Saturday, June 4, 2011

I don't think he was expecting that


Click for full photo.

Squirrel takes a seat for dinner


YouTube link.

Sound of running water gets dog swimming


YouTube link.

Man calls police after being bitten by kitten

A Speedway man is recovering from a kitten bite to his thumb. Craig Wyatt, 24, called police on Thursday afternoon after a kitten in a woodpile nipped him on the right thumb.

Wyatt said the feline bit him when he tried to tie a string around its neck. When police arrived the kitten was tied to a tree.



Officer Chris Helmer described the cat in a report as “very calm and non-aggressive unless it was provoked.”

Helmer said Wyatt had a puncture through his right thumbnail a puncture on the bottom of his thumb. The Speedway Street Department took the cat away and Wyatt filed a bite report.

Nuclear rabbit sparks panic in Japan

Report RT News.


YouTube link.

You can see the original video here.

Inseparable twin friars die hours apart, aged 92

Identical twin Franciscan friars who rarely left each other's side from their births 92 years ago have died within hours of each other.

Julian and Adrian Riester went to school together, travelled together, and joined the Franciscan order together when they were in their 20's.



The Buffalo-born brothers both died of heart failure, said a fellow friar in Florida, where they had lived since moving from New York state in 2008. They spent much of their lives at St Bonaventure University in New York.

"It really is almost a poetic ending to the remarkable story of their lives," said St Bonaventure spokesman Tom Missel. "Stunning when you hear it, but hardly surprising given that they did almost everything together," Mr Missel said.

Row over feeding children live fish as asthma cure

Campaigners in India have demanded that children under 14 be banned from swallowing live fish in a traditional treatment for asthma administered at a festival every year in June. Hundreds of thousands of sufferers gather annually in Hyderabad in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh to gulp down small live fish and a special herb paste.



The Goud family, which says it received the medicine recipe from a Hindu saint in 1845, treats people from across India for free during a two-day period determined by astrologers and the onset of the monsoon. The wriggling five-centimetre (two-inch) fish, which the family says clear the throat on their way down, will be dispensed this year on June 8 and 9. Child rights group Balala Hakkula Sangham has lobbied the state's Human Rights Commission to stop children under 14 from taking the medicine as it is "unscientific" and a violation of human rights.



"The process of giving the medicine is unhygienic as the person gives it to lakhs (hundreds of thousands) of people without washing their hands," added the petition seeking a ban. The Goud family claims "fish medicine" has been proven to cure asthma and other respiratory problems, but it declines to reveal the secret herb formula. "It has been the practice of the Goud Family for the past 166 years to offer this medicine free of cost to those who need it," Bathini Harinath Goud, head of the family, said ahead of the event.


YouTube link.

He said that children were not at risk and that people who complained were in the pay of pharmaceutical firms that produce mainstream asthma drugs. "These companies are paying money to rake up the issue as they are worried about the fish medicine affecting their business interests since what we administer is a permanent cure for asthma," he said. Goud said that last year 400,000 people swallowed live fishes handed out by 200 family members.

Police guarding 2012 Olympic flame to be offered psychological counselling

The police guard for the 70-day Olympic torch relay will be offered psychological counselling to help them "reintegrate" after the event. Some 28 unarmed Metropolitan Police officers will guard the Olympic flame as it journeys around the UK in 2012. The torch will leave Land's End, Cornwall, on the morning of 19 May.

The route, which covers vast tracts of the UK, will see the torch travel 8,000 miles before arriving in London for the start of the Olympics. A minimum of two police officers will accompany the torch bearer at all times.



A Met spokesman said: "We recognise this is a unique policing role never performed within British policing. Mindful of the fact that officers will be taken away from their homes for 70 days, their reintegration back into the Met after the event is already being carefully planned. The welfare of our staff is of paramount importance."

He continued: "Occupational health specialists are already developing plans. The Met already has specialists who work with officers. These include counsellors, occupational psychologists and other medical staff." London Assembly Member Jenny Jones, who sits on the Metropolitan Police Authority committee, said: "It sounds barking mad."

School threatens to exclude pupils who are not toilet-trained

A Liverpool school has warned pupils may have to be kept at home because they are not properly toilet-trained. Trinity Catholic primary, in Vauxhall, has sent out the official warning after telling parents that staff have “become increasingly concerned” that children at the Titchfield Street school are unable to go to the loo alone.

Headteacher Patricia Deus has told parents of foundation stage children, which covers the three to five-year-old age group, the problem is so bad that it is a “health and safety issue”. She said teaching staff are increasingly having to take time out to help younger pupils with toilet duties at the expense of actually teaching the children. And she has stressed that it is not the school’s job to toilet-train children, warning that parents may have to keep their children away until their bathroom skills are up to scratch.



In the written warning she said: “We have at the number of children entering foundation stage who are not properly toilet-trained. Staff are spending a considerable amount of time dealing with this and not only is it a health and safety issue, but it is also taking up valuable teaching and learning time. Unless your child has been diagnosed with a medical condition, it is not our job to toilet-train them. This is a parent’s responsibility and you may be asked to keep your child at home and work with them until they are fully toilet-trained.”

Health health experts have backed the school’s stance, saying it “is not teachers’ jobs to wipe children’s bottoms”. Tam Fry, honorary chairman of the Child Growth Foundation – a charity relating to children’s growth – said it was “ludicrous for teachers to be wiping pupils’ bottoms” and if need be the school should be given extra support staff. And he said the problem stemmed from a general breakdown in “family support networks” and an erosion of parenting skills.

Pony who visited railway station, hospital and pub taken into care - Update

A pony called Ruby, which attracted worldwide attention after CCTV pictures showed her owner trying to take her on a train, has been taken into care. The pregnant white pony was taken to safety after being spotted grazing on council land near Wrexham Maelor Hospital.

Ruby shot to fame when owner Joe Purcell, 68, attempted to take her on the Wrexham to Holyhead train, but was not allowed to board by staff. Days later more pictures emerged of Joe and the pony in the Maelor Hospital’s A&E department and the town’s Elihu Yale Wetherspoon pub.



The RSPCA was concerned for the animal’s welfare and it has now been taken into care. Wrexham council said: “The pony was found straying on council land over the bank holiday weekend.”

It is also investigating reports Ruby had been left alone on nights at the hospital helipad and the cemetery in Pandy. Mr Purcell has to get in touch within a fortnight to claim Ruby back.

Previously. And.

Injured mountain walker found after texting photo

An injured man was rescued in the Lake District after sending a photo of where he was to a mountain rescue team. Wasdale Mountain Rescue team was alerted on Thursday night by two men. The men described the surroundings but the rescuers were struggling to identify where they were until team leader Mike Gullen suggested they sent a photo.

As a result they were found on Broad Crag, near Scafell Pike, and the injured man was airlifted to hospital. Wasdale team leader Richard Warren said trying to locate the men was like trying to find a "needle in a haystack".



Mr Warren said: "They didn't really know where they were. It was getting to be a little bit hopeless but then the team leader suggested they sent a photo. That basically told us roughly where they were and the team set off." When the team got near the pair waved their jackets to bring them to their exact location, which was high up, and one of the team reached them.

They were airlifted from the crag by the crew of a rescue helicopter from RAF Boulmer and the injured man was taken to hospital with a suspected broken arm. Mr Warren said: "Having a photo really clinched it for us. It really did help." About 27 members of the Wasdale team were involved in the rescue.

People left hypnotised on stage after hypnotist knocks himself out

Three people were left hypnotised on stage when a hypnotist knocked himself out during a show in Dorset. David Days was performing at Portland's Royal Manor Theatre on Friday when he tripped over a participant's leg.

His team could not rouse him and the audience was asked to leave while the people were still "asleep" on stage. They were "woken up" soon after when Mr Days recovered. His manager said the performer has a voice recording which can be used to bring people round.



Mr Days, who has hypnotised members of the pop band Blue on television, did not require hospital treatment, his manager Tara Nix said. She added: "He was out for a little while and that is why we asked the audience to leave.

"Three people were left on stage but we always have a back-up tape and a back-up hypnotist to step in if needed. Luckily, it wasn't too long until he recovered and he and the guests are fine. To be honest I think this is the first time it has ever happened to a hypnotist."

Penguin impressions help rear abandoned chick

Zoo keepers are impersonating a penguin so they can hand rear a chick. The keepers at Living Coasts in Torquay, Devon, are using a homemade penguin puppet when feeding the chick so it does not become too used to humans. The macaroni penguin was hatched in an incubator because the egg was abandoned after one of its parents fell ill.

The puppet was made from an industrial black rubber glove decorated with red eyes and yellow plumes. The chick is fed every three hours during the day on blended filleted herring, krill, vitamins and water. The mixture is warmed to 35C and fed to the chick using a syringe.



Staff are also playing the chick a recording of the sound of the macaroni penguin group. Exhibit manager Clare Rugg said: "This way contact is kept to a minimum - yes, the chick will hear and see keepers, but it will also see the glove which has the shape and colour of an adult penguin."

Living Coasts Director Elaine Hayes said two birds were needed to look after an egg so it was abandoned after one became ill. She said the adult bird had since recovered. "We decided to hand rear because the egg was fertile but would not have survived and there are not many macaroni penguins in the UK," she said.

After midnight, madness in Mumbai

SALMAN Rushdie's 1981 Booker Prize win for Midnight's Children was a watershed moment.

Before Rushdie, the prize had been dominated by English-born writers. Post-Rushdie, the empire struck back and almost two-thirds of the past 30 Bookers have gone to writers born outside Britain.
Indian writer Aravind Adiga broke into this non-Anglo winners' circle with his first novel, The White Tiger, in 2008. A global bestseller, the novel not only put Adiga on the map, it also pointed to a new confidence in his burgeoning home market.

A rags-to-riches story that alternated between the obscenity of India's poverty and the obscene wealth of New Delhi's entrepreneurial elite, The White Tiger confronted the contradictions of India's economic miracle with a darkly comic realism that, as one blogger put it, made Midnight's Children "seem positively twee".
Adiga's second novel, Last Man in Tower, shifts the action to Mumbai, India's largest city by population and its commercial capital. The shift is significant not only because it mirrors Adiga's real-life move from New Delhi but also because it allows him to continue exploring on an even grander scale the themes of greed, corruption and moral disintegration. It's not for nothing that Mumbai has been called "Maximum City".

Last Man in Tower is the intertwined story of a group of lower middle-class Indians living in an apartment block known as Vishram Society (Tower A), which is described as "absolutely, unimpeachably pucca". Unfortunately, it's in a neighbourhood -- the toenail of a suburb called Vakola -- that is definitely un-pucca:
On a map of Mumbai, Vakola is a cluster of ambiguous dots that cling polyp-like to the underside of the domestic airport; on the ground, the polyps turn out to be slums, spread out on every side of Vishram Society.

Since 1959, when it was built near a swamp as a hopeful example of "good housing for good Indians", this 18-apartment co-operative has stood as a "dreadnought of middle-class respectability" amid mushrooming shanties.
But as the Indian economy gained momentum, so the tower block decayed. Once pink, its outer skin is now "a rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey". And as the rest of Mumbai boomed, so the relative cheapness of the land around Vakola attracted the attention of unscrupulous developers. The people who live in Tower A are a microcosm of modern Mumbai but it soon becomes clear there are two central characters around whom the action spins.

Yogesh Murthy, who lives in apartment 3A, is a recently retired, 61-year-old schoolteacher. Living alone since the death of his wife, he is universally respected by the other residents for his learning, restraint and fair-mindedness. They all call him Masterji. His daughter died in a tragic accident; his son is married and lives in a posher suburb.
Lined up against Masterji is the outsider, a property developer named Dharmen Shah. He is another of Adiga's amoral, ruthless and dynamic entrepreneurs. A crude, rapacious self-made multimillionaire who grew up in rural Gujarat, he thinks nothing of bribing police and politicians or of breaking the bones of those who oppose him. Yet he is vulnerable and strangely seductive, and it is implied that without people such as Shah nothing would get done.
The inhabitants of Tower A are complacent. They gripe about the inconveniences of living in this globalised, super-city: the noise, the pollution, the utilities that don't work. But they're more comfortable than their near neighbours in the slums of Vakola and they're missing the one thing that might make them act on their gripes: a better offer.
When Shah offers them twice the going rate for their apartments, some agree immediately while others require more convincing, in the form of "sweeteners" or brutal threats. Eventually, everyone is ready to sell -- everyone, that is, except Masterji. At first it seems that Masterji is holding out in solidarity with his two oldest friends, Albert Pinto and his wife Shelley, who don't want to go because Shelley is blind and frightened at the prospect of re-learning the contours of a new building.
Full review at The Australian.

Birthday Lecture 2011

The second KMS Birthday Lecture in London will be held on Sunday 16 October, 2pm,  at The Open University in Camden (the old Channel 4 Building).

‘HOW KATHERINE MANSFIELD INSPIREs ME’

PRESENTED BY

DAME JACQUELINE WILSON
DAME MARGARET DRABBLE
& SALLEY VICKERS
Chaired by kirsty gunn

WITH A PERFORMANCE BY
SUSANNAH HARKER
& KIRSTY GUNN



 THE VENUE ONLY SEATS 90. SEATS ARE SOLD ON A FIRST-COME, FIRST-SERVED BASIS.  
MEMBERS RATE - £15 PER TICKET,  NON-MEMBERS RATE  - £20. BOTH TO INCLUDE A SOUVENIR BOOKLET OF THE LECTURE. 


Tickets Available via Paypal
Members £15
Non-Members £20


Or send a UK sterling cheque, payable to the Katherine Mansfield Society, to: Dr Sue Reid, 10 Fortescue Drive, Shenley Church End, Milton Keynes, MK5 6BJ, UK. For bank transfers and queries, please contact Sue: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org

Ten of the best

Battles in literature

Henry IV Part 1, by Shakespeare Shakespeare loved a sword fight, but here he recreates the whole Battle of Shrewsbury, in which Henry IV defeats rebels led by Harry Hotspur. Combatants run on and off, variously dispatching each other while being mocked by the brilliant Falstaff, a fat rogue attired as a soldier, who feigns death once the battle gets too nasty.


Paradise Lost, by John Milton The battle between the good and the bad angels in Milton's epic is both momentous and absurd, as none of those involved can be permanently harmed by the other side. So the Archangel Michael manages to stab Satan: the sword "Pass'd through him, but th' Ethereal substance clos'd / Not long divisible . . . " Eventually, the Son of God appears in his "fierce Chariot" and drives the baddies into the abyss.

"Annus Mirabilis", by John Dryden Dryden's poem depicts the Battle of Lowestoft, in which the English fleet managed not to be defeated by the Dutch. Among the Dutch vessels were merchant ships from India, whose destruction Dryden celebrates in suitably poetic vein. "Amidst whole heaps of spices lights a ball, / And now their odours arm'd against them fly: / Some preciously by shatter'd porcelain fall, / And some by aromatic splinters die."

Waverley, by Walter Scott The hero Edward Waverley joins the Jacobite Rebellion and fights his former masters at the famous Battle of Prestonpans, where the Jacobites defeated the forces of George II. Scott has to make sure that his hero doesn't actually kill anyone (as the Jacobite cause is controversial), but instead has him nobly save the life of a relative who is fighting for his enemy.

The Battle of Marathon, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning The young poet retold in rhyming couplets the story of how a small Athenian army, commanded by the cunning Miltiades, destroyed the huge Persian force of King Darius at Marathon. "The Persian hosts, behold their bulwark die / Fear chills their hearts, and all their numbers fly". Lots of blood and democracy triumphs.

The Charterhouse of Parma, by Stendhal Stendhal pitches his naive hero Fabrice del Dongo into the Battle of Waterloo. He finds himself surrounded by mud, smoke and the cries of dying men, and is delighted. "'I have seen shots fired!' he repeated with a sense of satisfaction. 'Now I am a real soldier.'" Stendhal does great justice to the confusion and occasional farce of warfare; his soldiers even use obscene language.

The Luck of Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray Thackeray's anti-hero, an 18th-century soldier of fortune, recalls his involvement in the Battle of Minden. He clubs to death "a poor little ensign, so young, slender, and small, that a blow from my pigtail would have despatched him . . . ", and bayonets a French officer before butchering a further four.

Les Misérables, by Victor Hugo Part two of Hugo's huge novel includes a full account of the Battle of Waterloo, complete with lengthy explanations of military tactics. We end on the battlefield at night, with the corpses preyed on by a stooping figure who resembled "those crepuscular figures that haunt ruins". He is the villainous Thénardier, whom we will meet again . .
 .
War and Peace, by Tolstoy Prince Andrei Bolkonsky is badly wounded fighting with the Russian army at the Battle of Austerlitz. As he lies injured he gazes up at the sky and begins to understand the pointlessness of the struggle in which he is involved.

Birdsong, by Sebastian Faulks While Stephen Wraysford, a young officer in the British army, suffers the terrors of the Somme, Jack Firebrace is burrowing underground in an attempt to blow-up the enemy trenches. Under the clay it is terrifying, but anything is surely better than the murderous struggle above. 
  JM

My Reply To Matthew Hess

Matthew Hess is a cartoonist who is part of a movement in San Francisco to ban circumcision. He has created some thoroughly anti-Semitic cartoons that you can see here. Rather than write a standard Scratching Post polemic where I call Mr. Hess names and sneer at him, I found the video below.

As a Catholic, it bothers me that so many non-Catholics see us portrayed as being all about gays, abortion or priest scandals. We're not. I just got back from a profoundly Catholic retreat, Cursillo, and it was all about living a more Christ-centered life. Looking at Mr. Hess' cartoons, it's obvious he has no idea what it means to be Jewish. I'm sure he's not alone.

Enjoy.



Update: I know this doesn't really explain what it means to be Jewish, but I think that after watching it, it would be pretty difficult to work up the hatred to draw pictures of crazed, knife-wielding rabbis with fangs.

Monday Meetings at the Writers Lounge

Writers Lounge: Auckland
Free lunchtime sessions

Art Lounge – Auckland Art Gallery - New Gallery, Auckland CBD
cnr Lorne & Wellesley Streets 
ph 307 4540


Monday 13 June – Fantastic Worlds
Linda McNab and Russell Kirkpatrick in conversation with Tina Shaw
  
Monday 20 June – The Blogoshpere
Graham Beattie and Craig Sisterson in conversation with Simon Wilson

Monday 27 June – Crime Central
Andrea Jutson and Ben Sanders in conversation with John Reynolds

Monday 4 July – Food For Thought
Alexa Johnston and Ray McVinnie in conversation with Nicola Legat

Monday 11 July – Travel The Globe
Graeme Lay and Graham Reid in conversation with Yvonne van Dongen

Monday 18 July – Actors Read Their Favourite Authors
Elizabeth McRae and Jennifer Ward-Lealand in conversation with Rae McGregor

Monday 25 July – Publishing Here and Now
Dan Myers and Mary Egan in conversation with Carole Beu

Presented by the Auckland Branch of the NZ Society of Authors (PEN Inc) in association with Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tamaki

Kindly supported by Creative New Zealand

"Cookbooks aren't really about cooking"

Illustration by Frank Viva

Cookbooks aren’t really about cooking, and haven’t been since the advent of color photography and food stylists. They’re mostly lifestyle catalogs, aspirational instruction manuals for lives we’d like to live. Prose used to have to do the heavy lifting in this regard. No more. Now images implore us to cook, and it can take a toll on the reading.



So says Sam Sifton writing in the  New York Times looking at more than a dozen new cookbooks, full of fantasy, truth, good meals and bad.

LA Meets NYC: Mulholland Books Marries Hollywood, Video Games and Fiction

Publishing Perspectives.


Little, Brown’s new imprint is delivering page-turners with Hollywood pedigree and has signed unique partnerships with film producers and video game companies.


Read it here.

5 Reasons Why E-Books Aren’t There Yet


There are no two ways about it: E-books are here to stay. Unless something as remarkable as Japan’s reversion to the sword occurs, digital books are the 21st century successor to print. And yet the e-book is fundamentally flawed. There are some aspects to print book culture that e-books can’t replicate (at least not easily) — yet.
Let’s put this into some context first. Amazon sparked the e-reader revolution with the first Kindle a mere two-and-a-half years ago, and it now already sells more e-books than all print books combined. Barnes & Noble, the century-old bricks-and-mortar bookseller, is being pursued by Liberty Media not because it has stores all over the place but because its Nook e-reader is the Kindle’s biggest competitor.

Reasonable arguments that the iPad would kill the e-reader seem laughable now, as both thrive and many people own one of each. One thing E-books and books are equally good at: In their own ways, they’re both platform agnostic.
But for all of the benefit they clearly bring, e-books are still falling short of a promise to make us forget their paper analogs. For now, you still lose something by moving on.
It isn’t always that way with tech: We rejoice at cutting the phone cord, we don’t fret that texting causes lousy penmanship and we are ecstatic that our computers, tablets and phones are replacing the TV set.

I’m not resorting to variations on the ambiguous tactile argument (“The feel and smell of paper is an integral part of the reading experience….”) that one hears from some late-to-never adopters. And — full disclosure — I have never owned an e-book reader, because I have an ingrained opposition to single-purpose devices. But since getting an iPad on day one, I haven’t purchased a print edition of anything for myself.
I am hooked — completely one with the idea that books are legacy items that may never go away, but have been forever marginalized as a niche medium. With that in mind, however, here are five things about e-books that might give you pause about saying good riddance to the printed page.

Fix these problems, and there really will be no limits to the e-book’s growth.

Great Weekend Reads


 The Daily Beast

Book beast

by The Daily Beast Info

Fun with Words


Book Cover - Alphabetter Juice Alphabetter Juice, or The Joy of Text By Roy Blount Jr. 304 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $26. If you think you know English, Alphabetter Juice might make you think again. In this follow-up to his 2008 book, Alphabet Juice, the writer and self-diagnosed hyperlexic Roy Blount Jr. riffs on a language that bounces, plods, jingles, and thuds like no other. It's a celebration of the quirky, idiomatic, cobbled-together words, phrases, and expressions we use every day (and some long forgotten), without giving their provenance, their aesthetics, or their sonicky-ness a second thought.

Sonicky: a term coined by the author to describe words that are not strictly imitative or onomatopoetic, like snap, crackle, and pop, but whose meanings are conveyed by both their sound and their movement.
Enough abstraction—it's not Blount's style. Say the words urge, throttle, and splotch aloud. Note how you form those words, how they contract and expand your throat, tense and relax your tongue, and shape your lips to not only create noises that sound like what they mean, but that actually manifest their meanings in their physical formation.

Doesn't urge simply feel like yearning desire, with its long, drawn-out beginning, strained-R in the middle, and semi-satisfying soft-G finish? Doesn't your tongue throttle when you say throttle? Doesn't splotch, as Blount writes, "explode from the mouth and make an unmissable mess of itself"?
A swift, fascinating read, Alphabetter Juice is not your fifth-grade grammar textbook. It never dwells too long on one thing, nor does it fit a single category. Its alphabetized entries, from A to Z, jump from "bigth" to "blab," from "robinhood" to "rumpsprung," in a mash of straightforward etymologies, linguistic analyses, personal anecdotes, definitions for neologisms, and doses of LOL humor throughout.
Much of that humor sneaks up on you, as in the entry sandwiched between Q-tip and quip—titled, "questions not to ask an author, with answers." One being: Q. "You can work anywhere, right?" A. "Not here, for instance."
A regular panelist on NPR's quiz show Wait, Wait… Don't Tell Me and a usage consultant for the American Heritage Dictionary, Blount comes from a tradition that includes Mark Twain, H.L. Mencken, and even David Foster Wallace. That is, people who take language seriously, but who aren't always too serious about it.
Like its predecessor, Alphabetter Juice is neither exhaustive nor predictable. The section on Q, for example, consists entirely of the three entries listed above. In G, Blount leads with possible origins of G-string, moves on to gag, and meanders through numerous other G words before he reaches gillie/girl, whose entry, in fact, winds up discussing salmon.
A few entries later, for gollywaddles, Blount recalls Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's claim, in 2008, that the F-word is offensive "because it is associated with sexual or excretory activity… This is why people don't use gollywaddles instead."
"Poppycock," writes Blount. "What gives fuck its force is the combination of its meaning and its kinephonic value… Its rude, explosive soft-f-to-hard-k sound—soft f, uh, as in thrust, and k—and the way in which it surges through the oral apparatus make it a gratifying epithet to utter and often a frightening one to hear."
Bam.

But Alphabetter Juice is more than a novelty act, a breezy tour of the twisty-turny English language for like-minded word nerds. Joining recent books like Roy Peter Clark's The Glamour of Grammar and Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence, Blount's comes at a critical time in the life of letters. As technology changes both how and what we read, it's also changing what passes for decent writing. See mediablur, p. 148.
In a February 2010 New York Times column, David Carr described the so-called "content farms" that "assemble facts into narratives that deliver information... The results would not be mistaken for literary journalism," he wrote, "but on the Web, pretty good—or even not terrible—is often good enough."
Not for Blount, Clark, or Fish. Those authors, and their books, make a collective case for thinking as you write, for taking care with your craft. As Blount puts it, "I don't even have any patience for not-terrible guacamole. The chunkier the better."
Sometimes a curmudgeon but never dull, Blount knows his audience: people who like to read, who like to think about language, and who probably like to write too. If you can't leave the house or pick up a newspaper without rolling your eyes at nonsensical malapropisms, grammatical quagmires, syntactical knots, or simple misspellings, you'll find a friend in Alphabetter Juice. You'll laugh, scratch your chin, and learn a great deal.

And you'll probably find yourself wondering about all the words, phrases, and expressions that Blount doesn't include. Maybe you'll investigate on your own, hazard your own hypotheses, or just appreciate how little you really know about English. At the very least, you'll anxiously await the next round of juice.
David Alm, Contributor


More at The Daily Beast.

Grasshopper Headshot

I found this character clinging to our screen door the other day and he was nice enough to sit still while I photographed him. I didn't do a very good job of it, even this section of him isn't completely in focus. In spite of that, I think it's worth a click. Looking at the larger image, you can see his kinship with crabs and lobsters, particularly in the joints where his legs meet his body.

Enjoy.