A Gentleman's Domain

I most certainly will!

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Seen at a rest area off I-75 in north Florida yesterday.  The question must be: how badly does one need to use the washroom?

Prioities!

The cat lover in me totally agrees!

Thursday Thirteen #96

Here’s another selection of titles from my To Be Read shelf. The thing that these ones have in common is that they are the 13 longest books I own but have not yet read. All of these are over 600 pages long – some are considerably longer than that. Maybe it is the sheer size of these books that has put me off reading them. Anyway, friendly TTers, can you tell me anything about any of these? Any that you recommend? Any that you would like to warn me not to bother reading? All opinions and comments will be most welcome.

There's harsh, and then there's harsh!

Paws for thought....

This is the picture on the packet of cat treats that our three felines enjoy  so much.  I have to say, I find that image vaguely disturbing!

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Thursday Thirteen # 95

One of my most prized books is a single-volume edition of the Oxford Universal Dictionary. Longer, of course, than the Shorter Oxford but nowhere as long as the 12-volume Complete Oxford, its 2515 pages nevertheless contain tens of thousands of words that do not reside in a 21st Century Anglophone’s daily vocabulary. I always enjoy opening it at random and seeing how many words completely unknown to me I can find. Sometimes I even commit a few to memory and try to use them – after all, a word is still a word, even if it has fallen into disuse. And so, ignoring the countless botanical, chemical and biological terms in the book, I have found easily enough for many Thursday Thirteens. Here’s one:

            13 Obscure, Obsolete or Otherwise Unusual Words


Exust   – To burn up.

Cervelat    – A short reed instrument

Cunctator    – Someone who is tardy or delays matters

Porrect    – Stretched  out forward  

Looby  – A lout, clown

Purfle   – The embroidered edge of a garment

Fard  – White paint used as face make-up

Patefy  – To disclose, make open

Roband  – Nautical term for a small piece of rope

Shoat  – A young pig

Neaf  – A fist

Recado – A gift or compliment

Izzard   – The letter Z. This has become shortened to Zed in the English speaking world, except in the USA, where for some reason I have never been able to ascertain, it is known as Zee.  

Low Down Rhythm

Arthur Rosebery & his Band were contracted to the Parlophone record company in 1929, but like a lot of other bands they recoded for different labels under pseudonyms. This recording of “Low Down Rhythm” for the British Homophone Company issued on their Sterno label, was credited to The Florida Club Band. I don’t know if there actually was a Florida Club in London at that time, but if there was, Rosebery’s band did not play there.

This is a nice bluesy treatment of a now-forgotten song that was adaptable to the jazz idiom. The piano solo is a touch too long, but I do like the way the whole band resumes playing once it’s over.
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Smugness!

Concerning the inclement weather that has swept across much of the USA in recent days, I cannot help feeling a bit smug.  This satellite photo shows the sheer size of the storm, but you'll notice Florida, down in the bottom right, clear and unaffected.  Pass me another tee-shirt, m'dear; I'm off for a stroll in the sunshine!

What should one do in a crisis?

Thursday Thirteen #94

As I do every year, I kept a list in a small notebook of every book I read during 2010. I don’t count them, and I tend to lose track of how many there are after a few weeks. That way I can tally them up on new Year’s Eve and surprise myself. Last year I read 88 books, start to finish (abandoned books don’t count) which was down on the previous two years. Here are thirteen of them, all of which I enjoyed and recommend.


A Simple Plan by Scott Smith  This is what happens if you stumble across a lot of money and decide to keep it, on the grounds that the original owner won’t miss it, being dead, and no one will ever find out. One deception leads to another, and another, and so on. Very readable, very exciting.

Pirate  Latitudes   by Michael  Crichton   A rollicking story about pirates based in the English colony of Jamaica in the late seventeenth century, stealing gold from Spanish treasure ships. Crichton only wrote a few period pieces; this example is apparently a posthumous book. We are told that the manuscript was found among his papers after his death.

The Innocent Man by John Grisham  This is Grisham’s first non-fiction work and when you read it, it will make you angry – at least I hope it will. It’s about how an innocent man was arrested, tried and imprisoned in Oklahoma for a murder he did not commit. This is not a well-meaning justice system simply getting it wrong -- this is an incompetent, corrupt justice system picking on someone they thought would be easy to convict, with his innocence or guilt an irrelevance to them.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time by Mark Haddon  What an amazing book! It’s a simple tale, told by a young boy in a provincial town in England. What makes it unlike anything you have ever read before (I promise you) is that the boy has Asperger’s Syndrome, so his narrative, while fluent and intelligent, is very idiosyncratic. My description doesn’t do justice to the book. You’d best read it to see what I mean!

No Time For Goodbye by Linwood Barclay  A teenage girl wakes up one morning to find her entire family has disappeared! From that premise stems a riveting thriller. One of those books you can’t wait to get back to.

Bad Science by Ben Goldacre   Another weapon in the fight against the enemies of reason! In this book Dr. Goldacre exposes the uselessness and even dangers of quack medicines and health fads such as detox, brain gym, homeopathy, nutritionists, health scaremongers, vitamin supplements, the antioxidant craze. He also discusses the antic of pharmaceutical corporations and the insidious anti-vaccination movement. It’s an entertaining book but it has a serious purpose.

This One’s On Me by Donald Jack   I don’t understand why Donald Jack’s series of novels about Bartholomew Bandy haven’t gained a wider currency, because they are very funny. Flashman meets Bertie Wooster! In this one the former WW1 fighter pilot and Member of the Canadian Parliament returns to London where he get involved with a woman from Iceland and an Indian Prince who wants to start his own air force.

Medicus by Ruth Downie   A novel that takes place during the Roman occupation of Britain in about the third century AD. The hero, Gaius Petreius Ruso is an army doctor and is posted to a backwater in northwest England and almost as soon as he arrives he is caught up in corruption, murder, rescuing runaway slaves and a lot more. Amusing, exciting, fun!

How To Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young   This is the supposedly true story of a British journalist who went to New York to work at Vanity Fair magazine, and made a complete tit of himself. It was an amusing story although I didn’t find him very likeable. They made a film of this, starring Simon “Shaun of the Dead” Pegg.

Cops And Robbers by Donald E. Westlake   I usually read a few of Westlake’s every year, and I have about ten more in my TBR pile right now. This is a good one – about two New York City police officers who turn to crime and hide behind their badges to pull off the perfect robbery – from the Mob (never a good idea!).

Wish You Were Here by Mike Gayle  This book was in a discount bin near the cash register in a supermarket in England, marked down from £7.99 to £1.00 which suggested to me they were desperate to sell it. Not much of a recommendation, but I bought it anyway. Actually, it’s rather good – a story of three men who go away together to a Mediterranean resort for a holiday in the sun, and are later joined by the girlfriend of one of them. All kinds of conflicts, deceptions, trial, tribulations and a dose of angst make this an entertaining story.

The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid by Bill Bryson   I think I’ve read just about everything by Bryson. One of my favourite writers. He has lived in England since 1973, with a 6 year gap in New Hampshire, but his American childhood and youth have provided him with ample material for several books. This is about growing up in Iowa. I don’t remember if I laughed out loud as I read it but I definitely smiled a lot.

Human Detritus by Rasmenia Massoud  This was almost the last book I read in 2010, and it was a gem! I’m not saying that just because I’m fond of the author, but because it is true. It’s a collection of short stories, almost all told in the first person, from a female’s point of view, concerning relationships of various kinds, that run far from smoothly. I devoured it in less than 24 hours and was left hungry for more.  Click over to Lulu and buy it!
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Inked!

Colour me irritated. I was in sales for years and years, and rightly or wrongly I feel that that should immunize me against most of the marketing ploys that fool ordinary people. I know a pitch when I hear one; I recognize an alternative close when one is casually lobbed at me; I know how to give a closed answer to an open question, and vice versa. I never believed that old saw that salesmen are the easiest people to sell to. And yet…

In the olden days, when Gillette invented the safety razor, they sold them at a very low price. Almost every man could afford one. They sold like hotcakes (actually, I have always wondered why cakes have to be hot to sell well. I have bought a number of cakes over the years and as far as I can remember, they were all cold). Why, people wondered, were Gillette selling their new patented safety razors at such a give-away price. Well the answer of course was that once you had the razor, you needed periodically to buy blades for it, and that was where Gillette made a killing.

These days most of us use disposable razors, so the tactic of giving away the razors in order to sell the blades no longer applies – or at least, not to the art of scraping off the face fungus. But it exists elsewhere, and I have recently fallen victim to it. It was not completely unexpected. We all know, I think, that you can buy an inkjet printer for your computer at a fairly reasonable cost. Unless you want a top of the line model with all kinds of bells and whistles that most of us don’t really need, you can pick one up for a price that will leave you with some quite healthy change out of a hundred dollars. Where the printer people make their money is from the ink cartridges. My late father bought a very good printer some years ago, only to discover that new colour ink cartridges would cost him about 75% of cost of the printer. Needless to say, he determined only to print in black and white, which is probably what most of us do, most of the time. I hardly ever print in colour.

Anyway, my old printer died the death a few months ago so off I went down to Best Buy one warm and sunny Saturday afternoon to get a new one. Naturally, the model I had become used to was by them obsolete and no longer offered for sale, so I took a long look at the various models on offer and bought what seemed like a good printer/scanner/fax for a price just north of sixty dollars. I was actually rather pleased with myself. Included with the printer was a set of ink cartridges; a black one of course, and three colour ones. Now previously I had been used to having just one colour cartridge in my printer, but this one required separate cartridges of cyan, magenta and yellow ink. Ok, I thought, I won’t be using them more than once in a blue moon, so that doesn’t really matter. I go the box home, opened it, set up the printer on my desk, and did a couple of test prints.

It was then that I read in the book of instructions that even if you set your printer to print in black only, a small amount of coloured ink will be used in each printing. I have no idea why that should be, other than to make you use up ink. Sure enough, every time I printed something, with preferences set to “black only”, I could see from the animated chart that popped up each time that the ink levels of the three coloured cartridges was slowly dropping. I won’t mention the brand name, in order to protect the guilty but they had set it so that
Even
Printing
Seldom
Or
Never in colour, you had no alternative but to use ink from the three colour cartridges.  

I told myself that it didn’t matter, because when the colour ones ran out, I wouldn’t bother to replace them. That would show them! In fact, they showed me. One evening, halfway through printing a run of a dozen pages, the machine stopped and showed me a graphic of the cyan cartridge with a big red X across it and a warning that it was now completely empty. And – now here is the fiendish bit – the printer wouldn’t operate at all until I replaced it with a full one. Bastards!

Naturally this was late at night, so I couldn’t go anywhere to get a new one just then. Next day I took the empty cartridge to our local Walgreens, where they have a cartridge refilling service but of course my brand of ink cartridge was the one brand Walgreens didn’t service. So, I had to buy new ones. Three new ones in fact – I replaced the cyan, and I am at least ready for the imminent demise of the current magenta and yellow ones.

To be honest, the actual printer is pretty good, and the scanner is excellent (I expect the fax part of it is good too, but I have never used it). I’m just annoyed with the company for this marketing ploy, and even more annoyed with myself for falling for it. I say again: Bastards! Bastards and mug!
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Rancor and bitterness, for your entertainment!

My second YouTube upload.  And excellent comedy number, with hot accompaniment,  by Ambrose & his Orchestra in 1934.

 

 

My first YouTube upload

 

 Hope you like.  If you don't, I'm sorry to have bothered you.  If you do, comments are most welcome.

 

Thursday Thirteen #93

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Since I am in England right now, it’s fitting, I suggest, that for my first TT for quite a while I should feature thirteen books that I own, and have read, that are set entirely in England, with brief snippets of opinion. Agreement and argument are both equally welcome.