I spent this afternoon in the Fitzwilliam museum, looking at their “Cambridge Illuminations” exhibit of medieval books.

The content was very impressive, but (as I’ve grumbled before) the standard museum format is totally the wrong way of looking at anything like this.

If you visit the Fitzwilliam, what you get is a couple of rooms of exbibit cases. To protect the books the lighting is so dim that you can barely see anything. Needless to say touching the books is out of the question, so all you can see is one page from each book. The only explanation is the few sentences on a label, placed so you can only read it by bending down, and giving little more than the essentials of place and date.

All of which reduces visiting the exhibition to going “ooh, old pretty things”.

Slightly better is the virtual exhibition, a website with pictures of 65 of the exhibits. There is – I think – slightly more background, and you can look at the manuscripts without having to squint over somebody’s shoulder.

Still, wouldn’t it be better for a museum to put its images up on flickr, publicise them a bit, and let history-geeks of the world annotate and analyse them?

Better still, we could all go and listen to these lectures. It’s an undergraduate course from the University of Sydney, covering “the medieval intellectual tradition”, and the organisers have been generous enough to put recordings of all 24 lectures on the internet. I’ve been listening to them at work, and they’re really really good. The course manages to make the debates of the time interesting on their own terms, not just as precursers to something else, or as old-therefore-good.

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off to London now. Back thursday or friday, then off to the_mendicant‘s party near Oakham on Saturday. I’ll be in Cambridge again from the following Tuesday, and then I’ll be here (working) right through christmas and new year.

Also: cambridge town centre on a saturday in december? not nice.

Reuters‘ reporting from Saddam’s trial makes it sound like he’s still coming to terms with the basics of being jailed:

Saddam in closed-door wrangle, trial delayed

“Saddam Hussein was locked in….”

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There are Good Things happening at the moment.

Firstly, I have a shiny new laptop. And I have ubuntu working on it, with very limited hassle.

Secondly, this month I’m going to have a

lot

more time away from work this month. From next week, I’m only working four days a week. And I get saturday to thursday off, because of the way things work with changing shift patterns. Then I have six days off, which I need to take before the end of the year. So I’m likely to be away from work between the 12th and the 21st. Or something like that – in any case, I’m going to have a lot of time to do interesting things.

Now I just need to find some interesting things to do…

Another bit of shift-silliness – 6pm-2am yesterday, then starting work at 9am today. But all in a good cause – I’m getting a free meal out of Jagex this evening. I’ll probably get along to WUS sometime after that.

But anyway, back to the weekend…

I think everyone involved was a bit surprised that I managed to meet ioerror on Saturday. The only contact we’d had was through lj comments and a couple of very cracky phone messages, and I’d never met him or any of the people he was staying with. But once I’d deciphered the directions and made my way to Hampstead, it turned out I was walking into a full thanksgiving meal (thanks,Travis), with a bunch of interesting US expats.

Fortunately ioerror is a very easy person to talk to, and the other guests were fascinating as well. Conversation swerved from computers to politics to philosophy and back again – nice to talk to people who are well-informed about more than one thing:) There was a constant clicking of cameras – leading to one picture of me that I quite like, and plenty of others

Then (and I wasn’t expecting this either), myself and ioerror went to Slimelight for the night. Given the number of times I’ve ended up not going there with various CamGoths, I guess it was about time I went. I love the chance to go and dance until 7am – which you just can’t do in Cambridge. And also the anonymity of it. One of the great things about the Calling is that everybody knows everybody, but that also makes it horribly claustrophobic and political at times.

I’d also never realised how close Slimelight is to King’s Cross. Why on earth have I been staying in London, or getting the last train back, when I could have just danced until the first train on Sunday morning?

Weekend was enjoyable, and very full.

Saturday morning I went to a teach-in on Iraq. I probably wasn’t at my most alert – a 10am start isn’t ideal when you have to travel to London first, and when you finished work at 2am the previous night.

But the speakers were excellent. I’d expected Rahul Mahajan to be a bonkers Marxist and/or conspiracy theorist, mainly on the grounds that his blog is called

Empire Notes

. He did a good job of looking at things through the eyes of particular segments of Iraqi society. So Sadr comes across as paranoid, and the non-Iraqi jihadis are idealistic young men lost in a foreign country, who don’t know their way around and are easily manipulated by local groups.

Kamil Mahdi (a British-Iraqi economist, and CASI ally of times past) was an odd choice to give the opening rant. He was OK, but I’d rather have heard him talking about the economic situation. Then there was Ismael Dawood, who I hadn’t heard of and was introduced as an Iraqi Human Rights activist. He just went straight through a selection of human rights abuses commonplace in Iraq, and what changes he wants to get rid of them. Totally clear, ad very compelling. I’ve been searching for anything else he’s written/done, but all I seem to turn up are adverts for this events, and articles about a cricket-player with the same name.

I also got to spend a while talking to Mike L, who I see far too little of these days. He still manages to know everything about everything, and about politics in general. Among the fascinating things he told me is this:

Victor (Viktor?) Bout is one of the world’s most notorious arms smugglers in the world. The US and UK claim that he supplies Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban. He’s supplied weapons to fighters in Sierra Leone, Angola and the DRC. His assets were frozen by a UN Security Council Resolution. So, generally a pretty nasty guy. Britain has been pressurising other countries to wash their hands of him. But DfiD (the department for international development) has been paying him to ship Armoured Personnel Carriers to Basra.

I’d rant about the ‘ethical foreign policy’, but it’s been too long since we even pretended to have one of those. Anyway, all this took me up to the early afternoon. Then I went off to see ioerror for the first time. But that’s going to need a post of its own.

I’m puzzled by the memo leaked to the Mirror a couple of days ago. This claims that Bush wanted to bomb Al-Jazeera headquarters in Qatar, until he was talked out of it by Blair. It’s a crazy idea even for Bush, but that doesn’t mean it is impossible. What I find hard to believe is the story of how the document came to light. According to the Mirror article:

The memo, which also included details of troop deployments, turned up in May last year at the Northampton constituency office of then Labour MP Tony Clarke.

Would something this damaging be handed out willy-nilly to MPs – especially to somebody like Tony Clarke, whose voting record shows that he was reasonably anti-war and anti-Blair in the first place.

But then, the government seems to be treating it as if it’s genuine – charging people and threatening editors under the Official Secrets Act. So I’m confused – I guess it’s possible that somebody leaked this

to

Tony Clarke in the past, and that he and his staff kept it secret until now. It might become clearer in a while – for now, I’ll just hope that the document turns up on Cryptome, which it will if it gets into the public domain.

[also covered by the Guardian, The Times, and probably a few others.]