The Journal of the Browncoat Cat

1a. Plot:
The life of Lupe de Cazaril seems to be going from bad to worse.  A younger son of minor landowning nobility, he has made a career as an officer in the army of Chalion, a small landlocked kingdom at the heart of the Ibran Peninsula.  Betrayed after a long siege, instead of being ransomed with his fellow officers, he was sold as a galley slave.  He expected to die on the galleys but after a year was rescued and made his way back to the province of Boacia, where he did his military training in his youth.

The Dowager Provincara of Boacia takes pity on Cazaril, and offers him a job as the Secretary/Tutor to her headstrong granddaughter, Issele.  Cazaril’s hopes of a life of rural obscurity are shattered when Iselle and her brother Teidez are summoned to the court of the Roya  of Chalion, their half-brother Oricio di Chalion.

Teidez is to be heir to the Royacy and whilst younger than his sister, is seen as a major player in the politics of of the Ibran peninsula.  His older sister Iselle on the other hand is regarded as a mere pawn. Cazaril becomes entangled in a deadly curse hanging over the royal house of Chalion and comes face to face with the authors of his misfortunes, the powerful di Jironal brothers.

At Court, Iselle, proves that she is more than a simple  pawn, as she transverses the dangerous chessboard to becomes a Queen.

b. Background Information:
Chalion is based firmly on the balkanized mediaeval Spain prior to Ferdinand and Isabella.  However, as can be seen by the map drawn by the fan artist Bo Johansson, the geography is very different.  Chalion is part of the Ibran peninsular, which is the shape of Spain and Portugaul, but attached to what we would call North America, where Florida should be.  As can be seen from the map on the left, various changes have been made to the Gulf of Mexico to accommodate the story. All the Americas have been spun through 180 degrees north to south and east to west., whilst Saharan North Africa has being slapped into the Caribbean, creating the Roknari Archipelago.

Instead a single god, this world has five deities, the Father of Winter, Mother of Summer, Son of Autumn, Daughter of Spring and The Bastard.  These gods cannot interfere directly with the affairs of man, they must work through hands and eyes of the faithful.  However, the Roknari who are equivalent of mediaeval Moorish Muslims believe that the Bastard is merely a demon and worshipping him as a god is deeply offensive to the Father, Mother, Son and Daughter.

In the World of Chalion, only one sort of magic works.  This is Death Magic, where a Supplicant believes that his case is so strong that he or she is willing to sacrifice their life to the Bastard and that the Bastard will reward the sacrifice by taking the life of whoever has wronged the Supplicant.  Performing the ritual of Death Magic is strictly forbidden by law.  This filters out any bogus attempts and helps to prove that the Supplicant was performing an act of divine justice and not petty revenge.

2. Thoughts:
I am not a great fan of the Fantasy genre, in fact with the exception of David Eddings and Terry Pratchett, the genre bores me rigid.    Orcs and magic, swords and sorcery just are not my cup of tea.  Which is why, despite the fact that Lois McMaster Bujold is one of my favourite authors, it has taken me so long to discover her fantasy novels.  I really should have known that The Curse of Chalion was not going to be the average magic driven, pseudo mediaeval sub tolkienesque quest, because her SF novels transcend the macho military space opera genre.  In The Curse of Chalion, we see a rich and layered society that is rational where magic is an extension of religious faith and is kept to a minimum.  The politics of Chalion and neighbouring Ibra provide the engine that drives this plot.

Cover Artwork Copyright: Voyager ©2003

This is a novel all about faith.  Faith in yourself, faith in your god and faith in your purpose.  This may make the novel sound as dull  as ditch-water, but this is very far from being the case.  The allegory for faith used throughout the novel is that you cannot fill a goblet through its stem, you have to turn it over and fill it through the top.  That once you have faith in something and demonstrate your faith in it, then you can fill  yourself with that faith to overflowing, and there is nothing you cannot then achieve.  The characters really come alive as they discover their purpose in life and the faith that will help them achieve that purpose. Cazaril believes that his life is effectively over, but it is not until he sees the full measure of the corruption at the heart of Chalion and has faith in himself that he becomes active in changing the situation.  Iselle thinks of herself as a mere pawn in the Affairs of State, but it is not until her eyes are openned to the World through education that she believes that she too can make a difference to Chalion and the whole of the Ibran Peninsular.  When Umegat, a priest of the Bastard sees his life work destroyed, the resultant loss of faith almost destroys him.  Faith seen in The Curse of Chalion transcends mere religious belief, merely going through the motions and following all the prescribed religious rituals is not enough. Faith in what you are doing and what you actually believe in has to be so strong that you are willing to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others, as can be seen in the use of Death Magic.  This point is driven home when Cazaril describes a scene where at the height of the siege of Gotoroget, he throws away the symbol that binds him to the Son of Autumn and says to the Gods that he will do whatever they want of him if his people are saved from the horrors they are enduring.  Shortly there after, the siege is lifted, and Cazaril begins the life changing journey chronicled in this novel.

I have a habit of reading novels and then casting them as feature films, so that I have an actorial avatar to hang my image of the character upon.  This was not necessary with The Curse of Chalion, as all the characters sprung fully formed from the page.     The opening paragraph describes a rural scene in early spring vividly, and sets the atmosphere so well that I was hooked from page one.  The rest of  the writing is just as visual and is a pleasure to read out loud, either for its own sake, or for an enraptured audience.

3. Stars:
5 out of 5

At 8am on Friday, 5th February, 2010:

Weight: 18St 3.1lb (115.7Kg)
BMI: 35.6
Body Fat: 36.4 %
Water: 39.7%
Muscle: 31.7%

Diet Notes:

Gained 2.7lb

This is so disheartening, a “Bad” week, almost a “Diabolical” week.  Having cut down on my food intake to 2,100Kcals per week, stopped putting additional salt on my food and stopped putting Clover or similar spreads on my bread, I was expecting to have lost something instead of gaining weight.  I have also started  exercising and generally tried to be more active.  True it has only been five days since I started this, but last time I recorded my diet on this web log, published what I weighed on a Friday Morning at 8am, so that is what I will do this time.

On the subject of butter on bread, what is the point of putting a spread on toast when you have something like Beans on Toast or Scrambled Eggs on Toast.  It just adds extra calories to the meal and does not effect the taste at all.  Unless you put half a packet of butter or margarine on the toast the flavour of the topping drowns the flavour of the spread.  So I cut out the butter in that sort of meal years ago.  Now I am cutting the yellow spreads from all bread I have with meals.  Same logic, the flavour of the yellow spread alters the flavour of the meal and only adds empty calories to it.

Weight: 18St 0.4lb (114.5Kg)
BMI: 35.2
Body Fat: 36.4%
Water: 39.7%
Muscle: 31.7%

Diet Notes:
If you were reading this web log back in the early days, you will remember when I would post my weight every Friday morning, as a spur to help my diet.  Well, I bought myself a new bathroom scales yesterday. A whizzy digital one, with an infrared wireless adisplay that is fixed to the wall above the scales, making it much easier to read. It also calculates the percentage of Body Fat, Water. and Muscle the recorded weigh should contain, based on the users gender, age and height. As you can see, all these figures are way too high. So, emergency action is required.

Weight loss cannot be guaranteed by diet alone. Exercise is also required. I intend to  re-arranged the furniture upstairs, so that there will be space for me to use my running machine. Also, since the grand clearing put of my attic at Christmas, the Ab-Doer exercise machine is now accessible. This is the spur to actually start using them again.  I am deadly serious about losing weight.  I am far too heavy.  I lost nearly a stone at the begining of last year,  getting down to 17St 8lb, so going back up to 18St is a bit of a disappointment.

You will have noticed the yellow icon with a double headed arrow.  This is one of five icons I have designed to show at a glance how the diet is going.  The icon I insert by the stats at the start of the article will generate the thumbnail image that will appear on Facebook when I publish my Weight Report.  You can see the full set below.

So what do they mean:

• Purple – lost more than 3lb this week
• Green – lost upto 3lb this week
• Yellow – no change, same as last week
• Red – gained up to 3lb this week
• Grey – ganined more than 3lb this week.

You know, it is deeply depressing how many normally intelligent people have fallen for the Tory/Daily Mail inspired lie that the  Television Licence Fee is a form of taxation.  Here is the definition of Taxation from the  WordNet Dictionary:

Taxation (Noun)

1. Charge against a citizen’s person or property or activity for the support of government [syn: tax, revenue enhancement]
2. Government income due to taxation [syn: tax income, revenue]
3. The imposition of taxes; the practice of the government levying taxes on the subjects of a state.

Well, the Licence Fee isn’t #1 or #2 because whilst the Television Licencing Agency is owned by HM Government, it is run as a commercial concern and none of the money it makes in profit goes into H. M. Treasury, so it does not provide any income to support H. M. Government. Its not #3 either because the Licence Fee is not paid by every adult citizen in the UK, only by the head of a household that wants to use a television set.

So if it isn’t a tax, what is the Television Licence Fee.  Put simply, it is a Subscription fee.  You are paying your annual fee to be a member of the British Television Owner’s Club.  The surplus that that Owners Club makes is given to an organisation that will guarantee its members that there will always be a diverse package of different programmes on the BBC and everyone will have, even if it is only once a year, something that they will want to watch on their television sets.

DWM #417 ©2010 Panini Magazines

Well it sounds as if all those people who hated Eccleston’s Salford accent and Tennant’s Estuary English will be happy with Matt Smith.  If his normal speaking voice is the same as the one he uses for his portrayal of The Doctor, then we are going to have the first Posh Doctor since the series returned in 2005.  This assumption is based on three things.  First is the interview he gave on Doctor Who Confidential when his casting as The Doctor was first announced.  Second is the snippet recorded at Jacob’s Antiques in Cardiff last year.  The third an final piece of evidence is an recording of the original raw audio of the interview with Karen Gillan and Matt Smith that appeared in Doctor Who Magazine #417.

The Coat of Arms of the British Broadcasting Corporation

The British Broadcasting Corporation was founded in 1927, when the government of the day bought the existing British Broadcasting Company Ltd because they didn’t think purely commercial concerns could provide a high enough quality of programming.  The BBC is known and loved throughout the World.  Well loved by everyone except the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, not that they would ever admit to this though.  This hatred has nothing to do with the “Usual Complaint” of political bias, because all politicians, Right, Left or Centre believe the BBC is biased against them.  This is all to do with their basic political dogma.  se The success of the BBC proves it to be wrong at every single level.

• The Tories believe that nothing good can come of Pubic Services ever.  However, the BBC constantly produces high quality award winning programmes that are huge rating successes.
• The Tories argue that public services can never make a profit. And yet, the BBC owns  a number of successful and highly profitable companies, such as BBC Studios and Post Production Ltd, the largest Production Facilities House in Europe, which made a profit of £6.1 million in 2006-7.
• The Tories claim that anything financed by either taxation or anything that looks like a tax, like the Television Licence Fee is a drain on successful commerce and enterprise. In reality the reverse is true.  The industries that directly support the BBC in Wales are booming since the BBC began commissioning more and more network drama productions that were made in Wales.
• The Tories argue that public services diverts funding to commercial projects that would create jobs, services and profits for the British Economy.  Again in Wales, this is proving not to be the case.  The proposed BBC Drama Village is the centre piece of plans to regenerate the Roath Basin in Cardiff Docks.  Construction of a new multi-million pound home for all of BBC Wales’ successful drama productions and the new home for successful long running medical drama Casualty will create hundreds of badly needed construction jobs and when the facility is up and running it will generate hundreds of high paid and high skilled jobs that will be a great boon to the Welsh and UK economy.

The Tories are faced with a problem.  Openly admitting they are going to do in Aunty would be electoral suicide, any move to destroy the BBC will be done stealthily, if they win the next election outright. How do they do away with such a successful nationally and internationally respected organisation?  By making it look like an outdated basket case that desperately needs to be closed.  They will do this by playing silly devils with the Licence Fee.  In the United Kingdom, it is a legal obligation for anyone owning a piece of hardware capable of receiving a broadcast television signal, whether from any sort of aerial or over the Internet to hold a Television Licence.  The cost of this licence depends on type of equipment used and is administered by the Television Licensing Authority.  The BBC is funded by the surplus made by the Television Licensing Authority from the administration of the Television Licence Scheme.  This is what makes the BBC unique, it is State Owned, but not State Funded, so can remain politically neutral at all times.  Unfortunately, President Blair shares the Tory’s disdain for the BBC, so the current Licence Fee was set by the Government at a level that does not supply the BBC with enough funds.  The BBC owns a number of profitable businesses, and it is the money that it earns from these that have prevented the quality of the Corporation’s output from falling.  David Cameron has said that as soon as he becomes Prime Minister (its not in the bag yet you arrogant twerp) that he was going to freeze the Licence Fee at its current level, ending the BBC’s right too increase the cost of the Licence Fee to take into account the current level of inflation each year.  This would be a crippling blow to Aunty, as although £3 per year rise in the Licence Fee does not sound like much, multiply that by number of Licences issued, and you get a serious hole in the BBC’s income.  And then in 2012, the BBC and the Government will renegotiate their agreement over the Licence Fee.  The Tories wont be able to abolish the Licence Fee, as it is protected by the Royal Charter that governs the BBC, but they will probably cut it, and they have said that they think  giving a portion of the Licence Fee to other organisations that provide Public Service Broadcasting in the UK (exactly who that is is a mystery, they certainly cannot mean ITV) is a good idea.  Without the money it needs to run all the services it is mandated to run, the Corporation would implode.  It would have to cut jobs, channels, services and programming like crazy, and the BBC would look like a disaster at the very time that its Royal Charter is due for renewal.  The Tories will say, “look at the BBC, it clearly is not working, lets not bother renewing the Royal Charter and close down the BBC”.  With a few weasel words from the likes of the Daily Mail and poison from rags like The Sun, this deliberate policy of mismanagement would result in the United Kingdom and the World will losing something of immeasurable value. Nation would no longer be able to speak peace unto Nation through the medium of the BBC.

No doubt the Conservatives hope that by asking  Greg Dyke, the former Director General of the BBC (who remains a strong supporter of the Corporation, despite the shabby way he was treated by both the Blair Government and the BBC Trust) to investigate the Broadcasting Industry in the UK for them, that the Public wont realise how much they despise the BBC, and that by the General Election the public will also have forgotten David Cameron’s little slip about the Licence Fee.  Sadly for them, but fortunately for everybody else, along came lose cannon Daniel Hannah MEP.  Hannah infamously appeared on FOX News in the US, claiming that the National Health Service was a “60 year old Stalinist mistake.” and that the American people should reject President Obama’s attempt to reform their healthcare system.  Daniel Hannah said on the BBC that he no longer had a Television Licence because he only watched BBC programmes on the BBC iPlayer.  So he can hypocritically enjoy the products of the BBC without paying a brass farthing to pay for them. No matter how hard Conservative Central Office tries to claim that this maverick right-winger does not represent what the Tory Party really thinks, the more it becomes apperent that Hannah is the true face of Tory  Policy in the run up to the General Election  Which means it will be even harder it will be for the Tories to hide their hatred of the BBC.

So on Election Day, fear that EastEnders, Doctor Who and Top Gear will disappear from our television screens forever might be what saves Gordon Brown’s bacon.  That the love of Aunty will prevent Smiling Dave from getting the keys to Number 10 Downing Street.  That the average voter will vote with their TV remote control and install in power the government that is most likely to preserve the BBC.

It appears that Kraft have had to borrow heavily to finance the take-over of Cadbury’s.  Only £4milllion of the £12million that Kraft are paying for a great British Company is from its company coffers.  The balance is a loan from Royal Bank of Scotland.  Yes, that’s right, the bank that every single Cadbury’s employee as UK tax-payers own part of, thanks to the 70% stake in bank H. M. Government has in RBS.  How can Lord Mandelson now possibly claim that he has no power to stop the deal, when it is apparent that the only bank willing to finance this business venture is the one he is the major shareholder in.  This travesty of a take over must be blocked, and it must be blocked now.

The sale of Cadbury to Kraft General Foods is a tragedy, as it sees the end of the British chocolate industry.  Because you can guarentee the Kraft will rape the Cadbury name, just as it raped Terry’s of York.  All the assurances that this American company are worthless.  Just as they closed the historic York factory and moved production of Terry’s to Hungary, they will close Bournville and all the other factories and move production to Eastern Europe.  I have said before, and I wlll say it again, the French would not let an iconic brand go into foreign ownership.

And its another reason, if reason were needed to despise Peter Mandelson, (after all, he was the man who handed the 1992 General Election to the Tories).  His spineless claim that he had no powers to block this deal.  Sphericals my lord.  You are Her Majesty’s Principle Secretary of State for Trade and Industry, it is your job to keep British Industry running.  You have the power to refer this take over to the Monopolies and Mergers  Commission, and if they found against it, (as they no doubt would, as it would leave the UK with just two mega-sized chocolate Manufactures, Kraft General Foods from America and Societé de Produit Ernst Nestlé et Fils from Switzerland, with bugger all competition between the two) block the deal.

This video was recommended on the Gallifrey Base Web Forum to explain to an American member to try and explain what a Hen Night was.  These women are absolutely amazing.  Even the “seen it all” doorman at the Model Inn in Cardiff was impressed.

George in his Basket

My cat George is a bit poorly. He has not been his usual vocal self. He has been off his food and sleeping a good deal more than he usually does. So last week I made an appointment to take him to see the vets this morning. Given the recent inclement weather, this looked as if it was going to be a bit of a problem. Old snow was making the roads treacherous and new heavy snow was forecast for this morning. The vets that I normally take George to Robin Lewis is up the hill out of Tonypandy, almost in Penygraig.  If it had snowed, getting there would have been impossible.  Fortunately, whist the weather was still cold, there was a definite thaw in progress, and getting to the vets surgery was a lot less of a problem than I imagined.

Although the first problem was how was I going to get him to the vets, as nobody could find the cat carrier.  It definitely was not in my house, last time I took George to the vets i had borrowed a neighbour’s carrier.  Carolyn, my sister thought it was in the shed in her garden, when she checked it wasn’t their and neither was it in garage.  It looked as if I would have to buy a new one first thing this morning.  Fortunately, my brother-in-law Gary remembered that it was down in his brother’s garage in Pentre, where he keeps his Jensen Interceptor.  So he trekked down to Pentre and fetched it last night. Thanks Gary.

It was obvious that George was under the weather, because he let me put him in the cat carrier without any complaint.  No squirming when I picked him up, no desperate wriggling when he saw the carrier with its door open.  Not even a peep when the door was shut and I started carrying him out of the house.  Appart from the odd mew during the journey, George was silent.  He really did not like it in the waiting room, as there were two dogs waiting to be treated ahead of him and he really doesn’t like dogs.  Not that George should have worried, he was larger than the four month old Papillion puppy and the other dog was incredibly timid, cowering under its owner’s seat.

Anyway, George went in to see the vet, and everything on the surface appeared to be normal.  Weight and temperature checked out, but no way was George his normal inquisitive self.  I pointed out the symptoms and the vet decided to take some blood samples.  I was told to leave him, and phone at 12 noon when the results would be ready.  So off I went with two hours to kill. I ended up having a fried breakfast in ASDA with my mother and doing some shopping.

When I rung, I was told that George was very anaemic and he had a high lymphocyte count.  The vet had taken more blood samples and they would be sent to a lab for testing.  That I could come and fetch him, but it would be a couple of days before they got the results from the lab and they would know exactly what was wrong.  He was even more subdued in the car coming home.  He had been given a sedative so that they could take samples, and a patch of his fur on his chest had been shaved.  All in all he was looking more sorry for himself when he left the vets than when he arrived.

And to add insult to injury, I have just administered a dose of Profender Spot-on that the vet supplied.  So he now has a sticky, itchy patch on the back of his head that he cannot scratch or groom, which will give him a sore belly if he has got any worms.  He is currently sulking under the bed in the back bedroom, where he thinks I cannot reach him.