Speeches, spies, and memes, continued

On the road again, after the book fair ended with several great speeches by Wolf Lepenies (a scientist and journalist who received the Friedenspreis, the “peace award” of the German book fair) and Andrei Plesu who did the laudatory acclamation. Today, reading the papers, I was somewhat irritated by what the F.A.Z. (biggest conservative non-yellow press newspaper) did – it was the usual journalistic game of picking quotes while ignoring others, but in some cases this didn’t just lead to a limited pov but to direct falsification, as when they claimed Lepenies had taken position against Turkey joining the E.U. What he actually said was:

“There are good reasons which could be named against Turkey joining the European Union – the ignoring of human rights, the lack of protection for minorities, the danger of various European institutions being unable to function afterwards due to blocking themselves. But in no way can one argue that Turkey shouldn’t join the E.U. because “Christian Europe would loose its soul this way”. Europe – and this has always been its strength – never had a “pure” soul. (…) If we argue that a secular state like Turkey cannot be a member of the European Union because supposedly a Muslim country would be a stranger on our continent, do we wish to know how very much our Christian middle ages were co-formed by Islam? How can we claim the enlightenment as a “Western” achievement if we are ignoring its Judean-Arabic roots?”

Out of all this, guess what the F.A.Z. picked? “There are good reasons against Turkey joining the E.U.” That’s why I usually read the Süddeutsche. (Which btw thought the speech wasn’t that fascinating, as opposed to yours truly, but printed it completely so readers could make up their own minds.)

During recent weeks, I was able to watch the third season of Spooks (kathyh, this does not mean I don’t want it as a Christmas present – what I watched was only temporarily mine) and last night, I finished it. It, err, shares more than one quality with the third season of Farscape. (This is a compliment, no-Scapers.) To recapitulate, my fannish history with Spooks so far: loved season 1, thought season 2 was a shaky affair with some great individual episodes but overall too much of Tom Quinn’s love life and a WTF cliffhanger which had several characters behaving bizarrely, plus I missed Tessa. Season 3, I loved again.

( Detailed third season impressions )

Now, I owe some people some more love reasons. Which as today's hotel has only dial-up connection I had time to do. Let’s see.


( Kosh/Lyta )

( Charles Xavier & Hank McCoy (either movieverse or comicverse )

( Arvin Sloane/Jack Bristow )