Oh my dog
“Russian President Vladimir Putin’s intervention in Ukraine is not a sign of Russian strength…” said U.S. President Barack Obama, standing in an elementary school classroom on this colorful alphabet rug. Seriously. This happened. (Thanks to MikeW for the link in the comments). Doesn’t he have people to scope out these locations in advance?
Not that the press conference went out this way — the shot was framed in the standard talking-head-plus-flags format. Still, this day and age, they didn’t think other photos would leak to the internets?
Anyway, that’s the image I should have been riffing on tonight. Instead, I did something I haven’t done in years — got a book in the mail this morning and read it all in one go. Blew most of my day and had to sprint at the end.
What? Oh. It was Thomasina. Which Disney made into The Three Lives of Thomasina in the Sixties. I never saw the movie but, knowing Disney, I can pretty much guarantee the book was darker and weirder.
Also by this author: Jennie, a book I read many years ago and loved. And, um, Poseidon Adventure.
March 6, 2014 — 12:13 am
Comments: 18
Weekend public domain book thread…?
So, here’s a British classic that was new to me: Jock of the Bushveld. Dog adventure story, like Call of the Wild or White Fang. But in Africa. And nonfiction.
Wow. Very entertain. Much enjoy.
The links above go to Project Gutenberg. I don’t know when they started this, but they now offer Kindle editions, cleanly formatted, often with illustrations. Man, that opens up a whole lotta excellent free content for the ol’ reading device. And the holidays coming up (or as I think of Christmas, the Time of Reading).
So, anything in the out-of-copyright bin you’d recommend?
Here, I’ll go. In the fine old tradition of ghost stories for Christmas, how about some M.R. James? Or Algernon Blackwood?
The neighbor who recommended Jock of the Bushveld also loaned me a couple of nice old illustrated hardbacks by Ernest Thompson Seton, another adventurer and naturalist and sometime illustrator of the era (and early patron of the Boy Scouts). He — my neighbor — eagerly told me, “I have two thousand books in my library.”
Ah. Good. Ummmm…good weekend, all!
December 14, 2013 — 12:44 am
Comments: 54
be sure to leave a saucer of milk
This little feller is from the town museum in Pevensey, the one we visited last week. I’m assuming they’re assuming this is was Rowling’s inspiration for Dobby the House Elf.
I confess, I didn’t finish Harry Potter — books or movies. I found them a little hard going, to be honest. Like most fantasy books, they borrow heavily from all the books that came before. Which is fine, except I’ve been reading the genre since I was a wee slip of a weasel, which gives newer entries a real aw, geez, not this shit again sort of ambiance.
Anyway, it’s the weekend. Um, open thread…?
September 6, 2013 — 11:10 pm
Comments: 33
This lady
Dora Saint wrote novels about English life under the pen name Miss Read. Most of her books are about one of two fictional villages, Fairacre or Thrush Green. There are a bunch of them, too — twenty about Fairacre, fourteen about Thrush Green and a smattering on other subjects. None was a bestseller, but she had a loyal readership and put out about a book a year well into her eighties. She died in April last year, ten days short of her 99th birthday.
I read her first book, Village School, over the weekend. It’s one of the Fairacre ones. It was slow, gentle, subtly funny and only a very tiny bit sharp. I liked it. I’m not sure whether to tackle the whole series — I’m at the point in life where I’m painfully aware I won’t live long enough to read all the good books, and twenty is a big ask — but then I catch myself wondering what happened next.
It was her publisher’s idea to release the books under the name of her main character and narrator, the head teacher Miss Read. The village school is what we would call a one-room schoolhouse, with all the local children between the ages of five and ten, taught in two groups by two teachers. Thirty or so at a time. The school has no running water and buckets for latrines. Coke stoves for heat.
Thing is, it was set in 1955. And I gather, little village schools like this persisted into…well, I guess in more remote places, into today. I would like to think they all have toilets now.
Oh, what the heck. I’ve just bought the second one. I would like her publisher to note (I’m looking at you, Orion Book Group) that if they’d offered the Kindle edition for a sensible price (say 99p) they’d have gotten my money like a shot. I prefer reading off my Kindle. As it is, the used trade got my pittance and the publisher can go jump. I’m not paying £5 for a download when I can get something nice in the mail for under £2.
August 12, 2013 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 17
Yeah. This chick.
Remember this chick? Lena Dunham, creator of the HBO thing Girls (which I’ve never seen) and that unbearably cute ad equating voting for the first time to sex. Oh, here’s a passage from her Wikipedia entry, in case she doesn’t make your teeth hurt yet:
Dunham was born in New York City. Her father, Carroll Dunham, is a painter of “overtly sexualised pop art”, and her mother, Laurie Simmons, is a photographer and designer who creates “disquieting domestic tableaux” with dolls. Dunham’s father is Protestant, and according to Dunham, a Mayflower descendant; Dunham’s mother is Jewish. She has a younger sister, Grace, who is a model and student at Brown University and who starred in Dunham’s first film Tiny Furniture. As children, both Lena and Grace were babysat by photographers Sherri Zuckerman and Catherine McGann. Dunham attended Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York, where she met Tiny Furniture actress and Girls co-star Jemima Kirke. She graduated from Oberlin College in 2008, where she studied creative writing.
What’s that? Not irritated enough yet? She just sold a book idea to Random House for $3.7 million on the strength of a 66 page outline illustrated with Instagram pictures.
Stick with me. It’ll get funny in a mo.
The whole 66 page proposal somehow got leaked to Gawker, and they ran with it in its entirety. Which caused Mzzz Dunham’s lawyer to get all up in they face.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t link to Gawker, but their sanitized-for-the-lawyer version is a thing of beauty.
Streisand Effect — learn it, live it, don’t stick your finger in that thing.
December 12, 2012 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 22
No, really. I saw this today.
Uncle B let out a yelp, and there was this in the window. It’s a little local mom-and-pop hardware store.
In case you’re even more paleolithic than I am (seems unlikely), I gather Fifty Shades of Grey is a romance and medium-core BDSM fantasy novel rolled into one. Not really my thing. Hard to say which of the two is less appealing.
More stuff I learned when I looked it up: it started out as Twilight fan fiction (which is confusing, because there’s nary a vampire in it), posted online by someone calling herself “Snowqueen’s Icedragon”. Then Miz Icedragon changed the characters Edward and Bella to Christian and Ana and self-published it. Then it went e-book and a print-on-demand, publicized entirely by blogpost and word of mouth. And then the whole thing went monkeyshit.
Forty million copies and 37 countries later, it knocked over Harry Potter to be the fastest-selling book in history. Amazon.co.uk announced earlier this month it had sold more copies than all the Harry Potter books put together. Can I get a holy shit, ladies and gentlemen?
I hate to think how many Mary Sue‘s are out there tonight, typing one-handed…
Okay. Tomorrow. Six on the dot, Weasel Blog Time. Round 36 of the Dead Pool!
August 23, 2012 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 20
Yeah, that guy
Y’all know Rick Locke. You know, the Temporary Duty guy.
Dude is writing a sequel, but he absolutely refuses to finish it without more oxygen. (I know, I know…these creative types and their needs.)
Go. Check it out. Say something nice to him. Give him a money. Give him several moneys.
Don’t make me go all Jerry Lewis up in here.
June 27, 2012 — 7:49 am
Comments: 18
Seven naughty nurses and a waitress
Abe Books sent ’round a cute bit about romance book covers (and the sheer weight of nurses involved), in honor of Valentine’s Day.
Long-time readers may recall this is our anniversary.
The third for Uncle B and moi. Our favorite nice restaurant went out of business, so we’re going to get Chinese takeout and watch something on the box. We did chill down a nice bottle of Mumm we’ve been saving, though, so that’s okay.
But it’s also our anniversary — five years to the day since sweasel.com went live.
Happy anniversary! Smoochies! (But no champagne for you; my upload speeds aren’t up to it).
February 14, 2012 — 5:06 pm
Comments: 36
Coupla goodies for e-readies
Press release here, hat tip What’s Up With That, and all the wunnerful, wunnerful freebies here.
Oh, and thanks to my Kindle, I’ve gotten back into long-form journalism, so this was an especially lucky find: Longreads.com. Dedicated to collecting, sifting through and recommending the best in long-form journalism.
To read these puppies, here’s what I do: call up the article, switch it to printer version (if available), print to .pdf (I recommend the free version of CutePDF Writer), save the result in my documents folder, leave it on sort by date and manually move any new files my Kindle whenever I synch.
To read a .pdf on Kindle, it helps to switch to landscape view.
June 5, 2011 — 4:02 pm
Comments: 15
A pretty much spoiler-free review of Temporary Duty
I had a schizophrenic experience reading Ric Locke’s Temporary Duty. As I read it through, a little voice kept telling me, “oh, now, a proper editor from a publishing house would so make him change that.”
And then this other voice would say, “yes, but do YOU think he should change it?”
Like, the pacing is uneven. Wait, no it’s not — it’s logarithmic. The set-up and introductory part runs long (background stuff about the ship’s engineering and the aliens’ language and that — I like that flavor of sci fi, so I wasn’t put off). Then it picks up when they get moving. And then it picks up some more. And then it moves really fast to the end.
There are two protagonists, and I found it difficult to tell them apart for a long time. An editor would surely insist he pick one and make us identify with him from the start.
But I have to wonder how much of that I noticed because I was reading it for somebody, instead of just reading it.
I liked it. It was very Andre Norton-y — with a touch of the Chronicles of Gor and a pinch of the Waltons.
I hesitated to describe it that way to Ric. Critics are so snobby about good old-fashioned Norton-style space adventure, but I’m a great fan. Happily, it seems he is, too.
Oh, and dude was definitely in the Navy.
So who won the schizophrenic contest? Well, Voice #1 would’ve made him smooth it over until it was exactly like every other scifi book of its type I’ve ever read. Voice #2 thought that would be a damn shame.
New Dead Pool tomorrow, 6pm WBT. You’ve read about dicks in the news all week, now win one of your very own!
June 2, 2011 — 9:40 pm
Comments: 39