marramgrass

Carcassonne on Xbox Live.

Yee-ha indeed.

Afternoon, Radio 4 news, there’s more than one way to do it, post mortem, Benedict XVI, a very long way, a very short way, beta radiator, chunka-chunka.

Gordon Brown.

What will the difference be? I couldn’t begin to guess. Not my area of expertise, shall we say.

As prime minister I suppose Blair wasn’t all bad. Wasn’t all good, either. Brown strikes me as a harder man. Since I’m a bit of a wuss, and fairly mild in most things, that worries me a little.

Time will tell.

For now, here we are in the middle of this democracy thing. Part of that is our ‘right’, even responsibility if you look at it that way, to criticize the government. Certainly we’re all pretty good at it. Comes natural, like.

What would you do? PM for a year — how would you go about it? ‘Ruler’ of a fairly powerful country, with influence, what would you say, where would you go?

What would the consequences be?

It’s not a job I would want for anything. But if it was you, what would you do?

Comments are open…

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak

I remember studying Friedrich at school; The Book Thief reminded me of it. It’s that long since I read Friedrich that I can’t really comment on it, but I can tell you what I thought of Zusak’s book.

It’s a straightforward story of a little girl growing up just outside Munich in the early 1940s. The Second World War is happening all around; she dutifully attends Hitler Youth; her father was known as communist, so she is cared for by foster parents; her foster father isn’t a fan of the Nazis; they hide a young Jewish man in their basement. You may be able to figure out roughly where it goes from there.

A few things make the book stand out:

It’s supposed to be narrated by Death. This starts off a little gimmicky, but actually works well and adds impact. In fact, this voice provides some nice moments of poetry.

The foster parents are superb characters well portrayed.

It’s not the most subtle book in the world, but it is a good read. It has its poignant and moving moments, and they are effective even if you can almost hear the author thinking, “This, this is where they will cry.”

My knowledge and understanding of life in Nazi Germany are limited, but I do get the feeling that The Book Thief gives a good sense of what the war and Hitler meant for just a bunch of people trying to get by and not get noticed. In that respect it’s actually quite frightening and makes me wonder how I would have reacted. How do you keep your integrity when it means that not only you will suffer, but perhaps your family?

You’ll be glad you read it, I think.

I don’t understand cows.

I’m a city boy. Also, I have my doubts that cows understand me. Then again, when those eyes are looking at you from unnervingly close by, who’s to say what’s going on behind them? Maybe they do understand.

As a species they provide milk, steaks, burgers, short grass and more cows. I wasn’t aware until yesterday that they are also good at providing… let’s call it ‘the willies’.

Taking a long weekend in my father-in-law’s little cottage on the north coast (a semi-regular holiday haunt), I lay on the sofa reading a book by the fading window-light. A chewing noise invited me to look up. Less than three feet from my face was the face of a cow. A really big cow. It looked somehow affronted. Do you like it when people watch you eat?

Later, as tends to be the evening routine, I took the dog outside for activities she’d rather not have observed either. She saw the cows (yes, plural). They saw her. They came over, and looked. Seven of them, all in a row, looking hard. A short distance from me. The dog, the cows, I don’t think they’d be friends.

I was very aware that the fence there is only a couple of feet high. Despite the fact I’m a city boy, I was also aware that cows can run, that cows can jump. That cows are big and heavy and probably not too weak. I can’t imagine they got bullied at school.

To sum, I was mostly aware that what keeps the cows on the other side of the fence is nothing more than that they are happy there. I wondered what it takes to disturb that happiness.

That’s when I took the dog back inside.

The Glass Books of the Dream Eaters by G. W. Dahlquist

Steampunk has always appealed to me. I dug The Diamond Age; I took great delight in the LXG movie even though it was, objectively, crap; Wells and Verne have been friends of mine since I was young. So when the spiffy blue acetate cover of Glass Books invited me to read the blurb, I saw enough to tempt me to buy.

That was months ago, but I’ve only just got around to reading it.

It’s a book of contradictions. The plot is very straightforward, but takes quite some concentration to follow. The characters are drawn with broad strokes, but are attractive and compelling. Once the violence kicks in (early on) it doesn’t let up as the book screeches from one rollicking set-piece to the next, right to the very end, yet Dahlquist intensifies his pseudo-Victorian setting by indulging himself in a tremendously luxurious and playful approach to language, taking his time over every phrase: it’s a bit overwritten, but all the more fun for it.

As a novel, it’s all about the indulgence, actually. Sensuality, hedonism, greed and their exploitation are kind of the point. Carefully formed, the ten long chapters were originally published weekly to subscribers. It must have been a fun way to read it. The chapters alternate each following one of the three main characters, expect for the single chapter where they are together. As the climax approaches, we see things from these disjointed perspectives, slowly building to a picture of the whole: the assassin finds the doctor’s blood-soaked coat lying on the stairs — the doctor encounters a large pool of blood on the floor — the heroic debutante is revealed as having had a hand in both.

The work of the villainous Cabal is undeniably sinister, made all the more so by the slow reveal all the way through, where even by the end you only just get the hang of all the bizarre things they were up to (the glass books of the title aren’t even the half of it). It’s worth the read just to see where on earth the author’s going with it all.

Far from perfect, ultimately this is the written equivalent of what you might get should Quentin Tarantino and Joss Whedon decide to co-script a gothic, neo-Victorian styled summer blockbuster to be directed by Tim Burton. Yeah. Exactly.

And that’s what makes it fun.

(Take a look at the official website for the book. It is worth reading, and gives a good feel for the novel.)

As I’m still fooling around trying out some new ideas for this site, there’s a couple of new things in the sidebar over there to the left.

Up at the top, under ‘Info’, is a new link to Diversions, where I fancied trying to keep a log of the books I’m reading, the DVDs I’m watching and the music I’m listening to. It’s very basic, with new stuff being shoved in at the top, and it’s more for my own amusement and curiosity than anything else, but it’s there if you’re curious.

Then, at the very bottom of the sidebar, you should see the funny-looking widget from whos.amung.us, which is a stats thing. It’s bit different to the usual, because it’s main purpose is to say how many visitors are on the site right now rather than doing any detailed logging. It’ll probably be quite depressing, actually. If you happen to look at it and see a number bigger than 1, please leave a comment and let me know!

Tonight I have done some housekeeping on the server, including updating my WordPress install to the latest version.

What did you do with your Saturday night?

When these things happen, things can get a little jumbled. Accordingly, if you find any problems on the site, I’d be grateful if you could leave a comment here or shoot me an email to blog AT marramgrass DOT org DOT uk.

Cheers.

I have never been much into Doctor Who, although David Tennant (as one of the coolest guys on TV) is in real danger of winning me to the cause.

And tonight’s episode on the BBC was a real stunner. Tense, clever, neat… It was nigh on perfect as mild SF/horror TV. The baddies were properly menacing, in a kind of inverted Bugblatter Beast of Traal-way: harmless when you look at them, nasty when you don’t. And according to the currently-playing behind-the-scenes show, they were done with guys in makeup - even though they never move on-screen. Which would be how they managed the menacing not-just-a-mockup feel.

Clever.

It took me an hour to build, partly because there were a couple of parts I managed to put on upside-down and had to disassemble back to later. I’m good at the whole building-screws-nuts-and-bolts thing.

But we can say that the food was good. Very good. As was the company.

Why did we wait this long to buy a barbecue?

Last week a nice lady stuck a big pair of pliers into my mouth and wrenched out one of my wisdom teeth.

This afternoon the same nice lady stuck a pipe up my nose, filled my lungs with N₂O, stuck a big pair of pliers in my mouth and wrenched out another of my wisdom teeth.

Which I guess means I am now 50% less wise.

Oh well…