I’ve read a mere 31 out of the 100, if I don’t count the ones I started but didn’t finish (hello, Silmarillion, you doorstop of obscurity).

Among these 31, though, are books that cemented my love of SF/F, and which I will probably reread until I’m wrinkled and wheezing (particularly Lord Of The Rings, Cryptonomicon, Perdido Street Station, Dune, Canticle For Leibowitz, Martian Chronicles, Book Of The New Sun, Watchmen, The Sandman, and Fire Upon The Deep).

Of the whopping 69 I haven’t read, about half are titles I have no intention whatsoever of picking up (Wheel of Time, Stardust, WWZ, etc.), while the rest point to huge holes in my genre reading (Ender’s Game, Flowers for Algernon, the Dark Tower series and The Stand, etc.) I think it’s time to hit the library.

On August 9, 1971, a special forces unit of the British Army called The Parachute Regiment hit the streets of Belfast with the goal of jailing and interrogating suspected members of republican paramilitary groups, mainly the Provisional IRA (Demetrius left loyalist paramilitarists largely untouched).

In addition to the arrest and detainment of 342 people, many of whom were tortured by the British Army, Operation Demetrius also triggered some of the bloodiest incidents of The Troubles. The most immediate such incident was the Ballymurphy Massacre, which started on the first day of Demetrius when the Parachute Regiment took fire from republicans in the Springfield Park area of West Belfast, and continued for two days, leaving eleven unarmed citizens dead, including a priest and a mother of eight. Nearly six months later, twenty-six unarmed citizens lost their lives at the hands of the Parachute Regiment during the Bloody Sunday Massacre, which started off as a peaceful anti-internment march.

Internment continued as the official policy of the British government for more than four years before finally ending in December, 1975. In total, nearly two thousand people were arrested and detained without trial.

Demetrius also introduced to Northern Ireland an officially-sanctioned torture protocol known as the Five techniques, some of which have become favorite techniques of our own government here in the US in the war on terror. Andrew Sullivan has collected some clips about the torture the internees endured at the hands of the British army here.

In 2007 I did a walking tour of Northern Ireland. I flew into Belfast, hopped a train to Derry, and spent the next week walking back to Belfast (trying, but more often than not, failing, to follow the Ulster Way).

The route took me through a number of small towns where I met a few people who, after a pint or two at a pub, would make an ambiguous reference to a republican paramilitary past. One guy told me that he actually fled the country for a time.

I remember arriving at a small town about a day’s walk or two outside of Derry. There was no one behind the counter at the only hotel in town, so I went to the pub a few doors down to ask around for accommodation (the hotel proprietor was the pub, it turns out — I’ve since learned that if you want to find anyone in a small town in Ireland, you should always head straight to the pub). Anyway, as the new face in town, the crowd at the pub took an immediate interest in me and asked me where I’d come from. When I announced that I had walked all the way from Londonderry, the whole pub erupted in a chorus of hoots and hollars. I thought that they were impressed with my pedestrian stamina, but no. The bartender, a friendly recent college grad, leaned over the bar and told me “Around here, it’s just Derry.”

The Universe of Things, by Gwynneth Jones (1/1/2011)
Home Fires , by Gene Wolfe (1/18/2011)
Among Others, by Jo Walton (1/18/2011)
A Brood of Foxes, by Kristin Livdahl (1/31/201)
Shotgun Lullabies: Stories & Poems , by Sheree Renee Thomas (1/31/2011)
The Alchemist, by Paolo Bacigalupi (1/31/2011)
Swamplandia!, by Karen Russell (2/1/2011)
A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism, by Slavenka Drakulic (2/22/2011)
Redwood and Wildfire , by Andrea Hairston (2/28/2011)
Lost and Found, by Shaun Tan (3/1/2011)
Pym: A Novel , by Mat Johnson (3/1/2011)
The Tiger’s Wife, by Téa Obreht (3/8/2011)
With a Little Help, by Cory Doctorow (3/15/2011)
Deathless , by Catherynne M. Valente (3/29/2011)
A Life in Pictures, by Alasdair Gray (4/1/2011)
There is No Year , by Blake Butler (4/5/2011)
The Long Goodbye: A memoir, by Meghan O’Rourke (4/14/2011)
The Great Lover, by Michael Cisco (4/14/2011)
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake , by Aimee Bender (4/19/2011)
Let’s Play White, by Chesya Burke (5/1/2011)
Sensation, by Nick Mamatas (5/1/2011)
The Fires Beneath the Sea , by Lydia Millet (5/17/2011)
Embassytown , by China Mieville (5/17/2011)
Dancing With Bears, by Michael Swanwick (5/17/2011)
30 Under 30: An Anthology of Innovative Fiction by Younger Writers, by Blake Butler & Lily Hoang (editors) (6/1/2011)
The Alchemists of Kush, by Minister Faust (6/15/2011)
Never at Home, by L Timmel Duchamp (7/1/2011)
Five One-Act Plays, by Tony Kushner (7/1/2011)
Paradise Tales: and Other Stories, by Geoff Ryman (7/12/2011)
The Lost Words, by Oya Baydar (8/1/2011)
By Light Alone, by Adam Roberts (8/18/2011)
Train Dreams, by Denis Johnson (8/30/2011)
Ganymede , by Cherie Priest (9/27/2011)
The Forgotten Waltz, by Anne Enright (10/3/2011)
Children of the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (10/11/2011)
In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, by Margaret Atwood (10/18/2011)
Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders, by Samuel R. Delany (10/18/2011)
1Q84, by Haruki Murakami (10/25/2011)
The Freedom Maze, by Delia Sherman (11/15/2011)
A Bridge of Years, by Robert Charles Wilson (12/6/2011)

It’s hard to know what to do apart from feel heart-broken for the victims and their families, and give money to the Red Cross and other relief groups.

But as I was surfing Wikipedia, reading about this part of the world I knew nothing about when I went to bed last night, I read about this guy, Date Masamune, the samurai who founded Sendai in 1600, and thought this guy’s a total badass. Someone should make a movie about him and use the proceeds to rebuild Sendai!

So, here’s my pitch:

It’s Medieval Japan around the turn of the 17th century, and there’s trouble brewing in the Date clan. The head of the family, Terumune, is getting too old to lead the family, but he worries that his eldest son is too violent to succeed him. They call him One-Eyed Dragon because he was blinded in one eye as a child by smallpox. He is said to have plucked out his blind eye himself because it might leave him exposed to an enemy. Because he has only one eye, his mother favors his younger brother early on, grooming him instead of Masamune to take over their clan.

Terumune, during his life, has established peaceful relations with their neighboring clans. But as Masamune grows into a formidable warrior, channeling his anger at his mother’s neglect, he begins picking fights with their neighbors, destroying the peace his father spent his life trying to build.

One day, the elders of the Hatakeyama clan arrange a secret meeting with Terumune and ask him to rein in his son. Terumune replies that he had no control over the boy. Desperate to protect their lands, the Hatakeyama kidnap Terumune, hoping to ransom him for peace from Masamune.

Masamune hears of the kidnapping and intercepted them at a river crossing. His father, restrained by the Hatakeyama, shouts out to his son to kill them all even if it means killing him. Masamune obliges, massacring the Hatakeyama and his father along with them. Over the following days and months he invades and conqueres the Hatakeyama land, as well as the land of other nearby clans, consolidating property and power under him. His crescent moon helmet became a fearsome symbol of his power.

Meanwhile, Masamune’s mother, still intent on seeing her youngest son become head of their clan, tries to poison him at dinner. Masamune discovers the plot and kills his brother instead and drives his mother from his home to relatives in a neighboring clan.

Shortly thereafter, he assists Tokugawa Ieyasu in Sekigahara Campaign. Tokugawa, who is now the shogun thanks to Masamune, rewards Masamune by giving him Sendai Domain, the bread basket of Edo.

Masamune mellows into a wiser, cooler-headed leader. He turns the small fishing village of Sendai into a thriving city. He funds far-flung explorations, adaopting European boat-building techniques. He attracts foreign traders and missionaries to his domain, and exhibits sympathies towards Christianity, even going so far as to send an envoy to the Pope in Rome.

But when Tokugawa criminalizes Christianity, Masamune has no choice but to comply.

Here’s where we bend facts to fit the sin-redemption narrative: Masamune has become a closet Christian, and there is a missionary he is holding in prison for execution, as is law. But in a stirring scene where the missionary gets Masamune to repent the sins of his youth and makes him realizes all the harm he has done throughout his life, Masamune agrees to free the missionary and bear the political fallout.

In the murky vocabulary of diplomacy, the scheduled talks due to start under American supervision are viewed by the Israelis mostly as “proximity” discussions, in other words procedural talks rather than substantive negotiations.

It’s not exactly a new insight to say diplomacy has its own language, but it’s probably more accurate to say that the jargon of diplomacy takes the English language and saps out as much meaning as possible through odd word choices and awkward juxtapositions.  The less overt meaning it has, the better.

Why?  Oh, probably because of the intense scrutiny that these words are given.  When two people speak to one another, each one has a pretty good understanding of the context in which their words will be understood, and speaks accordingly.  But when nations of millions or billions of people speak to one another, the gulf between intention and interpretation can span galaxies.  So the more conservative the better.

Which is not to say that it’s necessarily ugly.  There is something almost poetic about “proximity discussions,” don’t you think?

It’s the same with the Federal Reserve – remember Greenspan Speak?   And it’s the same, or at least similar, with the decisions and opinions of the Supreme Court.  Just read this stuff.  It’s also true, on a much smaller level, of the contracts, interoffice memoranda, business emails, letters of intent, etc., that many of us peddle as part of our day jobs.

It’s not beautiful language, nor is it always easily comprehensible, but this is usually the case with any string of words chosen to have the most limited meanings for the largest number of readers.

Which leads to an observation/question: the words that change the world – that determine peace or war among nations, that get roads and train lines and dams built, that memorialize understandings between people and companies and nations – are all, by virtue of their necessary specificity, ugly?

I gather from the article that the security officer was one of the guards placed at the church by the local police in response to threats the church had been receiving.

It occurred in front of a Coptic church as service was letting out.  Says the BBC, it is allegedly retaliation by  ”rape of a 12-year-old Muslim girl by a Christian man” last November.

From the BBC’s Cairo correspondent, Yolande Knell, here’s some background on the tense relationship between Copts (who make up about 10% of Egypt’s population) and the majority Muslim community:

Since the 1970s, when Islamic extremism began to increase in Egypt, there have been sporadic clashes between Muslims and members of the Coptic Christian minority.

The most serious cases are usually in poor, rural areas where the trigger is often a dispute over land or women, which spills over into sectarian violence. Whole communities can become involved.

Local authorities’ handling of such cases is often criticised. Police are accused of delaying their response to reports of fighting and then simply arresting equal numbers of individuals from each faith.

Sometimes criminal investigations are dropped in favour of informal reconciliation meetings.

Naj Hammadi, the town where this flare-up is going down, is also where the Nag Hammadi Library was unearthed, where the Gnosit Gospels were discovered.