Did you want fries with that?

This rocks.

The Very Reverend Colin Slee

What a great man.  I disagreed with his politics and some of his ecclesiastical views, but when he would pick my daughter up and examine her Sunday school drawings and take the time to talk to us, it didn't matter. His sermons were things you remembered and his sense of humour was infectious.

Easter Sunday last before the service he admonished the congregation that the year prior there had been too many adults taking chocolate eggs, so this year it would be children only.  Then he decided mid-service that everyone was leaving immediately after the service for a Zimbabwe demo in the Strand and that the eggs would be given out at Communion.  I grabbed A and took her up with me and we both went to our knees at the bench.  The Dean came along and put his hand on A's head and gave her the blessing, and then pressed the wafer into my hand, intoning "The Body of Christ".  A, who is always hungry, leaned over to me and asked, "Daddy, what are you eating?  Is that a biscuit?"

She got her eggs. And she got her hugs from the Dean.  And we all had a lovely time.  And he will be missed greatly.

Oh...oh, I see...

We don't know everything then!

Okay, I'll Play

I can't believe people are pleased that they have read 12 of these books.  I really can't believe that a plagiarising little tosser like Dan Brown is on here and Bulgakov is not!

Here's my go...

The BBC apparently believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:


I have read 69, and number 6 is an ongoing project....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (what do you take me for )
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read some, but not others...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ('scuse me??)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ( I mean REALLY!)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (the man has interns write his effing books, FFS)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (YES, ALL OF IT)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (this, and no Faulkner?)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (hahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!!)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Difficult Decisions

 

 The Beatles catalogue is out today on iTunes.  This brings me some sense of joy in that this is the music that I grew up with.  I bought my first Beatles album, which was the first Beatles album when I was just old enough to buy things.

My dad used to rage incessantly about how awful they were and what a bad influence, what with the hair and screaming girls and all.  You should hear him now! "You know, I think I may have misjudged those boys."

I was physically restrained from going to a Beatles concert in the Lynchian nightmare that was my childhood hometown, just as they became 'something'.  I don't think I have ever gotten over it, actually.

The most surprising thing, if it is surprising, is how...well...unrevolutionary much of their music is when you hear it now.  It's just good music. It's nice. It makes you feel good.

I think A Hard Day's Night and Help are two fine Richard Lester films with fantastic music and a pretty funny script, the both of them.

But here is where rock meets hard place.  I could see myself queueing up on iTunes to download the whole shedload and helping Lennon and Harrison, and maybe even that tired old manque´ Starkey get through their dottage.

But a penny for that smug, tiresome McCartney fellow?  With that nasty brown wig?  Bad taste in women? 

I have to think about this, maybe for a while.

R.I.P. Dino de Laurentis

Have you ever seen any of these films?  Blue Velvet, La Strada, Barbarella, Serpico, Conan the Barbarian, Ragtime, The Serpent's Egg, King Kong, Flash Gordon, Dune, The Shootist?

Dino de Laurentis died today, and yes he made some really crappy films, but he made some brilliant ones too that probably would never have been made if somebody as 'wacko' as him had not been around.

Whoosh!

And what do we make of this?

Not much to make of it really, other than 'Cool!', but I continue to marvel at the potty-mouthed Dawkins crowd who are so, so lacking in a sense of wonder.

I have had it suggested that this doesn't look at all like a black hole going 'whammo', and I wouldn't know myself, but that it could be 'God's fingerprint'.  Hmmm.  Don't know about that either, but it does make me think about Ed Emberley and then I really do go HMMMM. 

Cruelty can be fun

America's progressive, intellectual elite takes umbrage...