I’m currently rebuilding the website as the old one got totally messed up when i was playing around with things (no idea what happened).
So i thought that while it was a total clusterfuck mess of SQL, i would take the opportunity to give it a whole new life and everything.
So if you go clicking on things you might find that very strange things happen. Don’t moan, i know a lot of things are broken, i’m working on it, it takes time.
I’ve got tons of old posts and pages from three websites that i’m working through and will be gradually posting all the stuff i want to keep on here while fixing all the broken things as i go through, one post, one page, at a time.
On top of doing all that, i will, of course, be continuing to add more new content and my latest posts will always appear directly below.
Or, if you prefer, you can also follow me on Twitter and Pinterest where i put a link to all new posts.
Enjoy
The Reason I Jump — Naoki Higashida
What a truly incredible book.
Noaki wrote this book when he was 13 years old. A child diagnosed with autism at 5 who has struggled all his life with this incredibly difficult condition has finally learned a way to communicate through the written word. This is a soul that has never been able to express itself before now able to tell the world what life is truly like living with autism. The book takes the form of 58 common questions that are asked about autism and answers to each are given by Naoki. These questions and answers are interspersed with Naoki’s prose and the book ends with a short story, also by Naoki.
It’s not a long book and it’s not a difficult read, it never goes off on tangents with pointless facts or science, it stays very much on target and is incredibly accessible. And in so being, this makes this book a must read book for everyone, because we will all meet people with autism along our paths. This book gives a lot of insight into just what is happening within that other human being, that there is a truly thoughtful and caring human being struggling within, and a little understanding of their abilities and disabilities would go a very long way to making their day a little better and not add any more to their struggles.
Just read it!!!
Naoki’s Page
#autism #naokihigashida
Storm Over Warlock — Andre Norton
An ok little sci-fi story. Andre was the earliest of women sci-fi writers, even before Ursula K Le Guin, and this book certainly feels quite old school in that it has quite a few elements that you’re more likely to find in pure fantasy books these days.
Not really the kind of thing i would think the youth would be into these days, but for us old school types who enjoy going back in time and don’t care if people mix witches, warlocks and dream spells in with their lasers, spaceships and food pills it’s quite an enjoyable little read and a wonderful piece of sci-fi history.
Essentially, a scout team are on a newly discovered planet, named Warlock, setting things up when aliens arrive and destroy them all, except the youngest and newest member of the team and two wolverines. Then it becomes a case of surviving on an alien planet while being hunted by the aliens. And so the story begins as more things are discovered about the planet and its native flora and fauna along the way.
Also available in the collections The Andre Norton Megapack and Visions of Distant Shores.
Andre’s Page
#scifi #andrenorton
The Lock In — Colby R. Rice
The third book of this enthralling series is just as good as the first two.
The Lock In continues where The Taken left off. Ezekiel has decided which side she needs to be on, but the problem with that idea is that she soon begins to realise that they might have different plans for her, ones that don’t include her being on their side.
So Ezekiel finds herself running on the streets again, but after the bombings everything has changed. Faust makes an appearance with his minions the Ninkashi, who are all very hungry, and much mayhem, gore and death ensues as more of the story and characters are slowly revealed to us. And that’s what makes these books so good: they are incredibly action packed, fast paced books, dark and not so pleasant, which contrasts so well with story and character backgrounds — that reveal more of the plot — getting drip fed slowly throughout that action. So even after 3 books, i’m still not sure what’s really going on, but it really doesn’t matter, because to get here has been an awesome ride. The destination is somewhere ahead, who cares where, the journey is more than good enough.
There simply isn’t any downtime in these books. Find a comfy chair or bed and start reading, you may be there for a while.
Colby’s Page
#fantasy #dystopian #colbyrrice
The Little Paris Bookshop — Nina George
Oh my, what an incredible book. It is a roller coaster of emotion, from smiles, giggles and laughs all the way through to crying your eyes out and feeling heartbroken. Although i’m sure there are people who can read this book and never feel a thing, which is entirely possible if you refuse to surrender yourself to the story and characters, but then what’s the point in reading a book if not to surrender to it completely?
Characters: There isn’t one awful character, everyone in this book is nice, or funny in some way, even the grumpy lock keepers and their moustachioed wives with dogs that wee on Max’s hands bring a smile or giggle to you. And that’s what makes this book so hard to take in places, you can fall in love with the characters and feel for them so completely. Other books have those nasty characters, the evil ones to balance the good, and that holds you in balance and never lets you fly off into the good characters so much, this book doesn’t hold you back from that.
Places: Nina is a genius when it comes to putting you into a place, a room, even a simple field. The way she describes tastes, textures, sounds, sights, smells, makes it all feel like a dream you are in. She never overdoes it, and always when the story needs it.
Emotions: You feel them along with the characters as you are taken into their lives. So many haven’t loved for 21 years (or there abouts). 21 seems like the magic number in this book. You have to go 21 years without love to be a main character in this book. But none of it ever seems unreal, just a coincidence. This book is about losing, about finding, about tragedy, about love, about dying, about living, its got the most wonderful high moments and most heartbreaking lows.
Story: The best bit. And that’s the bit where i will use the last book i read to draw a few comparisons.
This was my second reading of this book, having last read it just over 2 years ago before i started writing reviews.
One thing i remember when reading it last time was that it reminded me of Heart of Darkness and so the plan was to wait a couple of years and then come back to it having read Heart of Darkness immediately before and then write a review of both books and see if there were any similarities.
These two books are so similar, yet so very different. The template is definitely there, that of the river boat voyage, the bizarre encounters along the way and the deeply emotional journey of our boat captains. We begin one sitting on the Thames in London while the other begins sitting on the Seine in Paris. A description of companions ensues before we are taken on our voyages. And there’s where they differ.
In HoD we are on a voyage up river into the centre of the land, into the darkness and ignorance of man’s soul and what he’s truly capable of at his worse. While in TLPB we are on a voyage down river to the sea, into the light and opening up of a man’s soul from 21 years of darkness and ignorance, and we’re shown what people are truly capable of at their best.
Whereas in HoD we have Kurtz and his fiance, in TLPB we have Luc and Manan’s diary.
The final conversation with Kurtz in HoD is replaced in TLPB with the final entry in Manan’s diary, while Luc replaces the crazy Russian.
The bizarre encounters along the banks are quite awful episodes in HoD as they expose Marlow to ever more wrong, and dim the light ever further, while in TLPB the bizarre encounters along the banks expose Jean to ever more right, and turn on the light ever brighter.
And the pilgrims on the boat in HoD are replaced in TLPB with a runaway writer, a cook, and another writer who has been waiting for the love of her life to turn up; while the cannibals are replaced with 2 cats.
And no, i have no idea if Nina has even read Heart of Darkness, maybe she has, maybe she hasn’t. And even if she has, was that any influence on The Little Paris Bookshop? I could write and ask, but i simply love the not knowing because it really doesn’t matter. What mattered was that the first time i read TLPB i could barely remember reading HoD, it had been decades, and both were read while under the influence of alcohol, numbed, but this time i decided to read them one immediately after the other and i have been sober for 22 months. This time i wasn’t numbed by alcohol and really felt both books, i really felt that i read them both, and i really felt that they complemented each other in so many ways.
To be taken right into the depth’s of Charles Marlow’s darkness in HoD and be left hanging there at the end only to go immediately to the depths of Jean Perdu’s darkness in Paris and be then taken back into the light was quite the literary journey, and definitely one i would very much recommend for anyone looking for a true roller-coaster experience.
But however, and whatever, you want to read, just make sure The Little Paris Bookshop is on your “To Read” pile — everyone should read this book.
I have also read The Little Breton Bistro but like my first reading of The Little Paris Bookshop i wasn’t writing reviews at the time either. But i assure you, it’s also a wonderful book. And Nina’s latest book, The Book of Dreams is now out, which i’ll most certainly get around to as soon as i’ve re-read The Little Breton Bistro.
Nina’s Page
#ninageorge
4 Non Blondes — What’s Up
Such a beautiful song and the perfectly amazing voice to go with it.
Loves it!
#5t4n5 #4nonblondes #music
Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
The book that inspired the film: Apocalypse Now.
I read this book many, many years ago and i especially wanted to read it again before re-reading The Little Paris Bookshop. From my long ago memory of Heart of Darkness it struck me that there was something similar going on in the two books so i wanted to re-read both. More on the similarities in the next review, for this review i’m just sticking with Heart of Darkness.
So what did i think? It has the usual politically incorrect Victorian wording and attitude to non-Europeans, which tends towards appalling, even more so than usual as this book is mostly telling a story of the Belgian Congo when the Belgians were exploiting it and its peoples.
There’s a lot been said about this book, both good and bad, and you can read more on the wiki page if you want to know more.
For me, i’d like to see the glass half full with this one. Yes i understand the other side of the debate, and i most certainly do not condone any colonialism, i absolutely condemn it all, however; this book was written in the Victorian age and i do feel that if you are going to read Victorian literature then you have to lay aside your modern prejudices, morals, ethics, etc., and understand that the people writing it were victims and hostages of their own age as we are of ours. It’s not so much politically incorrect as it’s far more politically ignorant. And for me that is what a lot of this book is about: the political ignorance of the age.
Yes, Conrad uses words that are considered repugnant now, but they were not considered so when he wrote this. And its the words, i feel, that create the problem for a lot of people, allowing those to cloud their judgement of Conrad’s attitude and opinion. If you can take that step back and accept the words to be used as they were used in his age by white Europeans, only then can you see what Conrad was really saying when he wrote this book. You really cannot read this book as though it were written by someone in the 21st century for people in the 21st century. It’s a piece of history written a long time ago, read it as such.
So, if one considers the above, it is, i think, very clear that Conrad is very appalled with the worse of white Europeans descending upon the peoples of Africa appearing almost deity like — and exploiting that appearance to the maximum — simply due to their modern technology, their equipment, their immaculate white clothes in a hostile environment of sweat and mud. What chance would any person who has lived a natural life in a completely natural world have of remaining unaffected by the power and influence over the natural world that white Europeans had at their disposal?
Conrad makes clear that he alone, amongst the white Europeans on the boat, can see the humanity in the people’s of the Congo, while others would just consider them wild animals. How the sounds of the Congalese connected to a part of him, as only a human could connect to another human.
The only white person in the whole of Africa that Conrad wishes to speak to is Kurtz, the rest he seems to dismiss as arrogant fools and idiots who should never have been there.
One also has to remember that Conrad actually did go on this journey on a steam boat up the Congo to one of the inner stations, he witnessed what the Belgians were actually doing there, and he knew very well what Europe was being told about the people that lived there. The most telling part of this book is simply Kurtz’s last four words: “The horror, the horror!”
When Marlow, the protagonist, finally arrives home and meets Kurtz’s fiancé and she asks him what his final words were he cannot bring himself to tell her the truth because he feels it would crush her to know what he did in her name, as Kurtz only went there to win his fortune in order to be considered worthy to be her husband. One can quite clearly see the metaphor here, that Conrad himself, when he came back from the Congo, didn’t have anyone to speak to of the horror that he had witnessed being done in the name of the progress of European nations at the expense of those they dehumanise, oppress and treat no better than animals. There seems to me that if we place Conrad in Marlow’s place, we get to realise that when Conrad was in the Congo, he had no one to understand his feelings of horror, that he only wished to find one person amongst it all that he could talk to. And when he came home to Europe how was he to explain to the people of Europe the horror that was being done in their name by the worse of them that they would send to Africa on their behalf — and would they even want to listen?
So for me, this is what this book is, Conrad’s description of what he’d experienced in Africa that he felt no one would, or could, listen to; that he felt no one he knew would understand.
If only he could have found just one person at the end of his own journey to talk to who understood.
As i mentioned at the beginning, i was reading this before re-reading The Little Paris Bookshop, so please consider reading that straight after this. Some may think it’s a strange juxtaposition to make, but i think it works rather well.
Joseph’s Page
#viclit #josephconrad
Marie Antoinette’s Big Fuck Up
This follows on from “Scottish Privilege” and “£4.50 Doughnuts”, so if you haven’t read them already then go and do so first — else i’ll get really grumpy or something, and you wouldn’t like me when i’m really grumpy.
In English speaking countries there’s an urban myth that during the French revolution someone mentioned to Queen Marie Antoinette that the peasants were starving and she reputedly responded with “Let them eat cake.”
Of course, we love that one in England; anything to diss the French will always cheer us up, no end. Anyone who thinks frogs and slugs are food seriously needs to try eating some cake instead.
However, in French, her reputed statement was “Qu’ils mangent de la brioche.” which means: “Then let them eat brioche.” You can read all about the whole episode by clicking here.
If you did click there and read the wiki on it you’ll soon get to thinking that she didn’t actually say it, but that it was a pure propaganda stunt by the peasants to stir up animosity against the royalty. Or maybe it was just some bored English bloke deciding to have another bash at our favourite neighbours.
Anyways, history lesson over and fast forward to the UK under the bootheels of the Tory party austerity measures. Are the ruling classes of the UK going to make the same mistake as the French monarchy made and see the peasants rising up against them and chopping their heads off, or are they going to do something different?
Yes, you guessed it, they’re going for a different approach: that of aspiration.
After all, the last thing the poor peasants of the UK need to hear from Mandy Android is this:
Firstly, the ignorant, mono sylabic, tabloid oiks — which make up the vast majority of the UK population — wouldn’t know what the fuck that meant; and secondly, even if they did manage to translate it correctly, they wouldn’t be too impressed anyway as they don’t know what a brioche is — coz mcdonalds don’t sell ’em, init.
But they eat doughnuts. Everyone likes doughnuts, especially the poor, downtrodden masses of the UK. I checked while in Tesco yesterday and they’re still 79p for 5 from the in-store-bakery. Probably cheaper at Lidl and Aldi, but i’m way too classy to be seen in those type of places with the sort that frequent them.
So instead of the government handing out barrow fulls of Brioche to the hungry masses, or simply giving them enough benefits to afford to buy their own brioche, they have deliberately fucked up their benefit payments and created a country where the poorest have to sit at home, staring forlornly at their 68″ plasma tv screens, while watching rich cunts shoving £4.50 doughnuts into their faces, while they have to rely on whatever tinned and packet shite the food bank gave them yesterday.
Obviously, this is far better for the peasants than simply giving them brioche as Marie may, or may not have, suggested.
Why is it far better, you may ask?
Well, because it gives the peasants something to aspire to. Think about it. What else, other than their 68″ plasma TV screens and 12 hours of day time TV, do these people have to look forward to every day? If you dangle the carrot of aspiration in front of them, of being just like Judy and getting to go to London to buy £4.50 doughnuts, then they’ll soon be getting off their arses, getting really good jobs and jumping on trains every weekend to get at those doughnuts.
It just makes so much sense. It certainly worked for Margaret Thatcher who used ‘buy-your-own-council-house’ as her carrot of aspiration for the oiks, which got them all out from in front of their TV’s and getting jobs so that they could get a mortgage and be slaves to their jobs until their mortgages were paid off because they’d now be homeless if they didn’t pay the mortgage.
The oiks didn’t seem to concern themselves with the fact that they could have continued living a job free lifestyle, watching day time TV and been guaranteed to be able to live in their council house for the rest of their lives if they didn’t buy it because housing benefit would always cover the rent. No, they chased that carrot of aspiration all the way into corporate slavery and worked themselves into an early grave and their houses were sold to the highest bidder to pay for their old people’s home care bill. The highest bidder being a buy-to-let property magnet who now rents those houses back to poor people on short term 6 month leases at 5 times the rent the original council house would currently be rented to them for if it were still a council house.
So yeah, aspiration. Do you dream of being wealthy enough, or even pretending to be wealthy enough, to buy £4.50 doughnuts? If you’ve already bought your own council house then maybe this is the next aspirational step for you. In the meanwhile it’ll keep the masses downtrodden as they drool at the thought of getting one of those doughnuts one day instead of rising up and overthrowing those that keep them downtrodden and eating slightly stale, food bank doughnuts instead.
Seriously, people, quit aspiring to the shit they advertise to you in product placements within Judy Murray stories that aren’t worth publishing. It’s all designed to keep you enslaved to the system. If Marie had known then what the ruling classes of France know now then she would have opened a few tourists shops at the Palace of Versailles and offered expensive tat to the peasants to give them something to aspire to affording — which is exactly what the French government are doing at the Palace of Versailles right now.
Instead of tearing down the gates of Versailles, storming the palace, stuffing your face in the kitchens and nicking whatever valuables you could fit in your pockets; you can now aspire to buy a ticket — starting at 20 euros — to walk through open gates, wander around anywhere you’ve got a ticket for (look but don’t touch), pay a load more euro to eat brioche and drink coffee in the cafe and then spend even more euros buying a shit load of tourist tat on your way out. Which doesn’t leave much change from 200 euros for a peasant family. But at least you won’t have to put up with Judy Murray as they don’t take Scottish play money.
Anyway, fuck aspiring to pay for it, revolution was much more fun and much more cheaper. Storm the doors of the boutique doughnut shops and help yourselves — the police won’t stop you as they’re too busy with all the climate change demonstrations.
#5t4n5 #scottish #doughnuts #privilege #socialaspiration #thoughts
The Taken — Colby R. Rice
After such a relentless beginning to this series in The Given i did wonder if this book would keep up with the pace: i most certainly wasn’t disappointed.
As i surmised in my review of The Given, more characters and groups were added along the way slowly building even more complexity and depth into the story, our protagonist finally has to decide which group she’s going to join, and all this is done with never a dull moment.
Once again, it’s incredibly well written, fast paced, and just sucks your attention in as it keeps rewarding you by revealing ever more bits and pieces of the story as you go along.
I do admit to not being aware of having read any urban fantasy before. I kind of got put of the whole genre by the awful stuff TV show stuff. So it’s really nice to be shown just how good this genre can be when done really well. The magic system, which Colby calls “Alchemy”, is well put together and certainly works for the story really well, as each group and character seems to have something different to reveal about it as they themselves get revealed within the story.
All there’s left to say is, so far, so very, very good, and its definitely left me wanting a lot more.
I’ve got a few other books to read but i’ll be back soon with The Lock In.
Colby’s Page
#fantasy #dystopian #colbyrrice
£4.50 Dougnuts
No, i just can’t let this one go.
After my previous post on ‘Sottish Privilege’ in which i have a little rant about Judy ‘my-son-can-bat-a-ball-better-than-your-son-can’ Murray and her obscene financial excesses, i decided to dig a little deeper into what makes a doughnut cost £4.50.
So apparently, what makes these doughnuts so fucking special is that they’re made in Reading.
They make them in Reading, fresh every day, and then ship them into London through all that poluted traffic, adding to the already overloaded congestion and pollution that London suffers from while delivering these daily to their 10 London shops, so you can have a super fresh doughnut experience.
I presume that they don’t do this because there’s anything special about Reading — trust me, i’ve watched ‘Beautiful People’ — but because its cheaper to make them there and then ship them into their 10 London shops than it is to make them truly fresh in their shops in London.
Surely, at £4.50, you’d expect someone to stand in front of you and make it especially for you from 100% organic certified ingredients that have been lovingly fertilised with unicorn shit and pixie wee and watered with rainbow tears, but no, you just get a doughnut made in Reading sometime last night from ingredients that i can’t find published anywhere on their website.
One would think that if they were truly proud of their obscenely expensive boutique doughnuts they’d publish a full ingredient list on their website, but no, they don’t even state what kind of oil they use other than its some kind of vegetable.
But, not to worry, if you want to save some money you can buy a box of 6 for £24. Yeah, it’s actually really real, me and Judy ain’t making this shit up. They’ve got 10 shops in London, so one can only presume that there’s plenty of people, fucked in the head enough, to be buying them. Although, when you think about it, all that pollution from delivery vans delivering to 10 different shops every day in London does have most people fucked in the head enough to be paying £4.50 for one single doughnut.
So, anyway, i thought i’d look at Tesco and see what they can do for £4.50 in the way of nice cakey things… So, for £4.50, at Tesco, i can get 990g of mini gingerbread men, that’s basically a whole kilogram (let’s not quibble over 10g). Yeah, really, a whole fucking army of your very own mini gingerbread men for £4.50. So Judy and her friend, i’m presuming she was buying two doughnuts to share one with a friend, but maybe she’s just a greedy person and was hoping to devour them both herself. After all, who the fuck am i to be judging the feeding habits of a nation who eat deep fried, battered pizzas with chips as a snack…
So, if, and it is a big if, we presume one of her £4.50 doughnuts was for a friend, then Judy and her imaginary friend could have, instead, gone to Tesco and got a whole army of mini gingerbread men each and played Warhammer with them and when you killed your opponents you’d get to eat them too — now that’d be so much more fun than 2 fancy, made in Reading, doughnuts.
Tesco in store bakery also sells doughnuts fresh baked every day, ‘in store’ — not shipped half way across England — @ 79p for 5. Yes, a whole pack of 5 fresh baked doughnuts for 79p. So you can have 28 1/2 doughnuts for £4.50. So Judy, and her maybe imaginary friend, could have had 57 doughnuts between them and had such a mental sugar rush that a big fight (that Conor McGregor would have been proud of) in the middle of the street would have ensued over who got the last one — now that would have been headline news worthy of any tabloid and even possibly made the BBC front page.
Moving on: for other sources of cheap doughnuts, simply pop along to your local food bank and wait until someone donates a packet of doughnuts and you’ll get them for nothing. And if you’re really lucky, they’ll be from some rich, Scotch cunt who paid £4.50 each for two and couldn’t manage the second one after their Pizza Crunch breakfast so decided to give it away to the peasants.
There should be a [sic] somewhere in the previous sentence, but i didn’t put it in because i felt it destroyed the flow of the piece, so i’ll leave it to you to think about where it should go. Answers on a postcard. And for the fuckwits who can’t make out what i mean by [sic], this whole thing is wasted on you anyway because you obviously suffer from Dunning-Kruger effect, and right about now you’ll be getting all fucking righteous about everything and attempting to engage me in a tedious exchange of emails in the vain hope of educating me out of my ignorance — and stupidity — while all the while not realising it is you, yourself, who is the utter fuckwit here who is so fuckwitted that any attempt at educating you is a total fucking waste of resources and time: that’s what eating pizza crunch suppers does to your brain.
And people call Margaret Thatcher evil — at least she didn’t allow boutique doughnuts on her watch while the oi palloi went hungry.
Fuck it, it’s 7:04 and Tesco has been open for over an hour. You see the sacrifices i make so that you can have cutting edge journalism with your breakfast? So, anyway, it’s well past time for their in store bakery to have my 28 1/2 doughnuts and army of mini gingerbread men ready for a dining room table top battle — at least that’s my day sorted and £9 well spent.
And no, i’m most certainly not finished with this topic. Click here for the next episode.
#5t4n5 #scottish #doughnuts #privilege #thoughts
Scottish Privilege
While the rest of the UK is suffering under the bootheels of Tory austerity and having to use foodbanks, the Scots are living it up big time and taking expensive day trips to London to buy boutique doughnuts for £4.50 each…
Andy Murray’s mum Judy Murray shocked as London shop REFUSES to serve her
..and then they have the fucking audacity to complain that we don’t accept their play money.
If you’ve got enough spare change lying around that you can afford to go all the way to London for a couple of boutique doughnuts to shove into your privileged face, then surely you have enough spare change to afford getting your play money changed to legal tender somewhere along the way — obviously having lots of spare change doesn’t equate to having any fucking intelligence.
As the Scottish still don’t understand after being told again, and again, and again, and again, let’s try it more simply… Your play money is legal to use as money in the UK if people are willing to accept it, but it is not legal tender and no one actually has to accept it. Which is exactly the same as Monopoly money, as you can also buy doughnuts with Monopoly money but, likewise, only if all parties are in agreement. 
That aside, who the fuck in their right mind would even think of going to London and paying £9.00 for 2 boutique doughnuts — for fucks sake — and then have the holier-than-though arrogance to complain to all and sundry about the service while most people in England have less than £9 to feed themselves for 2 days and many have far less than £9 and have to use foodbanks? Only the privileged, strawberries and cream, Wimbledon cunts with more money than sense.
A special thank you goes out to the Daily Express for exposing these privileged cunts and the obscene disparity of wealth between the countries of the UK.
I actually learned to read using the Daily Express when i was 3 and 4 years old. Tis true. That’s how privileged — and intelligent — i am…
coz…
unlike Judy…
#5t4n5 #scottish #doughnuts #privilege #thoughts
Fiction
. . .me thinks it’s a good time to re-read Asimov.
Fiction
Nonfiction
Nonfiction
