which don't show up on "Due today") and when you finally do check it as done it'll repeat N whatevers from when you checked it off (so if it's something I do on Tuesdays but one week I do it on a Wednesday then it'd switch to Wednesdays after that unless I remember to check it off the day before even tho I didn't do it).

I'm also tracking our money a bit more closely (I always have a feel for it, but the feel is that we've dipped into savings a little too often over the last few months, so I'd like to see where that's going). So I looked for a free app that doesn't require internet or phonecall making permissions, and that was harder to find than you'd think, but My Money seemed to do what I wanted, and not what I didn't want, with a minimum of real world info involved. Essentially you set up an account (or however many), set up "budgets" (categories), enter transactions which you name & categorise & it keeps running totals for each budget during the month and for the month in total. And will draw graphs, and it seems to handle recurring transactions (I won't know for sure till Feb when some of them recur). And it doesn't know anything about our real money (like bank account, balance in account(s), who we pay money to for bills, etc etc), nor does it bother me with currencies etc it's just numbers. Basically it's what I used to use a spreadsheet to do but it has the advantage that if we're away from home I can add things in while we're away rather than remember for when we come back. Oh, and it means I can't get bogged down in the mechanics of the spreadsheet, so there's no excuse for not using it.

And I'm also trying out a shopping list app, having forgotten my piece of paper far too many times (my phone lives in my pocket, it comes with me when I leave the house). Out of Milk has so far done what I want without getting in the way too much - I tried out a different one that could do everything except make you a cup of tea, but it took too much work to set up and to figure out how to set up. So far this one has been easy to add items to, easy to tick them off as I go round the shops. And has actually helped with adding things to the list when I think of them (ie use the last whatever it is up, and there's my phone with me so I add it and don't forget before I get to the pad of paper or lose the note and start a new list accidentally). It's easy to add things you've bought before and there's also the possibility of inventory lists (maybe useful, maybe not, not sure I'd actually bother to update quantities as I use things, rather than just put it on the list when I notice it's low, I may set up lists when I tidy up the kitchen cupboards and see how that goes). And easy to set up multiple lists (I've got a rolling House Stuff one now too, as well as my standard groceries one).

"Renaissance People: Lives that Shaped the Modern Age" by Robert C. Davis & Beth Lindsmith was one of my Christmas presents (and counts as the last book of 2011 because I finished it while we were visiting Oxford so it must be pre-New Year's Day), and is about one of my favourite periods of history (the Ancient Egyptian stuff is J's thing really).

The book consists of 94 short biographies organised into seven sections, each of which has an introductory chapter. The sections are chronologically arranged, each with a theme - for instance Chapter 1 is "Old Traditions & New Ideas", covering 1400-1450 (setting the stage for the Renaissance proper) and including people such as Cosimo de'Medici & Jan van Eyck. Each life is covered in at most 3 or 4 pages, so clearly doesn't go into much depth on any given individual - instead they combine to give a flavour of the sorts of people & sorts of lives those people had in Europe during the Renaissance. Some of the people are the well known ones (like Leonardo da Vinci, Michaelangelo, Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, Catherine de'Medici etc etc), but others were people I hadn't heard of (some I should've, some it's unlikely I would've before).

A good read - interesting & not at all dry in style. As the biographies are all short it never gets bogged down, but still manages to convey a lot of information. And it's well illustrated - mostly with reproductions of painting of or by the person being talked about.

Yesterday was the first Essex Egyptology Group meeting of the year, and the talk was given by Sally-Ann Ashton who works at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge both as a curator of their Egyptian collections and in their outreach education programme in prisons. The focus of her work for the last few years has been looking at Egypt from the perspective of its identity as an African country, and she opened her talk by discussing identity and how one's own identity shapes one's perceptions & assumptions. Ancient Egypt is a particularly striking example of this as despite being geographically within Africa it has traditionally been discussed from a very Euro-centric perspective. She provided quotes from books showing that especially in the 19th Century there was a tendency for European & US Egyptologists to assume that the Ancient Egyptians must've migrated in from the Middle East or were even "a branch of Caucasians" rather than African people, displaying the racist world-view of the archaeologists involved rather than reflecting the evidence available.

After showing us some examples of Egyptian art where the non-European features of people are highlighted she moved on to what I think is the meat of her current work - looking at the material culture of the Ancient Egyptians and drawing correspondences & correlations with other African cultures. Two types of items that she has looked at in particular are headrests & hair combs. I've always thought of headrests as a particularly Egyptian thing, but they are actually found in a variety of African cultures - even still used today in some places (she had a photo of an Ethiopian man using a headrest taken a couple of years ago). The work she was doing on hair combs involved both comparisons in styles etc to modern & ancient African combs and also investigating the changes in the combs as compared to the changing population of Egypt. In particular she is looking at the width of the gaps between the teeth of the comb, and what that suggests about the hair-types of the comb users - her initial findings are that the early combs (pre-Dynastic) are much like modern combs used for afro-type hair.

She told us that studying Egypt as part of Africa is still controversial today - although less so in the US than in Europe & Egypt itself (she mentioned in passing in answer to a question that one of her colleagues in Egypt had stopped speaking to her after learning the direction her studies were going). One example she gave was that she was involved in an imaging project to reconstruct Cleopatra's features, and after the resulting (brown-skinned) image was published in the Daily Mail in 2008 she is still receiving hate mail (she was fairly laid back about it - saying that she's gathering it up & plans to write an article about it). I think possibly this controversialness lead her to over-stress her point a bit - after all while Egypt is part of Africa (and that is important) it is also bordering the Middle East (& at the time Mesopotamia was the seat of other advanced civilisations), and it is also bordering the Mediterranean which brought it into contact with other peoples & civilisations. Nonetheless this was an interesting & thought-provoking talk, and I think it may be necessary to make the point so strongly to overcome the "default" perception of Ancient Egypt and the nuances can be more usefully discussed once it's become a part of the orthodoxy.

I'm trying to kick-start a few dormant projects at the moment (why, yes, it's a new year, funny how that happens ;) ). One of these is to actually do something with the 26 & a bit years of data on weather in my parents' back garden (max/min temps, barometric pressure, humidity, rain, wind). There's also probably about 26 years worth of failed attempts to do something with the data ;) Starting with hand drawn monthly graphs back when I was a kid, through to various computer related things.

The last attempt got bogged down on designing a form for inputting the data so that the workflow actually worked for me. Pretty much everything I tried to implement just got in the way, and given the amount of data there is it has to be as easy as possible to do the data entry otherwise it won't get done. This time I'm side-stepping that altogether. Personally I find typing numbers into a spreadsheet both easy & accurate - I can just keep looking at the data and 99% of the time I type the right number without checking keys or screen, and in the vast vast vast majority of times when I make an error I know it as soon as I type it (the muscle movement "feels" wrong for the number I'm reading). And I can just work along one row & back the next (number, right arrow, number, right arrow ... number, down arrow, number, left arrow, number, left arrow ... number, down arrow, number, right arrow etc etc etc) - again a muscle feel thing for the right rhythm. But I could never get a form to quite sit as comfortably under the fingers, and not having the data just there to skim review (at the end of the sheet or when I thought I'd made a mistake) was a difficulty too.

So the brainwave on this reboot of the project was: if it's easiest to just type it into a spreadsheet, why not just type it into a spreadsheet? That's what I'm doing this time - type up a month, save it out as a CSV file with a sensible name (like Nov1985). And the data is there & manually editable etc (unlike the iteration of the project where it was in a SQLite database). I'd rather not just use a spreadsheet programme to do the data manipulation, I've tried that before and while I'm sure it's possible to make the spreadsheet dance & do tricks, I found it required too much manual intervention to get the graphs to look as I wanted them to. So that requires a bit of programming (which is the fun bit of the project :) ).

Yesterday I typed up a few months (Oct 1985 - Feb 1986), and started some work on a perl script to read in the data & draw graphs/generate statistics etc. Right now the script works to read in the data from the files & put it into an internal data structure. I also started to write something to calculate averages for the various parameters for a month or a year, but went round in circles a few times (nested loops, limited scope variables, & when to reset variables to zero are things that tend to break my head unless I pay close attention) & it still doesn't currently work.

The immediately obvious issues that need fixing when I next work on this (noted primarily for my own benefit) are:

• Strip line end characters (\n\r) from line ends before manipulating data. If I recall right, there's an elegant way to do this I just need to look it up.


• If there is no value for a parameter make this end up as distinct from when the value is 0, set this up while it's reading the data in.


• Find the graph drawing modules(? extensions? I forget the name for these) that I had before and set them up again.

Took the Christmas decorations down yesterday, which always seems a little sad. And makes the front room look bare & empty (which it is so not). And is mildly irritating, coz part of the point of an artificial tree is that it doesn't shed needles everywhere, but I still find myself hoovering up lots of artificial shed needles ;)

So I cheered myself up by teasing the cat a bit - he's fascinated by the tree box, but can't figure out how to get in it by himself (the overlapping flaps at the top defeat his tiny little mind). After a bit of amusement just watching him try & get in I waited till he settled on the top of the box, then slooooooowly opened first one flap then the other - gotta give him time to adjust to the new conformation of the box for the first one, then he thought he'd be able to do the same trick second time and dropped into the box *giggle* Not too mean, coz I let him sit in there for a while & hide & feel pleased with himself before I turfed him out to put the tree in it :)

He got revenge later by getting up on the dining table and nearly into one of the hampers we got for Christmas before I caught him. Had to donate a box we brought glasses back from J's parents' place in as a new toy for him to keep him out of mischief.

Woke up yesterday to a few power blips - I guess related to the high winds. Didn't actually affect us all that much, but it made the microwave complain and the lights flicker. (And I discovered that the microwave clock resets to 1:00am, which just seems Wrong. Everything should reset to 00:00!!).

So nothing major, but when we got to the dentists for our checkups we discovered those same little power problems had taken out the computer system there. I rather hope they have proper backups ;) They still did our checkups, but weren't doing any major work - all the notes on things like which teeth people were having extracted or whatever were on the computer system. And as my dentist put it (in conversation with the dental nurse as they peered at my teeth) she "wasn't risking having a computer problem finish her dental career". I gather the receptionist didn't want to ring round to cancel people's appointments till the big boss had given his OK (he was at the other practice). Obviously they couldn't make other appointments either, so I need to ring back today & book an appointment for the fillings I need :/ (ETA: And apparently their computer systems still aren't back up, I really hope they have backups!)

The power stuff did also remind us that we still had some of the electronics on the TV half of the room not on a surge-protected powerstrip. So on the way home from the dentist I picked up a couple of individually switched surge-protected 6-ways to replace the existing 4-ways, and now we actually have the entire hi-fi plugged in for the first time in a while (missing were the tape deck and the record deck), and I managed to find space for the secondary router over there (the main router has the main PCs on it each with individual IPs, the secondary one has one of those IPs and runs NAT coz we've run out of IP address for all our stuff and does wifi for phones etc). Next all I need is two short network cables and then we can have the PVR plugged into the network too (for iplayer on it) - well, one cable to replace the too long one between the two routers, and one for the PVR.

And that was my thrilling day yesterday ;) I shot things/people all evening to make up for it! Including successfully knifing someone, which kinda made my evening (simple things ...). Er, this is in Battlefield 3 in case you were concerned ;)

First TV night of the new year - and starting on two new series (both in HD so we can clear off some space on the PVR!).

I gave J the book "Jerusalem: The Biography" by Simon Sebag Montefiore for Christmas, and we'd also recorded the linked TV series so thought watching it now would make a nice complement to J's reading. The first episode covers the period from the first evidence of settlement on the site (in the bronze age, around 3000BC) until the 7th Century AD. It was an interesting programme, despite sometimes feeling a little shallow (likely because this covered ~3700 years in an hour, J says the book is more in depth) it still told me things I didn't already know. It also felt pretty even handed in its treatment of the meaning the city has to the different religions for which it is holy. Also I was particularly impressed with the way the visuals fitted the things he was talking about - rather than the seemingly random "crowded modern street" scenes that appear to be the fashion for historical documentaries. Examples that particularly stood out to me were when he was talking about the city being sacked (by the Babylonians) the images were of men in uniforms moving through the streets of Jerusalem (actually police, I think), inter-cut with scenes of running children (actually just running coz they were kids, but it worked in the context). Also some very evocative empty (or nearly empty) streets and alleyways while he was talking about the exile of the Jews in Babylon & the expulsion of the Jews from the city after Titus put down their rebellion against the Romans.

Second programme of the evening was the first episode of Frozen Planet, a David Attenborough programme about wildlife at the poles. Full of breath-taking scenery, astonishing footage of the wildlife, just as you'd expect :) And full of "ooh, I didn't know that" moments, too - did you know there's a bare bit at the Antarctic? With no ice, and pretty much nothing else? I didn't before I watched the programme.

We managed to fit 4 households in 4 different places into a week and a half this Christmas (ok, that includes our own, which makes it a little less impressive ;) ) - which meant we saw several people but none of them for quite long enough.

Started off with Christmas Eve, Christmas Day & Boxing Day by ourselves in Ipswich - mostly playing games, to be honest (and eating and drinking!). J got 4 or 5 PS3 games among his presents, and I'm currently obsessed with Battlefield 3. There was also enough food to feed the 500 (there is still turkey in the freezer, I must make soup soon), and a fair amount of wine too :)

Then a week of travelling about visiting family - starting off in Oxford with my parents, followed by a few hours with J's sister and family in Macclesfield, and then New Year in Blanchland with J's parents. Whilst in Oxford we also managed to fit in a trip to the new Egyptian Galleries at the Ashmolean, and I went & looked at some of the paintings in the museum too (including the room of the peeled lemons ...). And in Blanchland we set up the new computer that we & Jo & Chris had got John & Anne for Christmas - which now means they can do G+ hangouts too (their old PC was too slow to handle them) and so can see Jo & Chris's son more often than they can travel there :)

And now we've been back home for a couple of days and normality is beginning to reassert itself (the 7am start this morning was rather brutal), the cat has even asserted his superiority by jumping out at me from under the dining table this morning so I think he's forgiven us for the cattery ;)

(Tho Christmas is not over yet - I don't really understand why everyone seems to be taking their decorations down, it's not Epiphany yet!!)

Yesterday was a gorgeous sunny day, far too nice for J to want to stay in the office all day - so he took the afternoon off & we headed off to the beach :D

It didn't start auspiciously, to be honest - the car wouldn't start (it did later, still dunno what was wrong), so instead of driving to Aldeburgh we went to Plan B and walked down to the station to get a train to Felixstowe instead. Not only did J get blisters off his sandals on the walk, but we also missed the train by about 5 minutes (having had no idea when the trains were & there's only one an hour ...). So we kinda hung out at the station for a while.

   

(These photos are all fairly heavily processed - I've recently stumbled across a newly started forum for photographers (CafeTogs). It seems a nice friendly place to post photos/talk to people about photos :) And I've been playing around a lot more with processing the photos I've taken, inspired by stuff other people have posted.)

But after that poor start, the afternoon improved :)

First stop once we got to the beach was to buy an ice-cream! :) Then down to the sea for a paddle:

   

Followed by some basking in the sun. I was a little surprised how empty the beach was - sure, it was a working day, but the schools had kicked out by the time we got there so I was expecting more kids around.

               

Then a walk along the waterfront, before settling in for a nice pint of Spindrift in one of the pubs :)



All in all a lovely summer's afternoon trip to the beach :)

Random thought that's longer than 140 characters, but would otherwise probably go on identica/twitter/facebook:

I forget, very quickly, how good listening to music on headphones is. Normally I listen to stuff on the stereo while I'm at the pc or in the kitchen or whatever, so I don't get the proper stereo effect or even enough volume half the time (oh the woes of not having a detached house ;) ). And that way I miss out on stuff like the initial beat on Blue Monday kicking in in my lower jaw somewhere, and some neat right---->left swooshing stuff.

Also: I need to get my playlists (all 4 of them) into my normal music player (on J's computer, hooked up to the stereo) coz I only listen to them when I'm listening to music through headphones (on my computer) while he watches a film and I'm not playing games.

We've just come back from the Marillion Weekend 2011 - basically 3,000 or so Marillion fans take over a Center Parcs in the Netherlands, and the band play 3 shows over the weekend and there's all sorts of other Marillion-related stuff.



There's a helluva lot packed into 3 days, so I'll write about highlights & such rather than try and put it into a coherent chronological order :) I'll link in some photos, but the whole set (of ~50) can be found here. I didn't take my DSLR, because (as J pointed out) I'd probably have spent more time trying to work out the settings to get decent pictures with it (and worrying about it getting bashed) than enjoying the concerts. So these were all taken with the Lumix, and the gig ones are handheld above my head in a bouncy crowd. Frankly I'm astonished anything came out at all ;)

( I didn't want to cut this, but it's too big, so I've had to )

Two weeks worth of TV night in one, just a day before I watch some more! Very much mini commentary on these, I've been putting off writing about them for too long anyway.

Michael Wood's Story of England: This was the last episode of this series, and it had got up to the era of photography and living memory. As always that emphasises how much the world has changed over the last century (whereas reading documentation from longer ago emphasises how much people are people and the same under the skin). And it covered the two World Wars, which makes for poignant and saddening viewing.

The Spice Trail: We watched one of these each week, and have now finished the series. In contrast to the first episode I had no issues with it crossing the line into cringe-inducing watching in the other two :) Episode 2 (Nutmeg & Cloves) was very much a tale of European colonisers behaving badly in Indonesia. Episode 3 was about Saffron & Vanilla - I'd forgotten (if I ever knew) that vanilla is a New World spice, it's so ubiquitous and "normal" these days you don't think of it as not existing in European culture forever.

A History of Ancient Britain: Watched the first episode of this so far. Hate the camera work - too much shaky handheld stuff, and for heavens sakes stop playing with the focus point (and depth of field) just because you can. (And definitely a sign I've watched more telly over the last year than pretty much ever before that I'm having opinions about how it was filmed!) Content was good, however - and a reminder of how shallow our civilisation is, this was a whole hour's programme covering evidence for people in Britain for hundreds of thousands of years before there was farming. Including Neanderthals as people, here - evidence (in Britain) starts at ~500,000BC, farming gets developed (in the Near East) at ~6,000BC. (Edited to add: I mean shallow as in hasn't lasted long in the grand scheme of things, even compared just to having people about - not the other connotations of the word.)

Whole bunch of books read over the last 11 or so days. Mini-reviews partly coz if I leave it till I've the inclination to write a post-per-book then it'll never happen ;)

"Chill" & "Grail" by Elizabeth Bear (books 8 & 9). Managed to time it just right so I finished "Chill" the day before "Grail" came through the door. These are the sequels to "Dust" - "Chill" happens pretty much immediately afterwards, and gives more of the back story as well as dealing with where next now the generation ship is back on the move. "Grail" is set once they reach their destination - and discover it's inhabited by people who left Earth after them (and to whom they're now legend, in the same category as the Flying Dutchman in our culture). So "first contact" plus culture clash - neither of which I'd like to live in, but nicely done in that the new one is superficially more like our culture so we can see both sides of the culture clash as "familiar". Lots to think about & get your teeth into - the big one that springs to mind is things about identity, people whose memories/personalities are in new bodies are the person of the mind not the person whose body it was, and set against that Tristan (who has continuity of experience plus is still in the same body) whose time locked up in the dark has changed him so he's not the man he was neither to himself nor to others. And the "rightminding" tech/concept of the non-ship people gives me the creeps, but would the ends (a generally more peaceful, more rational, more sane and well adjusted society) justify the means (screwing with people's mental state to make them fit societal norms and to make them easier for society to deal with). Why do I have knee-jerk horrors about that, is that like their knee-jerk horror about physical/genetic manipulation?

"The Dragon Factory" by Jonathan Maberry (book 10). This is the sequel to "Patient Zero" that I read last year - same hero (Joe Ledger) who this time instead of fighting against terrorist zombie attacks is fighting against Nazi inspired/directed genetic disease attacks. Gloriously over-the-top thriller, not particularly plausible but I don't think it's supposed to be - it's modern Bond type story with super-villans that want to take over the world muahahahaha!

"Third Strike" by Zoë Sharp (book 11). Thriller at the more plausible end of the spectrum, story is mostly tightly focused & personal with government backed conspiracies to be stumbled into rather than the secret bases and grand teams of minons of the Maberry. This is several books into the Charlie Fox series, and characterwise you might not get all the impact of various bits without having read the rest (and it'll spoil the character storylines from earlier books if you read them out of order). Still enjoyed it, but the character-arc twist/setup for next book at the end somehow left me not being particularly enthusiastic for the next one. I guess I just wish Charlie's personal life could take a distinct step forwards, and this seems to have moved us one step forward over the book and two steps back by the ending.

"Hell & Earth" by Elizabeth Bear (book 12). Second half of the second duology in the Promethean Age books, this was part of 09's xmas pressie that only turned up last month. This duology is fae in Elizabethan England - with the protagonists being Will Shakespeare & Christopher Marlowe - the other one is modern day US. Of course, now I need to re-read the first two books ("Blood & Iron" and "Whiskey & Water") to see how knowing how the history turned out changes how you see the modern day era story playing out. And coz of my long pause between reading the other 3 and this one I suspect I missed quite a bit in this one while feeling my way back into the story. Love the Elizabethan feel to the prose and storyline - Bear details in the afterword several bits of historical accuracy sacrificed for storytelling, but the flavour is right :)

"Dying Bites" by D. D. Barant (book 13). Good idea for a different take on the current Urban Fantasy genre, but I felt it was let down by sloppy world building. Our heroine (brittle and somewhat screwed up but kickass and competant, as seems to be the norm for this genre) is transported by magic from our world to a parallel world where only 1% of the population are true human, the rest are vampire, werewolves and golems - so that she can hunt a true-human serial killer for them. I liked the way that this meant there was no need to explain how come there were these beasties & no-one had noticed till modern times, and the way that it meant the protagonist had to deal with culture shock on top of everything else. And I liked the dilemma it put her in with her loyalties torn between catching a killer (whose capture would also let her go home), and sympathising with his political stance. But I felt the author's desire to explain how this world had ended up like but not like ours lead Barant to give too much detail that undermined any credibility and completely snapped my suspension of disbelief. (Hard to do, I'll handwave a lot!) Barant has a character explain how the divergence point was in the 1100s, and gradually vampires infiltrated the aristocracy and the werewolves infiltrated the Catholic hierarchy. The non-human races survived the Black Death better than the true humans and that was the start of human decline (although it took centuries to reach that 1% mark). So far, so good. My problem was that everything seemed to've played out the same way even tho there were immortal vampires in all the high-ranking families - there was a Stalin, a WW1, a WW2. The US seems to have developed in much the same way - there's a Seattle, they go to Anchorage which is that sort of Alaskan wild frontier stereotype. Japanese culture seems like the same. And I just don't buy it. Having an immortal ruler is going to dramatically change a country's history, not just have all the same events but "oh btw he was a vamp" or "oh btw he was a 'wolf". Not going to bother with more of this series.

The British Museum Book of the Dead exhibition closed last Monday, so we took the excuse presented by an interesting sounding lecture in the evening to go for a day-out to the museum on Friday. J headed straight for the exhibition, spending a couple of hours in there, but as I'd found one visit to be sufficient I went for a little wander around with my camera. I mostly poked through rooms J and I had already been to, so I went through the Parthenon room, some of the other Greek stuff, the Egyptian sculpture gallery, the African galleries. Once J came out of the exhibition we had a coffee and then went to look at the rooms with the Islamic stuff. These galleries are deceptively small looking - I think we spent an hour & a half in there, and I looked at about half of it (J looked at maybe a third). Going to have to go back and have another look at that :)

Demons, Disease and the Dead: The Darker Side of Egyptian Religion

This was a lecture linked to the Book of the Dead exhibition given by Kasia Szpakowska. She took us through the darker side of the cast list of the Book of the Dead - so she talked about the demons that hinder you (tho not all are malevolent), the fact that the dead aren't just the justified true of voice (those who pass the Judgement) there are also those who are condemned. And even the true of voice can cause problems for the living and must be placated (the offerings of food to the dead aren't just about keeping them fed, they're also about keeping them happy). One thing that particularly struck me from this part of the talk was that fire is often depicted as a snake! This was because the venom from a snake gives you a burning feeling, so when there are scenes with spitting snakes (for instance in the Book of the Dead) then it might well be a scene with fire. She moved on from there to talk a bit more generally about disease treatment in Ancient Egyptian society - primarily by talking us through the various things that might have been done to help someone suffering from bad dreams. The link between these two segments of the talk is that diseases of all sorts were thought to be caused by demons and the unjustified dead. The line between magic and medicine in Ancient Egypt was pretty much non-existant - for instance swallowing bread to dislodge a fishbone in the throat would be accompanied by ritual words, and they would have regarded both as essential. Szpakowska was a good speaker, but stumbled occasionally on her transitions from one section to another of the talk - I wondered if this was a cut down version of a talk she gives more often or a possibly an amalgamation of two talks. The lecture theatre was packed and it had sold out, the questions at the end made it clear it was a pretty broad audience with people's interest ranging from Egypt to demons (including one chap who was clearly there to add techniques to his demon fighting arsenal ...).

Hidden Treasures of Egypt

The second lecture of our weekend was at the Essex Egyptolgy Group meeting on Sunday. This was given by Dylan Bickerstaffe and he described it as "the closest he gets to a talk on 'what I did on my holidays'". In structure it was a collection of photographs of lesser known places just off the tourist trail in Egypt, or things you might not have noticed in places that are firmly on the tourist trail. All with a particular focus on Amenhotep III and Akhenaten (although not everything was from that era). Amongst (many) other things he showed us several cartouches that had been re-carved over the ages, which tell more about the monuments than maybe we would be able to learn if no Pharaoh ever usurped the monument of another. And he also talked about a set of black pillars that have several cartouches on, and he's not quite sure how come they bear the names of so many different kings (one of these is in the British Museum and J had noticed it before and been curious about it, so that was quite neat to hear about). As well as being an academic (I think) Bickerstaffe does tours of Egypt (both on his own and via Ancient World Tours) and one thing this talk definitely did was sell me on the idea that he'd be a good tour guide - interesting & knowledgeable.

Not dead! The last week or so got busy and used up a lot of my mental energy - not particularly on the same things - and LJ posts were the thing that slipped. So I've a bunch of catchup-type posts to write over the next few days. Loosely these will be (if they all get written): this generic one, one about our British Museum trip plus the Essex Egyptology Group meeting, one about the books I've read, one about the TV I've watched, and probably a separate one linking to photos from the BM trip.

So this is mostly a collection of miscellaneous bits & pieces that don't fit in anywhere else.

As Tuesday was Pancake Day we went round to Ed & Tash's for pancakes & drinks :) This is our traditional way of celebrating pancake day (well, they/he normally visit us but as Tash is pregnant and needing lots of sleep we went there for the evening). And thus Wednesday morning was lost in hangover-land as might be expected ;) It was a good evening, tho, worth the hangover :)

One of the things that ended up taking more time than I'd really expected was my turnset in the Crusader Kings succession game I'm playing - partly it took up more time because I was being more careful and paying more attention while I was playing than I would for a single player game. And partly coz it does take a while to write up and edit the screenshots for that sort of thing, and I underestimated as well as it falling on a busy week. (Thread here; my turnset posts here, here and here.)

Census form arrived in the post - interesting to look at (haven't filled it in yet, will do soon probably online). It includes a rather curious definition of "room" (why do bathrooms not count? is it really significant that my house has one less "room" than my attached neighbour's because two of ours are knocked into one?), and I'm surprised by their interest in our central heating as one of the few things that they specifically ask about the house. Compared to the censuses I've looked at for genealogical stuff (ie 1841-1901) the relationships of the household bit of the form is very very thorough. And you're asked your date of birth not age. Of course thinking of my own census filling-in reminds me how little the censuses really tell us about our ancestors - if you only have info from the census data then you'd think that over the last 30 years I've only lived in two different towns in 2 different households (Oxford with my parents and brother (1 address) in 1981 and 1991; Ipswich (2 different addresses) married to J in 2001 and 2011). But between 1991 and 2001 you can add another 3 towns, which includes 1 house I lived as a lodger, 1 house share, 1 college student accommodation and 1 house I lived in with my ex. And pre-1981 we lived somewhere else in Oxford (which won't be caught on any censuses because my parents weren't living there in 1971 (and in fact weren't married then either). Obviously compared to some people's lists that's still not a lot of places to have lived, but it's still a fair amount to be invisible.

This next book (number 7) isn't for a book club, instead it's something I'd got out from the library and now it's overdue & I can't renew it so I thought it should be next on the list ;) It's the first of a trilogy (I think book 2 is published soon), and I think is the first book by this author. In some ways this is fairly typical stuff - boy grows up to be something special, youngest admitted to the magical university, best ever student etc etc. But in other ways it's not at all. To start off with the story really starts at the end - Kvothe is now an innkeeper in a remote village, waiting out the rest of his life. Some sort of disaster is looming or overtaking the rest of the world, and this is when Chronicler arrives to get Kvothe to tell his tale so it can be written down. So we get the first part of the story of his life knowing that somehow it's all gone awry later. Which isn't just a framing device either, there's a story in the "now" interludes, too.

Kvothe was born a travelling player - so he learns from a young age to act, to tell stories, to play music & sing. Stories and playing a part are themes within the broader story too - and more than once Kvothe's knowledge of how the story should go get him into trouble. That's one of the things I really enjoyed about this book - yes, Kvothe is the best & brightest and a proper "hero from the tales" but this is precisely what gets him into trouble all the time. And you're never many pages from a reminder that he's just a teenage boy for most of this story. A pretty full of himself teenage boy at that - but he's still a sympathetic protagonist, and I'm definitely interested in reading the next two books and seeing how we get from the boy to the man of the "present day" interludes.

And I have a niggling suspicion that once you've read the whole lot there are things in this one that will pop into a different focus - particularly the stories that various story-tellers tell during it. And the words of the songs that get quoted, there's truth even in the children's rhymes if you know how to look at it. And it's probably important that this is Kvothe's story as told by Kvothe with the benefit of hindsight and as told when the past is catching up with him somehow.

The Women of Science Fiction bookclub book for February was "The Dispossessed" by Ursula Le Guin (book 6) and before I started I thought I might've read it before, but now I'm pretty sure that I haven't, I'd just heard of it. It's set in her universe that has the Hainish in it - where there's a collection of planets (of which our Earth is one) all settled by human-ish people, who were all related hundreds of thousands of years ago but have developed in isolation since. So it lets her tell stories about people who are people, but who haven't had our history. The Hainish & Terrans only barely feature in this book, towards the end, the rest of the story is about a binary pair of worlds - the mother planet of Urras and the more recently settled "moon" of Anarres.

The protagonist is Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, who has gone to Urras to work there & collaborate with their scientists - the first person to go from one world to the other since the settling of Anarres. The story starts in the middle, with this journey, and then in alternating chapters we both go forwards from there and also follow Shevek from birth to leaving Anarres. This juxtaposition of different threads of time not only highlights Shevek's growing disenchantment with each world in turn, but also is appropriate to Shevek's work on time & simultaneity (which hooks back into Le Guin's wider universe here with the potential practical application of an instantaneous communication device, the ansible).

The juxtaposition also forces the reader to compare the two societies. The nation that we see on Urras felt to me like a caricature of Victorian society - ultra-capitalist, wealth & status obsessed aristocracy pretending to be a meritocracy, oppressed and demonised poor living in slums. Anarres was settled by a group that were anarchist (with an almost religious fervour) - they invent a new language to avoid the capitalist assumptions of their old one, completely re-organise their social order etc. At first the society on Anarres sounds as if Le Guin is setting it up as a utopia, but as the story continues it becomes clear that while the ideal might have been a good one once people were putting it into practice it got twisted & didn't work quite as it promised to work. What it made me think of was the collapse of the various Communist countries in the late 80s & 90s (long after this book was published) & of Orwell's book "Animal Farm" - share & share alike is a fantastic idea but once you get real people involved you find the system changing so that some people have more of the power & more of the resources. And so it is on Anarres - theoretically you do the work you want, when you want, but practically speaking no-one actually refuses a posting even when that means it splits up families and it seemed like the mechanism for ordering postings is manipulable. So as, say, a composer if you weren't writing the sorts of music that were favoured by the in-group then somehow you'd always end up on postings that have nothing to do with music rather than ones that would let you teach or perform.

This is a "classic" of SF and has won several awards, but unfortunately I found it fairly hard to get into and it felt dated and preachy to me. Partly this is because it was written a long time ago - published in 1974, the year I was born. And styles change, and concerns change (always an issue if you're writing something with a message). I don't think this would have been written in the same way if it had been written following the collapse of the Communist countries, it felt like a product of the Cold War to me. One of the other things that had felt dated was the protagonist himself - making me think of early works by Asimov (tho I'm damned if I could back that feeling up with any specifics). But just now thinking about how to talk about that I had the realisation that the story Le Guin was telling needed that sort of driven not-quite-socially-ept scientist character. Shevek comes to see the flaws in the society of Anarres and to try and change it precisely because he is a man who consciously works out what the ethical behaviour is in any given situation, rather than blindly following what others do.

You'll notice I've not talked much about Urras so far - that's the bit I found very preachy. Anarres to me was both an interesting idea for a society, the result of a conscious attempt to create a fairer world and a world without government, and also interestingly flawed. Urras felt too much to me like Le Guin was rubbing the reader's nose in what our capitalist, sexist society would be like if taken to extremes. This impression wasn't helped by the fact that over the last 40 or so years the treatment of women by society has improved. So the attitudes of people on Urras about how women just weren't clever enough or capable enough of doing anything intellectual or societally useful came across as even more caricatured than I think they might've done to people reading the book in 1974. Maybe instead of thinking it was very preachy I should be filing this issue under "dated" and, like with the bits of Life on Mars that I watched, just feeling very pleased that I am an adult now rather than in the 70s.

I was also a little surprised by how shallow the characterisation of the women felt (this being Le Guin, who I associate with feminism). Shevek had to be male, there's no way she could have written the society of Urras the way she did and had a female protagonist - such a female scientist would not have been welcome on Urras to the extent that she would not have been invited. But the supporting women seemed fairly one-note to me. As an example - there's Shevek's mother, who represents the sort of person Shevek would be without his compassion. Having said that, tho, the male characters are also fairly one-note, so that's perhaps an unfair criticism. The story is really about Shevek (and very focussed on him, out of the individual people) and about the societies, not about the supporting cast.

So in summary - I think this was a good book and has many interesting things to say about politics and about people, much more than I think I got out of it on a single read through. But if I hadn't been reading it for a bookclub I wouldn't've finished it due to finding it dated and preachy, and I'm unlikely to read it again.

Started off TV night on Weds with the penultimate episode of Michael Wood's Story of England - which covered the period from Henry VIII through to the early 19th Century. Which brought it to roughly the same time period as I've got my genealogy research back to (in some cases), it shouldn't've surprised me when they talked about someone's age on the 1841 census but somehow it did. This period covered the religious back & forth of the Reformation & the Civil Wars - the parish records for the mid-1640s are non-existant because of the wars, and because (as Wood pointed out) the parish priest may or may not have been in favour at any given point. And covered the move from feudalism to capitalism - at the beginning of the period most people in the village farmed a bit of land for food for their family, and at the end of the period there were still some farmers but the open strip fields were now enclosed and they grew food for sale & everyone else worked other jobs to buy what they needed. The Industrial Revolution was a part of this trend, and the programme closed with a segment about the machine knitters (which was the primary industry in the village) who were dreadfully exploited - whole families working long hours for little pay, and not even able to buy enough of the necessities of life. It's a shame the next one is the last one - I could quite happily have watched twice as many of these :)

Second programme of the evening was the first episode of The Spice Trail - a kind of sequel to The Frankincense Trail which we watched last year. Kate Humble goes to exotic places looking for the origins and makings of various spices. This first episode covered pepper and cinnamon. By coincidence J and I had been talking the other day about pepper, wondering where it came from - and now we know! It grows as green berries on a creeper, that are then sun-dried (black pepper) or soaked (white pepper). And cinnamon is the inner bark of a bush, that they peel and then roll up into the cinnamon sticks we buy. Where the programme shone, I thought, was the historical & botanical information and showing us the farmers/producers of the spices. But I thought (as with The Frankincense Trail) there was a bit much of the "hey look at the funny people" stuff, I'd've fast-forwarded past some of it had I been watching on my own - but I have a very low threshold for that sort of thing before I find it both boring & cringe-making. J didn't have nearly as much of a problem with it as I did (and doesn't categorise it that way anyway :) ).

Garden tap now fixed \o/ Plumber came out last Friday and got it to go off enough to leave, then replaced it yesterday and put a proper lever handle thing on the pipe inside to turn it off over winter :) That was pretty painless, wasn't even that expensive.

Just as well, really, the breaking things thing continues ... we discovered over the w/e that we're down to one working Rock Band guitar (plus the pro-guitar but that's not really suitable for the normal 5 lane mode). The Rock Band 1 one we still had is dead as the proverbial door nail, wouldn't switch on even once we put fresh batteries in. The Gretsch Beatles one is now actually unplayable - the fret buttons had been dodgy for a while (flickering on/off and dropping on out sustains) but now they don't stay on even as long as needed to play a note reliably. So there's the Hoffner & there's something a bit screwed up with the strum bar on that - still playable atm, but not good.

You'd think it'd be easy to get a replacement - there's the new Rock Band 3 instruments, and unlike the RB2 ones they actually got released over here. But no! J ordered one off play and it's sat in limbo - awaiting stock, should ship sometime. I ordered one off some reseller on amazon ... and it said it shipped, but now they've refunded coz it "failed its final quality inspection." which I guess means when they said it had been dispatched they were lying *rolls eyes*. Not impressed by that. No more on amazon. I've ordered one from Mad Catz direct today (that failed at the w/e their store wasn't accepting payments ...) and apparently they were in stock there so we'll see. I remember from ordering the pro-guitar that they aren't big on informative shipping notices or anything (i.e. I was pleasantly surprised to get an order confirmation email this time round), so I anticipate that it might just show up, sometime soon.

Also ordered ourselves an iPod dock thing. Primarily to use to put music on while we go to sleep - the stereo in the bedroom is slowly dying. I'm not as annoyed about this breaking, it's done pretty damn well - 18 years of use since I bought it. One of the first "big" things I bought when I got my own income (in my year out before uni). And it's only dying, not dead - just doesn't always find track 1 on a CD, you can start from track 2 normally and rewind back to near the beginning of track 1 fine, which is tedious but works. So it almost feels disloyal replacing it! But a new more portable thing will be good - can put it in the kitchen too where we don't have a stereo but sometimes it would be nice to have music in there if J's playing a game in the living room while I'm cooking. And we can take it with us when we go visit people and places. And if it sounds a bit like I'm justifying this to myself, well that's coz I am a bit ;) Coz it does feel disloyal to replace my trusty old stereo ;)

"Fledgling" (book 5) is the February book for calico_reaction's book club. It's a vampire story, but nothing at all like the currently popular Buffy-esque urban fantasy vampire genre even tho it was published in 2005 (shortly before Butler's death in 2006). I don't own anything by Butler, but I definitely read her Xenogenesis trilogy a long time ago (from the library in Oxford, I think, which dates my reading of it to pre-1996; and re-read it in 2002 when I was visiting Rachel & Ellen in Sacramento). Not sure I remember much about the story in those books, but I half-remember the premise and I remember that they were good books. So I was pleased to read something else by Butler, and something more recent too.

I said it's a vampire book - it's more that the species that the protagonist belongs to (the Ina) are the source of our vampire mythology but the myths and folklore haven't really got it right. The story opens with this particular Ina coming to after what has clearly been a horrific experience - she's badly hurt, and amnesiac. The entire thing is told from her perspective, so we learn about the Ina and how they interact with and live in (but not of) our human society as she does. Fairly early in the book we find out that while she looks about 10 or 11 years old she is in fact 53 but still a child as the longer lived Ina also take longer to grow to maturity (as an aside, Butler was 58 when she died, so given the lead time between writing a book & publishing it I guess this was her own age while she wrote it, or near enough). Some things come back to Shori as she heals, but these things are things like language, reading & writing ability, her sense of ethics - never do the events that lead to her injury come clear, and neither does she remember anything about her life before that. This filled two roles in the narrative - not only did it give us our way into the story, but also it became important to the plot.

The plot itself is in some ways small - it's the story of Shori finding out who she was and what happened to her (and her family), and then doing something about it. The human world isn't really involved, it's all about the Ina and their society and their interactions as they affect Shori. But in other ways it's broader - it's about the ways that people react to change, and to those who are different, and the ugliness that can result from that. The racist overtones are made explicit, and I felt that this was a story using racism to demonstrate how this is one specific ugliness out of a whole group of ugly behaviours and ideas. And also something I'm struggling to articulate clearly about the pettiness of worrying about something like skin colour - from the outside (the Ina side) it should be irrelevant, and having Ina who are even partly concerned about colour it is really clear how pointless that is really. The line is clearly drawn from "but why should she give a damn?" to "why would anyone anyway, really, except for cultural reasons?".

Skin colour comes into it because Shori is dark skinned - one thing the vampire lore gets right is that the Ina aren't able to go out in the sun, they suffer extreme sunburn. Shori herself, we learn early in the story, is the result of Ina genetic engineering, combining (somehow) some human DNA to darken her skin and also to allow her to wake during the day (Ina are generally obligatarily nocturnal). This is a clear and obvious advantage, but it also marks her out as new and different.

Other ways the lore is right is that the Ina live off blood, blood from humans. And they enthrall the humans they feed from using their bite, creating a symbiotic relationship (where the balance of power and benefits is very strongly skewed towards the Ina). And Butler does a fantastic job of presenting this all from the point of view of an Ina, which means presenting it as good and right to the character and yet still keeping the character of Shori sympathetic. I love books that do this - keep you in the point of view of and cheering on a character who is actually doing things that scream "wrong wrong WRONG" at you. There's quite a bit about the benefits the humans symbiotes get - longer life, better health, a life of luxury and unconditional love from their Ina. About how they can keep up family ties, how they're free to marry. And about how it's a choice (normally). But how much of a choice is it really? It's clear that the thrall starts earlier than the Ina say - if you get bitten by an Ina you have to obey his or her commands, if you choose not to be a symbiote then they'll command you to forget this whole thing (which is disturbing in itself). But by the time you're given the choice even tho you might not count as fully "bound" you're already craving them, so is it a choice like the Ina say/believe or just a way of weeding out potentially troublesome cattle who still retain some vestiges of their free will? And as I say I think Butler does a fantastic job writing this - you see it all from Shori's perspective, about how lovely and happy and wonderful this is, and aren't these people lucky. But as the reader you also see the way the humans behave and read between the lines of the things they say and do - and it's clear that slavery is still slavery even if you love your master, and even if some people do actively choose the life.

And then that ties us back round to the racism/other ugly behaviours thread of the story - Shori is a sympathetic character, who tries to behave ethically, even if her behaviour and attitudes are making my hindbrain squeak "wrong wrong WRONG" because I'm on the victim side of her "ethical" behaviour. Just because you think you're doing the right thing and trying at all times to be a good person, doesn't mean you're seeing past your cultural blinkers and actually doing the right thing. And just because someone is doing something repugnant doesn't mean they are an evil person. The world is more nuanced than that, and full of shades of grey. My thoughts on this keep descending into clichés round about now - hate the sin & not the sinner, don't judge someone until you've walked a mile in their shoes, there's something good in everyone, etc etc.

The book also makes me think about nature vs. nurture. Shori's lost all memory of the first 53 years of her life, yet she retains (according to other characters) things that made her Shori - someone refers to her as still having "my Shori's temper", someone else mentions that she's always been "an ethical little thing". Yet she has no explicit memory of any formative experiences - some things clearly just are who she is.

It's also a good story. I didn't think of any of this while I was actually reading it. I just read and wanted to find out what had happened to Shori, what she was going to do about it. It's afterwards, thinking about it to write about it or just having bits pop back into my mind, that I've thought about the other things it was saying beneath the surface. Definitely recommend the book :)

Trying to cook more new things & more variety of food this last couple of months - actually managed two new meals in the last week, both from the Jamie Oliver book.

First (on Monday) was "Tray Baked Chicken, Squashed Potatoes, Creamed Spinach, Strawberry Slushie", which actually have reasonable names, too! Verdict = good, will definitely eat again. I failed with the potatoes to actually squash them (probably have to cook them a bit longer/cut them smaller), but they were tasty anyway. And the spinach tasted sufficiently unlike spinach to be OK for J and sufficiently unlike cream to be OK for me, so that was an unexpected win ;) The strawberry slushie would also do nicely as a party drink with a decent slug of vodka in it.

And then yesterday I did the "Pregnant Jools's Pasta, Crunch Chicory & Watercress Salad, Little Frangipane Tarts", and we're back to dumb names. The pasta tasted good tho, very good - sausage-y tomato-y not-quite-bolognaise sauce. And the frangipane tarts were also tasty, and even tho I couldn't get pre-made pastry cases for them they still weren't that much effort (I did get pre-made shortcrust pastry, just had to roll it out and cut it myself). Actually all round this one was easy, I think I could've done it in the 30 mins if I hadn't a) had to make pastry cases and b) accidentally put out the gas ring under the pasta when it bubbled over then not noticed for a while (didn't gas us out, thankfully, just wasn't heating the water any either). Salad was a bit meh tho, didn't end up with any watercress in, coz the ingredients called for rocket+watercress mix and I could only get either that plus spinach (and J's not all that keen) or rocket "salad" mix. And it ended up the sort of green salad both J and I don't much like, and the DIY dressing was just a faff. So another time I shall do a tomato salad I think, with my normal salad dressing already in the bowl with it :)

Other meals were old favourites or cheats ;) Takeaway on Saturday, post-afternoon-pub-trip, that was the biggest cheat and chicken tikka masalla from a Patak's curry paste jar on Thursday was the other (not as much of a cheat as a cook-in sauce, but nearly). Roast beef for Sunday dinner and the pasta for Wednesday night were the no-recipe old-favourites, and lemon chicken for Tuesday night which is one of the first two recipes I got out of my Chinese cookery book probably 15 years ago ...

(Video picture quality unfortunately not very good, sound is fine except for the rude words being censored out, but this was the best one I found - my youtube-fu is weak.)

I got earwormed by "Thou Shalt Always Kill" off this album over the weekend when matociquala used a line from it as an LJ entry title - when I say "hey", thou shalt not say "ho" - and spent Monday listening to it on repeat (except for a brief pause to listen to a podcast which included a new song from The Unthanks). It's almost always "Thou Shalt Always Kill" that gets me to listen to the album, but once I'm there I remember how many of the other songs I really like so stick with it for a few goes round.

This album for me is all about the words - not the music at all. Well, I suppose I don't quite mean that - I think of it as a figure/ground thing, and it's a spectrum that runs from not paying attention to the words at all (if they're even present) through to barely noticing the music. An example of the other end of the spectrum for me is Niyaz "Niyaz" where the words aren't even in English most of the time, so I can't understand them, but it's still a great album. "Angles" wouldn't work the way it does without the music and the beat, it's needed to give the words their pace & impact, but it's the words that make me like the songs.

For some of the songs it's the turns of phrase in the lyrics that I like the most - lines like well good God damn and other such phrases, haven't heard a beat like this in ages from "The Beat That My Heart Skips", almost everything in "Thou Shalt Always Kill" (When I say he say she say we say make some noise ... kill me) or I ain't an alcoholic, I just drink a lot, I ain't a genius, I just think a lot from "Development", or you might say I'm keeping it surreal but ... I'd rather you didn't from "Waiting for the Beat to Kick In". The delivery helps, of course, some of those don't look as smile-worthy written down as they are in the song.

Then there's the songs with a story that packs an emotional punch - the two that always get me are the title track, "Angles", and "Magician's Assistant". And on this set of listens bits of "Tommy C" too. Or that say something to me on a different level - in this life you can be oh-so-smart or oh-so-pleasant, I've been smart; I recommend pleasant and how hard is it to decide to be in a good mood and then ... just Be In A Good Mood from "Waiting for the Beat to Kick In". Obviously not universally applicable, some things in any life are worth getting worked up about, but when I'm getting wound the fuck up by petty little shit then it's always a good idea to take a step back and try just being in a good mood.

First programme for the evening was a programme about Egypt that J had spotted was on More 4 over the weekend - Nefertiti & The Lost Dynasty. This was about trying to track down the mummy of Nefertiti and/or identify the other potential Amarna era mummies, and was clearly made before the recent DNA evidence. As a result the evidence they were showing all came from CT scans of the various mummies. It was interesting to see the previous evidence and to put it together with our knowledge of the evidence the DNA study came up with - for instance there was strong anatomical evidence to suggest that the Older Lady from KV35 was Tiye (corroborated by later DNA evidence) and that the Younger Lady from KV35 was Tutankhamun's mother & the KV55 mummy was his father (both also corroborated by the DNA evidence). And none of the three mummies was Nefertiti (again corroborated by later DNA evidence). So, nice to see how it hangs together, which strengthens all the identifications proposed.

In terms of watching the programme, it was also nice to see the places and things - particularly the mummies. And the obligatory reconstructions were well done (even if the actors were clearly encouraged to pull weird faces ;) ). The script, however, left much to be desired. For starters there was one thing J picked up on as outright wrong - Tutankhaten doesn't mean "Servant of the Aten" it means "Living Image of the Aten". And mistakes like that don't inspire confidence in the rest of it :/ Particularly as they could've looked it up in 2 seconds (like I just did to double check the right translation).

My other quibbles are primarily stylistic. Firstly an overuse of the word "proved" when what they actually meant was "theorised" - yes, as J says, I have a more technical approach to "proof" than the general lay audience might, but other programmes do this better (mostly not ones about Ancient Egypt, tho). I just think it's better to say "the evidence suggests that ..." or "this evidence supports our theory that ..." rather than "We have now proved that ...", particularly when anyone applying a bit of logic and common sense can come up with a couple of other sensible possibilities and/or questions that need to be answered before you can say you've ruled out all other options. (Yes, they might also have considered other things the programme didn't tell us about - I'm aware that we'll only be shown a simplified overview. But even then it's still wrong to say that this one specific thing is "the proof".)

Secondly, I thought the presentation was rather muddled. They CT scanned 3 mummies, and on the third one we got a voice over telling us what this meant and how images were obtained. Surely this should have happened first? Also the programme was clearly originally intended to tell us a story about Nefertiti, but then they didn't find Nefertiti's mummy, surely they could have re-done the voice over to turn it into telling us a story about Tutankhamun's family? Rather than starting with Nefertiti, but turning it into being about Tutankhamun's family by the end. I also felt a bit more empahsis on showing us the evidence rather than showing us the experts pointing at the evidence would've been nice - like when you're saying "this arm is in proportion, this one isn't" it might be nice for us non-anatomists if you'd done a couple of quick still images with the arms "attached" so we could see visually that it was wrong. Rather than just point at numbers on the screen with two bespectacled gents explaining how it proved this, that & the next. Or if you're comparing two skulls, how about orienting them the same way not at a 15° angle to each other. Simple things.

It still interesting to watch, just I think as programmes go it's one to watch only if you want to watch everything about ancient Egypt and find out all the details (and it is nice to see the things like the mummies that you can otherwise only read about). But there are better programmes out there if you're just wanting to watch some ancient history programme.

Second programme of the evening was the next episode of Michael Wood's Story of England - where they were capable of adding the right caveats to their evidence -> conclusion trails ;) This one covered the time from the Peasants' Revolt in the late 14th century to the start of the Tudor dynasty in the early 16th century. Wood traced three separate (but intertwined) strands through the time period - the rise of education amongst the peasantry, the increased social mobility and a rise in free thought. I continue to enjoy the mix of modern day footage, old documents and archaeological evidence that they've achieved. Particularly fascinating in this episode was the house in the village that they can trace in documentary evidence back to the late 14th century or early 15th century and then tree-ring dated the timbers in to get a "earliest possible" building date of 1385 (that was the most recent felling date for any of the timbers). Which nicely dovetailed with some of the documents. And they then followed members of that same family to show the social mobility - they moved to Coventry (where a daughter married the mayor) & then to London to be Mercers there (and a later generation invited back to be Mayor of Coventry himself - he turned it down tho). Not bad for a family which had started as villeins a couple of hundred years before. This social mobility of course enabled by both the better education for even the peasantry, and by the significantly reduced population after the Black Death opening up opportunities. And these twin influences also helped to lead people to question the received wisdom of the church. Kibworth had links to the Lollard movement, which was a sort of Reformation-come-early and failed - as it was against the King (Henry V) rather than with the King (Henry VIII). Next must be on to the Tudors and the Reformation - my favourite era of English history :)

I meant to post yesterday lunchtime, but instead we had an emergency trip out to Focus and the flap surrounding that quite put me out of the mood for writing stuff, instead I played some games :)

So - the outside tap has been dripping for a bit, and it's been on our list of things that should get sorted, but it wasn't a bad drip and we're not on metered water so it was low priority. Yesterday it was more of a trickle - and then while we were sorting out the leaves in the drain next to it we turned the tap on a bit to wash off the drain grill thing. And the tap wouldn't turn off even as much as it had done before, eek! Had to switch the water off, then head off to try & get something to cap it. Came back with 3 options - 2 sizes of cap (one too large, one too small ... I did measure it, so I knew they weren't gonna work, but hope springs eternal or something ...) and a new hose fitting (the old one was broken) so that worst case we could have the water going down the drain. The gun-thing at the end of the hose seems to be mostly holding it now, and in all the faffing about trying to fit things and turn it off we've managed (I think) to slow the leak back down to a drip, got that extra 1/8th turn or something. Plumber called out for Friday to fix that and the bit inside the house where you ought to be able to turn it off at a screw valve but the head of the screw is too knackered to turn (which has been on the list of things to get sorted for over a year, and if we had got it fixed then we could've put off the tap more, oh well).

Thank goodness J was working from home yesterday and we could go panic buy stuff as easily as that.

While at Focus we popped into Bennetts and picked up a replacement coffee machine. On Sunday we noticed something white and squidgy poking out of where the water comes through in our previous coffee machine ... we're not quite sure if it was something that should be there but was degrading or something that shouldn't be there (and we couldn't remove it all anyway short of breaking the machine into pieces). I would rather think it was something that should be there... the alternative is less pleasant :o And anyway, the permanent filter was a bit knackered, and the hinge for access to the water tank and coffee filter was a bit broken too. Time for a replacement rather than faff about. So now we have a new one, without the espresso making side coz we haven't used that in years.

While we were there we looked at ovens, too. But there wasn't much selection. What was there looked like they were all much the same size as each other (within millimetres anyway), but no nearer to deciding what to buy. I feel like I need to make up my mind soon tho, just in case it properly breaks too!

Yesterday's entry wasn't going to be about broken things though - it was going to note that this was mine & J's 15th Valentine's Day together. So we watched Indiana Jones & the Raiders of the Lost Ark. Which I'd never seen before - I saw the most recent Indiana Jones film in the cinema, and again at Christmas, but I've not seen any of the others. J was convinced I must have seen bits, how could I miss them given how much it's a part of pop culture from our youth. But no, that was a completely new film to me. The experience of seeing it after the Crystal Skull one was actually quite surreal - I had a lot of moments of "oh so that scene in that film was a homage to this one in this film", and seeing how Marion got to not be particularly bad-ass in the first one (except out drinking the Nepalese guy) was a surprise after seeing her being a much more capable woman in the fourth one. I guess "in world" you say she grew up ... in our world tho it's all about the times having changed (thankfully!) since the early 80s ;) And I spent almost the whole film saying "but why do people complain about the fridge when there's this bit??" ;) We talked a bit about the endings of the two afterwards - J had said after we saw the fourth one that he didn't think the ending was as good ... and I think we came to the conclusion that it's because at the end of film 1 you still don't have many answers, what is the Ark? What was it for? Why'd it do that? So you can make up what you want or revel in the sense of mystery depending on taste. But at the end of film 4 you've got a lot more answers, which actually feels less satisfying and ever so slightly lame.

In other news - I've written a guest post for Ellen's new blog "Tine Life", so if you've ever been curious about what I thought about British food, or how to make Leek Pudding, go read it here. And read the rest of Ellen's blog, too :)

I'm starting to slip a bit with the entry-every-day thing, skipped a couple of weekends. Need to get back on top of that really, otherwise I'll stop altogether & I'm enjoying having the entries there to look back on. I had intended to write things as backup stuff that could just be dropped in on days when I felt there were other things I'd rather be doing than typing - but they'll mostly be book reviews and I've not been reading that much recently, too many other things competing for my attention.

On that note, I've got quite the stack of stuff built up to read - I want to finish my current chapter in the history book I'm reading before I move on to the fiction, but that may have to slip because there's a couple of book club books to read by the end of the month. The current "to be read heap" beside my desk is: "Fledgling" by Octavia Butler (Feb book club); "The Disposessed" by Ursula Le Guin (Feb book club); "The Knife of Never Letting Go" by Patrick Ness (Mar book club); "So Long Been Dreaming" eds. Nalo Hopkinson & Uppinder Mehan (last Nov book club but the library couldn't get it to me on time); "Far North" by Marcel Theroux (saw a review, looked neat); "The Name of the Wind" by Patrick Rothfuss (saw a review of the book after in the series, looked neat); "Chill" by Elizabeth Bear (sequel to "Dust"); "Hell & Earth" by Elizabeth Bear (should've been part of my xmas pressie form J in 09, but amazon failed to get it to me on time). I have yet to source the other two March book club books (may skip the fantasy one again, but I've skipped it this month so feel I should make more of an effort next month :/ ), and we just bought the Mistborn trilogy by Brandon Sanderson coz they were in a 3 for 2 offer in town.

To be honest, it's all fiction and I read fiction fast, so I definitely have time to get on top of the Feb ones by end Feb, and start on the March ones and even read some of the others that don't have deadlines. I just have to take the time to read a few days, rather than the other things I also want to do. Other things are including having got back into my genealogy research - two threads on-going there at the moment. The first is the Candys (who marry into the Stewarts in ~1860) and the Addisons (who marry into the Candys in ~1830), and the other is looking at my great-grandad on the Stewart side's life post 1920ish. Various emails on that subject flying around between me & my Dad & one of my uncles - I think we've found a plausible death in Canada in '59 (great-grandma came home to Scotland with children in tow, great-grandad stayed out there). And possibly the passenger info for great-grandma sailing out to Canada in the first place. Next step there is getting hold of copies of the original records, rather than relying on the transcribed & indexed ones.

The next episode of Michael Wood's Story of England in our queue covered the late 13th and 14th Centuries - so it started off fairly positive, looking at the how the end of the 13th Century was a boom time for Kibworth (and England). And showing us how the records at Merton College (who bought the manor for the main village in the 1270s) let historians trace individual families through the rest of the history of the village. They're very detailed, right down to which villagers owned which strips in which fields & such like. But there was a sense of doom hanging over it - we all know what happens in the 14th Century, after all. But even before the Black Death (which doesn't get there till 1349) there were catastrophes in store. In 1314 famine and animal disease hit England - the programme presented us with firsthand reports from the people of the time (again much of this came from the Merton College archives, the accounts that the village had to present to their landlords). And it intercut this with footage from our own recent animal disease troubles (burning of livestock with foot & mouth) and bad weather. Which served to hammer home how lucky we are these days, with our lack of direct dependence on the success of our own harvest, or the survival of our own livestock. And then of course the programme moved on to the Black Death, which hit Kibworth particularly hard with two thirds of the village dying (I think that's what he said). And again the firsthand accounts of the aftermath of that were directly compared to modern life - they juxtaposed an account of the charity donations set up to provide a priest to say masses for the souls of the dead with footage of a cancer charity fundraising event which also had candles lit in memory of those dead, ill or recovered from cancer. Very well done, and affecting - brought home the sheer scale of the catastrophe in a way historical accounts sometimes fail to do.

And to offset the somewhat depressing mood we'd been left with, we watched Still Folk Dancing After All These Years. This was Rachel & Becky Unthank from The Unthanks going round England watching people do local folk dances. As well as being folk singers they also do Northumberland clog dancing (and include it as part of their stage show), so they have a sort-of professional interest in this. But mostly the appeal was that they come across as two friendly and cheerful women, who were enjoying watching the dances. They had a go at a few of them, too - and didn't take themselves too seriously. The dancers were fairly varied - the obvious selection of Morris Dancers of various types. But also other traditions. I think my favourite was the Staffordshire Horn Dance, which this one village (Abbots Bromley, I think?) has done every year for the last thousand or so years. We were particularly entertained by the parish priest (the horns used in the dance are kept in the church) talking about how it was "pagan with a little 'p', friendly pagan". I thought it had a noticeably different style to the ones that had been revived during Victorian times and later, tho I couldn't put my finger on what it was (not being a connoisseur of such things).

I've had this album on repeat for the last couple of days after forgetting about it for a month or two. If you like the song in the vid above ("Stick Stock", and it's not really a video just the song with the album cover as a backdrop), then you'll like the rest of the album. It's not all quite as deliciously creepy as "Stick Stock", but it's all at that end of the folk spectrum - some trad songs but mostly original (I think) with that non-Disneyfied fairytale feel.

I have no idea how come I'd never run across this game before, it's been out for years & years (2004 originally I think, maybe?), and it seems to be right up my street. You control a dynasty initially in charge of a kingdom or dukedom or county in high medieval Europe. There seem to be 3 times you can start, one of which is 1066 and the game runs through to 1452 and the end of the medieval era. You get to do things like choose the basic laws of your realm, set taxation levels, raise armies, marry off your children, form alliances with other realms etc etc. Once your main guy dies the inheritance laws you've set determine who the heir is - and he has a whole different set of friends and rivals (and a different personality) so you have to start almost over and keep the dynasty going towards its longer term goals. I believe once you get to 1452 the "winner" is the realm that's highest ranked, but I've not got to the end of a game so I don't actually know how that works!

I heard about the game via the Civilization community I lurk in (Realms Beyond), and I've jumped into a tutorial/showcase succession game running there - that thread is worth a look if you're interested in the game because Mist (who's captaining the game) knows what he's doing and has played the first turnset giving us a very thorough tutorial. Thankfully I'm quite far down the end of the list, so by the time my 10 years turnset rolls around I should have a handle on the game enough not to embarrass myself ;)

In the solo game I've started I decided to use one of Mist's other suggested starting points from our game planning thread - so I started off as Duke of Lombardia. Note that Mist describes this as a filthy rich dukedom & I still managed to crash the economy pretty quickly. Oh, and I got him excommunicated straight off because I changed to a set of laws that the Pope wasn't keen on. But that Duke died off fairly quickly (of old age), so that was OK as the heir wasn't involved ;)

( a flavour of the game, with images )

Yesterday afternoon we headed off to Witham for a meeting of the Essex Egyptology Group (which we've now paid up to become members of), where we listened to a talk by Elena Pischikova on the work she is doing at South Asasif. She was a good speaker, who presented the story of her discoveries of and in the tomb of Karakhamun as it had happened. Karakhamun was a Late Period priest in Thebes (so c.700 BC, during the 25th Dynasty) of Nubian origin. Pischikova has seen references to his tomb in 19th century documentation, and became convinced she'd located it practically underneath a modern Egyptian village inhabited by descendants of a notorious 19th Century tomb-robber family. When she got funding (direct from Zahi Hawass initially, in 2006) she had no idea if they were going to find anything left at all, after all those years when it may have been looted, had been used as a cellar, as stables and finally as a rubbish dump. It apparently took them 4 weeks to find the first sign that the site was worthwhile, which she said was very stressful - was she wasting everyone's time and money, and trashing her reputation. But then they started to find fragments of decorated wall! It was an underground tomb, but the ceiling had collapsed - so most of it is in fragments. Their work is not just to uncover what is there and catalogue it, but they are also reconstructing it. So far they've done most of one pillar from one of the two pillared halls, so it's very early days. They are also still excavating, their most recent discovery is of the burial chamber below these pillared halls which is much more intact and contains some stunning looking painted walls plus some of the burial equipment is still there (it sounds like it had been looted, however, probably in antiquity).

As well as being a great story the tomb is an exciting find on two different levels. Firstly, it's full of really high quality art - even if it is in fragments it's really beautiful stuff. And Pischikova took the time to point out some of the details and to let us admire the carving (and painting) of it all, during her talk. It's also tremendously interesting from the point of view of finding out more about the Late Period Nubian Egyptians - this was a period of renaissance in Egypt, where they were both looking back to their past and re-interpreting it and also producing a great new flowering of culture. And this is a richly decorated tomb from the early part of this period. So things like the decoration on the walls of this tomb will tell Egyptologists something about things like the structure of the Book of the Dead in this period, or what symbolism about the judgement of the deceased they had. And the burial chamber, even tho looted, still contains some of the original burial equipment which will tell a story about how high status Egyptians were buried in this period. And the man himself seems interesting - he didn't have a very high status himself (it seems) but the decoration and scale of the tomb are impressive, so did he have family connections to royalty? The writing on the walls might shed some light on that, once it's pieced back together.

All in all, a very good & interesting talk. She finished up by introducing her daughter, Katherine Blakeney, who is Assistant Director on the project and they explained the various ways people can help both financially (including by buying t-shirts) and in the actual work. Astonishingly a large part of this is done by volunteers (which is helped by the working being done in the traditional "off-season" for Egyptian archaeology) and donations are an important part of their funding. We bought a t-shirt for J :)