Welcome to Britain, where you’re legally innocent until suspected

I am seriously running out of words to describe the arrogance and xenophobia of this government. From today’s Guardian:

Nick Clegg has signed up to a plan drawn up by Theresa May to strip foreign-born terror suspects of British citizenship – a move that would render them stateless – if they are judged to present a threat to national security.

(For non-British readers: Theresa May is the Home Secretary of our current coalition government. Nick Clegg is the Deputy Prime Minister, and is supposed to bring a Liberal Democrat perspective to the Conservative-dominated government.)

Paul Simon: There Goes Rhymin’ Simon (1973)

From the very first bars of the first song on Paul Simon’s second post-Garfunkel solo album, there’s a completely different feel from the previous year’s self-titled album. If I had to pick a single word to summarise how that album feels it would be “weary”; for this album, that word would be “sunny”.  [Listen on Grooveshark.]

Snowden-haters are on the wrong side of history

In the autumn on 1963, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, worried at Martin Luther King’s growing influence, began tapping his phones and bugging his hotel rooms. They hoped to discredit him by gaining evidence that he was a communist, but found no such evidence. But they did find evidence that he was having affairs. The FBI gathered what they considered to be the most incriminating clips, and in November 1964 they anonymously sent tapes to him along with a letter telling him to commit suicide:

White people in this country have enough frauds of their own but I am sure they don’t have one at this time anywhere near your equal. […] You are a colossal fraud and an evil, vicious one at that. […] you don’t believe in any personal moral principles.

The paperback of The Eleventh Doctor has arrived!

It came through the door this morning!

The Eleventh Doctor is now available in paperback

My book The Eleventh Doctor: a critical ramble through Matt Smith’s tenure in Doctor Who has been available in electronic form for more than a week now [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk, others]

Now it’s also available in paperback! (At present, it’s only available direct from Lulu, where it’s printed. In six to eight weeks it should also appear on the various Amazon stores.)

I’m looking for jacket quotes for the paperback edition of my Doctor Who book

Hey, folks,

The paperback edition of The Eleventh Doctor is now ready to go, after a lot of heavy-duty LibreOffice-wrangling (which I might write about some time) and some great work on the cover by Anna Nordling.

At this point, the only thing that’s holding me up from hitting the Publish button is that I wanted to include a couple of quotes on the back cover. You know the kind of thing: “Once I had put it down, I couldn’t pick it up again”, “Taylor exhibits exactly the level of cultural insight you’d expect from a professional programmer”, “At least the fonts are nice”.

My book is out! The Eleventh Doctor: a critical ramble through Matt Smith’s tenure in Doctor Who

It’s here!

My book on the Eleventh Doctor is now out in Kindle editions [amazon.com, amazon.co.uk]! Please, folks, spread the word in any Doctor Who communities that you’re a part of, and on your own blogs!