I KNOW this makes me sound like a teenage girl, but SQUEEEEAAAALLLL!!! I love the horrible warped snowmen Calvin comes up with and this video realises them in beautifully lit 3D. The scene is made from flour and sugar, and there’s a breakdown of how the makers did it here. It’s just awesome and perfectly recreates the brilliant strips Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson drew every winter. And the “we miss you, Bill” at the end just kills me.
Watterson didn’t just do the famous snowmen scenes for comedy. He used them to satirise pretentious art critics, with Calvin spouting awful post-modernist crap about the meaning of his snow sculptures while a puzzled Hobbes points out the failings of Calvin’s efforts:
Calvin’s creations would also be used by Watterson to slam on the money-grubbing and selling out of the art market, something he despised (he never licensed Calvin and Hobbes for toys, T-shirts and so on, a move that upheld his integrity but also cost him about $10 million a year — which as far as I’m concerned just confirms his integrity).
The way Calvin (a hyperactive six-year-old) and Hobbes (his toy tiger that may, or may not, come alive when no one else is around and if I really have to explain this to you then for Christ’s sake do yourselves a favour and read some now) switch from basic humour to deep philosophical discussions and back is amazing, and that’s not even including the genius that is Calvinball. These discussions take place everywhere but mostly on the long and dangerous sledge rides they’d take through the local woods. Calvin would pontificate on the meaning of life while Hobbes, by far the more practical of the two, covers his eyes and usually bails as soon as possible.
Watterson restricted the characters to certain locations — school, home, the woods, the backyard, their endless sledging and cart runs — and the strip never suffers for it. Calvin’s imagination is a bottomless pool of near-genius ideas and plans, regardless of how stupid Hobbes thinks they are. Calvin’s scientific experiments, which include a time machine, a duplicator and a transmogrifier, provide plenty of material for great comedy. And then, just when you think you can’t laugh any more, Watterson hits you with this:
This is pretty much my favourite strip. I can remember reading it for the first time and laughing so hard I thought I’d faint. It’s so simple but at the same time so clever; just the idea of them sitting up all night armed with a baseball bat in case ghosts attack is a classic example of what Watterson can do with four panels. And then he gets you with this:
Look, I’m a soppy bastard and I admit to bursting out crying at this one. It perfectly encapsulates how much Calvin and Hobbes love each other and how much they mean to each other. Watterson could even show this deep affection without needing words:
There’s also an insanely touching series that lasted for 10 weeks in which the duo find a sick baby raccoon and try to help it, with the aid of Calvin’s mum. But it dies and the last four strips are spent with Calvin and Hobbes discussing the meaning of life and death. Calvin says to his dad, “I’m crying because out there he’s gone, but he’s not gone inside me.” It’s an incredible topic for something that appeared on the funny pages of newspapers and is one of the many, many reasons C&H transcends its comic strip restraints to become a cultural treasure.
One of the things you gradually become aware of when reading the strips is that Calvin doesn’t have any friends. It’s pretty shocking when you first realise it, but then his relationship with Hobbes is so close that there really couldn’t be anyone else. Except possibly Suzie Derkins, the little girl down the street who Calvin has a sort-of-secret crush on for which Hobbes torments him mercilessly. The only other kid in the strip is Moe, a bully at school who torments Calvin until he takes Hobbes to school and threatens him with death by tiger. Of course to Moe, Hobbes is just a small stuffed toy but Calvin still scares him enough to be left alone. You just have to wonder if he’d stood up to Moe without Hobbes, and the answer is probably “no”.
Whether Hobbes really came alive or was just a figment of Calvin’s imagination was left to the reader to decide. Watterson gave hints that went both ways, such as when Hobbes ties Calvin to a chair where his parents discover him — “But how did he tie himself up?” — or the numerous times Hobbes gets damaged and Calvin’s mum has to sew him up. Or give him a bath in the washing machine, which he loves. Chuck in Calvin’s long-suffering babysitter Rosalyn, his alter-egos Spaceman Spiff and Tracer Bullet, the exploits of G.R.O.S.S. and his dad’s explanations for how things work and what you have is the greatest comic strip in the history of everything.
But great things can’t last forever. In 1995 Watterson announced he was finishing Calvin and Hobbes, a decision that came out of nowhere — there is no such thing as a crap C&H strip, let alone an average one — which blew newspaper editors and fans away. I didn’t get into the strip until 1999 or so and didn’t see the final cartoon until probably 2002. It’s just perfect:
I cried at this one, too. Sue me. Luckily, it’s is more heartening than this fake final C&H that showed up online:
The idea that Calvin’s amazing imagination would be killed off by taking “pills” and that he’d come to see Hobbes as just a toy is not only too sad for words, it’s also horrible. I’d rather imagine them out there sledging through the woods forever.
To see more Calvin and Hobbes Christmas tributes, go here and here. I’m definitely doing something like this next year and bugger what Ev says. The title of this post is ripped off this, which I suggest you go and buy. Now. Or Mr Fezziwig gets it.
IMAGINE the scene. Gucci has come up with a new overpriced bottle of smelly stuff perfume. It’s intense, guilty, and many other meaningless words dreamed up by the marketing department. Gucci wants a logo that’ll sum up the mysterious, dangerous world you’ll enter once you spray this on yourself, ignoring the reality that if you’re the kind of person stupid enough to spend $75 on a bottle of this the only place you’re going is some douchebag ultralounge. Anyway, I’d love to have been in the room when this design was conceived. Why?
BECAUSE IT’S THE BATMAN LOGO WITH A HARD-ON. It is, look at it! Just to make sure I checked with friends people I know in the office and 100% of him agreed that this does, in fact, look like the Bat logo with a bell-end. Here’s a closer look:
How much did Gucci pay for this? Did no one at any stage of the concept, design and realisation of this see that it’s basically the Dark Knight’s emblem with a pendulous nob dangling between its wings? I know the logo is made up of two capital G’s (you can see that more clearly here) but that doesn’t excuse Gucci from inadvertently coming up with the gayest superhero-related thing since this.
SOMETIMES you get stuck in the middle and just don’t know which way to turn. After all, when one group known for being made up primarily of bigots attacks another group known for being made up primarily of nutcases, what do you do? Is it a case of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” or do you just sit back with some popcorn and a large Coke and watch the sparks fly?
What’s bringing this bout of soul-searching is the news that DIY store Lowe’s has pulled its advertising from a TLC reality show called All-American Muslim. It’s done this not because of something offensive it’s spotted in the program or because the show’s “cast” only shops at Home Depot. No, it’s boycotted it because a right-wing religious group called the Florida Family Association conducted a campaign against the show. As the three of you who read the site know, I have huge problems with both Christianity and Islam. I’m not massively keen on religion in general, but I absolutely despise fanatics of any stripe.
(A disclaimer: I haven’t seen All-American Muslim. I have a tendency to avoid TV, and reality TV in particular, so I’m in no position to comment on whether the show is in fact a training ground for jihadists or just another programme showing the not-very-fascinating everyday lives of a bunch of Americans. Oh, and yes, I know about 9/11. And 7/7, for that matter (if you’re American, here’s a link explaining what it is).)
(And another disclaimer: I lived with a Muslim family for my first year at university in west London. They were great.)
Anyway, here’s the FFA’s views on All-American Muslim:
The Learning Channel’s new show All-American Muslim is propaganda clearly designed to counter legitimate and present-day concerns about many Muslims who are advancing Islamic fundamentalism and Sharia law. The show profiles only Muslims that appear to be ordinary folks while excluding many Islamic believers whose agenda poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish.
Basically, the FFA’s big problem is that the show portrays “ordinary” American Muslims and not the raving anti-USA flag-burning loonies that you’re supposed to think they are. After all, how are you supposed to keep the hate going if they’re portrayed as normal human beings? But the whole point of the programme is to show the lives of “ordinary folks” — the kind who get up, go to work, pay bills and taxes and raise families — who are also Muslim and give an insight into how their beliefs affect their daily lives. To the FFA, if you’re not wearing a bomb belt or flying a plane into a building then you can’t possibly be Muslim.
Now there are claims, rumours and legends that Sharia law is operating in Dearborn, Michigan,where All-American Muslim is filmed (the city has the highest Muslim population in America). The arguments over this are so wide-ranging and obscured by the usual stupidity that there’s no point in going into them here; just read this for one side of the story, or this for the other. For myself, I think that if Sharia law had been introduced in the city we’d probably have heard of it by now; as a test, go to Dearborn and order a bacon sandwich and a beer. If you’re stoned to death you can be pretty confident that they have Sharia law there. (And at least you don’t have this shit going on like we do).
And I would really, really love to know what the line “poses a clear and present danger to liberties and traditional values that the majority of Americans cherish” actually means. I know what the FFA means by it: that brown people who do things differently must be seen and not heard, and preferably not seen either. Are the Real Americans™ who make up the FFA so insecure in their own beliefs that they have to lash out at those of others? Are American liberties so fragile that showing people of a different religion on the telly means the downfall of civilisation as we know it? Bollocks it does; Jersey Shore, or as I like to call it, Wop Shitheads, has probably driven more people into the arms of Al Qaeda than anything else.
Besides, imagine if TLC wanted to do a show about Islamic extremists. Ignoring the fact that the channel responsible for Douche & Shrew Plus Eight is hardly the right place for such a programme, there’s no way anyone would want to appear on it as they’d be off to Guantanamo before the opening credits ended and TLC’s offices would be raided by the FBI — and quite rightly. Showing the lives of ordinary American Muslims is a lot more interesting simply because, thanks to the media’s portrayal, most people fail to realise that there is such as thing as an “ordinary” Muslim just as there are “ordinary” Christians, Jews, Hindus, atheists, Star Trek fans and World of Warcraft players.
At least TLC didn’t try to hide the cast’s religion, unlike another show it broadcasts. 19 Kids And Counting is about the Duggar family who — not that the programme ever admits this — belong to a Christian fundamentalist group called Quiverfull. It’s an organisation that demands its adherents have large families to spread the message of Christianity and, more scarily, provide “troops” for what followers call “the war” but what anyone else would call “imposing their lifestyle and beliefs on everyone else” — you know, just like The Gays are apparently trying to do. Don’t Quiverfull’s aims pose a “clear and present danger to liberties the majority of Americans cherish”… oh, wait, the Duggars are white and Christian. Stupid me. (This is going to sound horrible, but screw it: Michelle Duggar just lost baby #20. I guess God must have seen this).
Or how about you protest the truly repulsive Toddlers and Tiaras? A show where four-year-old girls don fake teeth, boobs (seriously) and parade around in front of judges? It’s little more than kiddie porn given a veneer of respectability because TLC (yes, them again) claims the programme is a documentary rather than the blatant exploitation of clueless kids and the revolting failures that pass for their mothers. Oh, fuck, I forgot: there’s no Muslims on the show. Guess that makes this perfectly fine with the FFA.
The FFA claims it’s responsible for sending out millions of emails to TV companies and advertisers. This is technically true. What actually happens is this: One of the FFA’s little Hitlers sees something he/she doesn’t agree with. An pre-written email is then sent to everyone on the FFA’s mailing list. The recipients then copy/paste it into a new email and click “send”, probably not even reading it. It’s a totally passive form of protest and is dependent on ignorance, laziness and a blind obedience — just the kind of people the leaders of the FFA (or, for that matter, the Nazis) rely on to spread messages of intolerance.
And now for Lowe’s. There are about three million Muslims in America, every one of which Lowe’s can kiss goodbye forever, not to mention the boycotts and protests currently being organised thanks to the store’s action. The statement it made could not be more obtuse:
[T]here are certain programs that do not meet Lowe’s advertising guidelines, including the show you brought to our attention. Lowe’s will no longer be advertising on that (All American Muslim) program.”
So, Lowe’s, which guidelines does All-American Muslim not meet? Do you have a guideline that says “We don’t advertise on shows featuring Muslims”? Or maybe, “We bend over backwards to accommodate hate groups”? I was under the impression that advertising was supposed to get your product out to as many people as possible and not, you know, to drive millions of customers away.
Lowe’s actual reason for pulling out was made clear in a second statement on its Facebook page:
It appears that we managed to step into a hotly contested debate with strong views from virtually every angle and perspective – social, political and otherwise – and we’ve managed to make some people very unhappy. We are sincerely sorry. We have a strong commitment to diversity and inclusion, across our workforce and our customers, and we’re proud of that longstanding commitment.
Lowe’s has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.
We strongly support and respect the right of our customers, the community at large, and our employees to have different views. If we have made anyone question that commitment, we apologize.
Thank you for allowing us to further explain our position.
Just stating the truth — “We were contacted by this group who threatened our corporate wallet so we rolled over and gave in” — would have been a better tactic. Lowe’s may have tried to avoid being associated with a controversial show, but in acting as it has it’s just created an even bigger one and come out of it looking like a bunch of bigots. Did the marketing muppet who made the decision to pull advertising not realise that WE ALL HAVE THE INTERNET THESE DAYS and shit like this is going to blow up faster than someone can start a Facebook group? Obviously Lowe’s can advertise with whoever it wants to; after all, it’s a free market. Hopefully the idiots running it will acknowledge that when they notice a drop in sales.
And one more thing Just as Lowe’s seemed to forget that its decision would spread quicker and cause more heat than herpes in a USC sorority, it also seemed to forget the golden rule whenever Christians protest something: they just draw more attention to it. Which is why the ad space vacated by Lowe’s has been snapped up by others keen to show that not all American businesses are cowards and racists.
AND I mean that. Craig, who as we all know is the best Bond ever, slammed the Kardashian whores in an interview with GQ magazine:
“Look at the Kardashians, they’re worth millions. Millions! I don’t think they were that badly off to begin with, but now look at them. You see that and you think, ‘What, you mean all I have to do is behave like a fucking idiot on television and then you’ll pay me millions?’”
Holy shit, finally someone in the public eye has pointed out that the empress has no clothes. Or dignity, talent, usefulness or reason to exist. This obviously hasn’t gone down well with the Kardashians, which is surprising seeing as their whole “career” has involved them going down at one time or another (or, for that matter, hundreds of times). The matriarch of the clan, Kris*, said:
“It’s not made him look like the world’s nicest guy. The right thing for a real man to do now would be to issue a public apology. The easy thing would be to criticize his career now, but our family won’t stoop to that level.”
Given that the family’s claim to fame comes from cashing in on Kim’s sex tape, they’d have to be horizontal to in order to stoop any lower. (Luckily enough, horizontal is the natural position for a Kardashian.) As for criticising Craig’s career — really? This is what Daniel Craig has achieved:
1. He’s James Bond, for feck’s sake.
2. Casino Royale made $597,000,000 at the box office. Quantum of Solace took in $592,000,000.
3. Stars in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, based on one of the best-selling books in recent history.
4. Has worked with Stephen Spielberg twice (Munich and The Adventures of Tintin).
5. Was awesome in Layer Cake. Seriously. If you haven’t seen it, see it.
6. Is married to, and therefore banging, Rachel Weisz.
7. Did I mention he’s JAMES FECKING BOND?
8. Is a good looking bloke.
9. Has never needed to be pissed on in order to boost his career.
On the other hand, Kris:
1. Oversaw the rise of her clan of attention-whore daughters and waste-of-space son like an evil scientist producing some kind of unstoppable STD that lives on publicity and semen.
2. Doesn’t seem bothered that her former husband helped get murderer and all-round piece of shit OJ Simpson acquitted.
3. Looks like a retarded Barbie doll that’s been left too close to a naked flame.
4. Has become a byword for everything that’s wrong with today’s shallow, entitled, status-, self-, and celebrity-obsessed world.
5. Is incapable of realising that her entire family is considered to be a joke by anyone with an IQ above 34.
6. Lacks the self-awareness to recognise that attacking a hard-working, talented and articulate actor for expressing an opinion held by 99.99999% of the world’s population isn’t exactly the best course of action for someone whose claim to fame is that she raised a family of retarded sluts.
7. Is for some reason not embarrassed that her eldest daughter is only famous for being pissed on.
8. Thinks that selling the rights to your marriage for millions, then getting a divorce and selling the rights to that story for millions, is good business rather than morally reprehensible.
The website for E! “News” (the only programme less entitled to use the word “news” in its name than the Republican Propaganda Ministry Fox News) made a snarky comment that Craig’s outburst is a ploy to drum up publicity for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. Now I don’t mean to sound like a cynical bastard, but the E! Network just happens to own the rights to Keeping Up With The Kardashians which itself just happens to be produced by Kris. Hmmm… rearrange these words into a well-known sentence: Of. Conflict. Interest.
As for publicity, the Millennium Trilogy, of which TGWTDT is the first part, has sold more than 27,000,000 copies worldwide, a figure only dwarfed by the number of brain cells Khloé Kardashian kills off when trying to remember which end of the crayon to write with. Somehow I don’t think it needs the publicity, do you? I admit to having problems with the trilogy, more specifically with the second part, but compared to the Kardashians’ output it’s bloody Shakespeare.
Anyway, enough. I can’t quite believe I expended energy writing about these worthless whores when said energy would have been better used to pick my nose, but there you go. If you’re a Kardashian fan, feel free to have someone read this to you then put down your gallon bucket of ice cream, balance the keyboard on your immense gut and flame me in the comments.
*Why the hell do they all have names starting with K anyway? Maybe that’s as far into the alphabet as she can read.
WHEN you wake up at 7am to hear the newscaster on TV say the words “state of emergency” and “Pasadena” in the same sentence, you know you’re going to be ripping up the front page you designed the night before. Normally this would throw me into a paroxysm of “Oh shit I just did that page,” but this kind of breaking news I love — a solid story that affects a huge area, comes with tons of really good photos and, best of all, it’s not a bloody city council story.
So, showing the kind of initiative not seen since I last did the laundry without being asked, I grabbed a bit of paper and a pen and knocked up a new cover for the Pasadena Sun:
Looks like my two degrees weren’t a waste of time, after all. The old layout had the art story over four columns, one story over two cols, and the other two over three each. The new one is one of my favourite designs — I love doing the three-across-the-bottom layout as it gets three stories on the cover and leaves plenty of room for a main story with one big photo, a second photo, the story and a sidebar. So with this approved by the Sun’s editor Bill, I logged on at noon, redid the front, and then… waited.
Newspapers are basically a production line. The reporters produce the raw material, the editors check it for mistakes and polish it where necessary, and I package the words and pictures together on the page in a way that hopefully appeals to the readers. Being at the end of the line means if there’s nothing in for me to design then, well, there’s nothing for me to do. The rule with breaking stories is that the bigger they are, the longer the wait. And this one wasn’t just breaking, it was developing, with new information coming in all day. I got on with the rest of the Sun as well as two of our weekend papers — the Burbank Leader and the Sunday Valley Sun — while waiting, all the while keeping in email contact with Bill and other colleagues as I worked from home today. Thanks to our publishing schedule I’m always working two days ahead — Mondays I do papers for Tuesday and Wednesday, Tuesday I work on Wednesday’s and Thursday’s, and so on, so there’s always something I can get on with. It’s a lot better than it used to be, when Wednesdays were a desert of sod all between about 5pm and 9pm. Aside from the delays it’s usually pretty straightforward.
But let’s face it, nothing in this world is straightforward and at 7.30pm I got an email from Bill asking if we had time and space for another story. The LA Times and another newspaper group had sued the California State Assembly to get details of lawmakers’ budgets. The judgement came late in the day so I checked with Mike and Jon, our copy editors, to see if they could handle such a late story, as they were still ploughing through the storm stuff. They confirmed, our reporter Adolfo banged out the text, and I rearranged page five to get it in. I also had to redo the skybox, the strip across the top of the cover, to advertise the story; before it had been a tease for the main sports story on page nine.
With our 8.30pm deadline fast approaching I called pre-press and asked them for an extension, and as they’re awesome I got an extra 15 minutes. It doesn’t sound like much but even two minutes can make the difference if an error, major or minor, is spotted and corrected before the page hits the press in Irwindale. We were glad of the extension as the paper was finally ready to go at 8.44 and after spell-checking all the stories and changing one small design error it left the building at bang on 8.45. Here’s the final cover in full glorious colour:
Everyone involved — Adolfo, Veronica, Tiffany, Joe, Bill, Mike, Jon and Raul — did an excellent job and allowed me to produce a great cover, not to mention a great paper as a whole.
WITH three more of Sponja’s latest kittens caught and waiting for new homes/the van from the local Chinese takeaway, we realised we’d need somewhere to house them. The spare catbox helped for a while but it wasn’t big enough. Then Ev hit on the idea of making a home for them out of PetCo cat carrier boxes and leftover moving cartons. With the aid of a craft knife, marker and a ton of tape we knocked this up last night and this morning.
From left: bathroom, living area, kitchen, indoor pool. We were a tad disappointed that we couldn’t afford marble flooring or Kohler fittings for the bathroom and the indoor pool isn’t heated but we think the kittens will be OK.
I added a hinged lid for easy access to the litterbox so we can clean up the vast quantities of poo usually associated with a herd of elephants, not three small kittens. Note the cigarette lighter which they can use as a flamethrower in case of attack by Emric. There are two more kittens still roaming free so I’ve set up the trap in the back garden. If we catch those as well we might be looking at a cardboard McMansion by the end of the week.
I’VE seen a few blog posts about and against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA). I haven’t paid a lot of attention to them but tonight I decided to look into it in more detail and it’s pretty bloody frightening.
SOPA will, if passed, will bring in Chinese levels of censorship to America. Unlike China, though, the bill isn’t aimed at political websites or ones that criticise the government; in its simplest form, it’s yet another attempt by the “entertainment” industry to stifle protect creativity by destroying those it thinks are stealing its most precious possessions. Current laws already provide for this but SOPA would go much, much further.
For starters it would give corporations the right to shut down sites that break SOPA and then add those sites to a blacklist. I’ve put a few Cure videos on Planet Mut and if SOPA had been in operation when I did it I’d now be blocked by most search engines and ISPs — without any kind of court hearing or trial. As far as sites like Twitter and YouTube are concerned, they’d have to monitor every single post to make sure it didn’t break the law otherwise they’d be cited and blocked. To give an example of what they’re up against, there are one billion tweets posted on Twitter every week. YouTube has 48 hours of video uploaded every minute. How are they supposed to check all this content? Well they’re not, are they? At least that’s what the United States Chamber of Commerce, the Motion Picture Association of America, the American Federation of Musicians, the Directors Guild of America, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and the Screen Actors Guild — all of which are backing SOPA — are hoping.
Twitter, YouTube, Facebook and other such sites are protected under the current DMCA by what’s called the safe harbour provision: they’re not prosecuted if someone posts copyrighted material to them, but they are expected to remove it as soon as they’re informed of the infringement. This has worked well for years; we’ve all seen the “content removed by request of copyright holder” messages on YouTube. But with SOPA, not only could YouTube potentially be blacklisted, the teenager who decided to upload the content could face five years in jail. The bill is so broad, however, that if a teenager videoed herself singing a Lady Gaga song and uploaded it to YouTube she could face up to five years in jail for copyright infringement. It looks like this is about to come true.
As things stand the DMCA does a pretty good job of protecting intellectual property (although how anyone involved with this could be considered “intellectual” is fecking ridiculous). SOPA actually looks like it could pass and become law, proving once again that America has the best democracy money can buy.
BOOK blog The Broke And The Bookish does a weekly meme of top 10 lists based around different themes. With it being Thanksgiving this week (or “Let’s Be Grateful The Indians Didn’t Have Gunpowder Day”) the topic is the 10 authors you’d invite to your Thanksgiving feast. So without further ado, and in no particular order, here they are…
George Orwell He fought in the Spanish Civil War, spent a year down and out in Paris and London, went down coalmines in Wigan, worked as a colonial policeman in Burma, produced numerous reviews, essays, columns and articles about anything he wanted and then wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four while dying of tuberculosis. A profoundly decent man with a sharp wit and a strong awareness of social injustice, a lover of the English language and an excellent, excellent writer, he’d be perfect to talk to over a nice cup of tea while chainsmoking rollups.
Martin Cruz SmithSmith is responsible for bringing Arkady Renko to the world of novels. A world-weary and obstinately honest investigator with the Moscow Militia, Renko’s adventures under the Soviet regime (Gorky Park, Polar Star, Red Square), the post-Communist world (Havana Bay) and the kleptocracy of modern Russia (Wolves Eat Dogs, Stalin’s Ghost, Three Stations) are some of the best crime thrillers ever written and frequently rise into the ranks of literature.
Harper Lee The reclusive author of To Kill A Mockingbird wouldn’t come, but I can but wish.
Robert HarrisFatherland is one of the best alternate-future novels ever written. Set in Nazi Germany in 1963, Harris writes of a world where the Germans won the Second World War and are about to enter an alliance with America when a disillusioned Gestapo officer decides to find out how the murders of leading SS officers are linked to the disappearance of his Jewish neighbours, with horrifying results — the book’s ending, the realisation of what Xavier March discovers in Poland, packs an enormous punch. Harris writes characters brilliantly, his meticulously-researched settings are terrifyingly realistic, and the fact he wrote the definitive book on the Hitler diaries fiasco only makes him even more awesome.
Sara Wheeler Wheeler is a travel writer who’s written about Chile, India, Antarctica and the Arctic. Her Terra Incognita is one of the best books I’ve read on the Antarctic and her biography of Apsley Cherry-Garrard brings to life one of the most endearing and tragic figures of Polar exploration. Cherry is one of the few books I make a point of reading once a year.
Dominic Sandbrook There are times when you see a book and just buy it on the strength of the title alone. Sandbrook’s Never Had It So Good: A History Of Britain From Suez To The Beatles was one of those times and it introduced me to one of the top historians writing today. He brings the period of Britain my parents grew up in to life through diaries, letters, anecdotes and contemporary reports. His follow-ups (White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties and State of Emergency: The Way We Were 1970 to 74) are the best social history you can read.
Apsley Cherry-Garrard He only wrote one book — The Worst Journey In The World - but it’s acknowledged as the greatest work of exploration literature ever put to paper. Not bad for someone who originally planned the book as a how-to manual for future explorers and wrote separate bits out on odds and ends of paper before arranging them on his desk in the order he thought best. What he actually produced transcends plain storytelling and becomes a meditation on heroism, self-sacrifice and suffering.
Quentin Crisp “As soon as I stepped out of my mother’s womb I realized that I had made a mistake.” Crisp’s 1968 autobiography The Naked Civil Servant is a funny, caustic and fascinating look at his life. A flamboyantly gay man (he wore makeup and dyed his hair) living at a time when being gay wasn’t only frowned on, it could get you arrested and/or a good beating, Crisp details his rebellion at society and how he found success despite being seen as a freak.
Terry Pratchett He created the Discworld, what more do you want? OK — Carrott, Angua, Rincewind, Vimes, The Luggage, Death, Mort, Susan Sto Helit, the Librarian, Unseen University, the Witches, Moist von Lipwig… More? Well there’s the Tiffany Aching books which are for young adults but are among the most wonderful and beautifully written stories, and let’s not forget Maurice, Dangerous Beans, Darktan, Hamnpork and Peaches, who may be a cat and some rats but are the best characters to appear in a book. Ever. Seriously.
Tom Sharpe To be blunt he’s gone downhill recently, but his earlier novels are raucous, scathing, ribald, crude, vulgar farces full of excellent characters, ridiculous situations, oversexed idiots, frantic plotting and biting satire. Try Wilt, Porterhouse Blue or Riotous Assembly to see what I mean.
IT’S taken a while, but the rest of Sponja’s second brood have finally shown themselves. I can’t tell if there’s four or five of them — two or three are black and the other two are identical to Mr. Fezziwig.
They’re all about five weeks old and we have to capture them before they get too big and fast like the last lot did. It would be a lot easier if they’d just get stuck in a box like Fezzi did, but we’re going to have to get the trap out of the garage and go after them in our neighbour’s garden this weekend.
There’s no way we can keep them all, not even one, as going up to six cats would be madness. So if you’re in the area and would like a nice soft bundle of fur to call your own, email me and we’ll sort something out.
