(no subject)

[peterbirks]

Have been suffering agonies in my left shoulder for about 18 hours, only partially alleviated by Nurofen and Deep Heat. It's almost certainly due to the knotting of the muscles while practising on the piano, added to my normally dreadful posture when playing online.

The pain actually woke me up at 4.15, despite me having only gone to bed at midnight.

This gave me the opportunity to lose a few dollars on Ultimate. The month continues to be a struggle and I didn't see a "good" game all weekend. It was very much a matter of up a bit, down a bit, breaking even over the three days and thank god for rakeback/bonus dollars.

I'm in severe danger of running out of Ultimate Bet bonus dollars, something I never thought would happen. I don't have rakeback deal there, either. This could lead to some necessary reassessment of things in the near future. The Noble Deposit bonus runs out at the end of March and, given the paucity of games on the site, I have no hope of clearing even half of it.

So, unless some startling new offer crops up, I might be stuck with having to play properly. That would be a good excuse to move up in stakes and see what happened, anyway.

President's Day today, so there might be some action on Ultimate this afternoon. Although, if this morning's triple rock-fest was anything to go on, there won't be.

+++++

I've just finished John Boyne's The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas and I recommend it highly. Is it a children's book that went askew, because the subject matter pushed the author in another direction? I'm not sure, but I do know that Boyne writes remarkably well. Not only is it a story well-told, but it was only this morning that I realized how brilliant Boyne is in visual descriptions. Rarely has such a book left so many pictures in my head. Marvellous.

Comments

Re: Harry - not all bad

[real-aardvark.livejournal.com]

What has the woman made? Around a couple of hundred million? Who buys this crap?

The only way I would recommend that anyone, from the age of 99 years going down to around about the zygote level, should read a Harry Potter book is if they are pleading with me to lend them a copy of the Da Vinci Code. (Creese, if you're looking in, just say no. It's like the Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, only even more senseless and badly written.)

When I read the first Harry Potter book, it struck me as reminiscent of the first Paddington Bear book, albeit without the whimsy, the characterisation, the jokes, the sense of place and time, an involvement in the back-story, the effortless use of the English language, the superb illustrations and the marmalade sandwiches. I'm sorry, but magic jelly beans just don't cut it for me. In addition, I found the silly puzzle-solving "denouement" at the end an utter disappointment. At least the Paddington stories had a decent framework and a satisfactory solution in each case. Paddington books are deficient in at least one sense, however: they weigh in at around 150 pages, rather than 500 and (grotesquely) upwards.

My friend (from Primary school: he's now a lecturer in Philosophy) David, who has read HP to his daughter, points out that the author is clearly desperate to avoid the classic "he said, she said" trap. Unfortunately, she does so by injecting so many synonyms, alternate phraseology and general gibberish that the end result has no flow whatsoever. Matt is quite right to point out that you have to read ahead for a few sentences in order to paraphrase. What sort of a children's book is that, pray?

Oh, and the second one is very, very much "Children of Dune." After that I retired, weeping pus.

For reading to kids, I would far prefer Lemony Snickett, which is actually enjoyable for the reader. This seems important to me. I quite like doing the voices in the Narnia books, and I'd love to convince modern children that Alan Garner books are worth reading ... but a lot of the stuff that I grew up with sounds terribly verbose these days. I'd recommend most classic SciFi for plot and general lack of pretentiousness.

On the other hand, the last book I read to a twelve year old was "Zombie Butts From Uranus," so I'm sure I can sink to even lower depths than Geoff...

Re: Harry - not all bad

[(Anonymous)]

I read the first three Harry Potter books to number 2 and number 3 sons (simultaneously, thank God) and it was no great hardship. The writing is not particularly good, but the ideas appeal to the age group the books are aimed at. Quite what adults are doing reading them, I don't know. Didn't they cover all this nonsense in the fantasy role playing heyday? Oh no, hang on, not everyone spent hundreds of hours a year slaying imaginary trolls in their youth like I did, did they?

I agree with Matt that the books became about 200 pages too long from about the third book onwards, but who is going to have the chutzpah to edit JK Rowling?

I really enjoyed Pullman's "His Dark Materials". I bought it for Mrs. Fiendish, who quickly discarded it as the central character was a pre-pubescent female and therefore not someone she could empathise with. Basically, if the book does not involve a quest, a mysterious good wizard, a supremely evil wizard, a rag-bag collection of different racial types (gnomes, centaurs, that kind of stuff) then Mrs. Fiendish won't enjoy it. As a fan of private eye fiction I am hardly in a position to criticise her for essentially reading the same book over and over again, but unlike her, I don't keep my books with a view to re-reading them in future years (well, except for my Hammett books, which I like to revist every 5 years or so).

Anyway, I enjoyed the series, even the slightly convoluted "death of God" ending. It seems that Pullman's attitude towards gods and religions are similar to mine own.

All my lads are now too old to be read to. Number 3 son did show encouraging signs of reading for pleasure but that was before the days of World of Warcraft. His favourite was the Edge Chronicles (Sky Pirates) series, and I enjoyed these too. Although they are light, they are not too "black & white", and they occasionally betray Gormenghast like influences; I think Peake would have approved of the floating city of Sanctaphrax, a city built on floating rock and which therefore has to be tethered by a giant chain to the ground to prevent it floating off into the stratosphere.

Hmmm, actually, I miss not reading to number 3 son as I no longer have an excuse for reading ripping yarns such as these. I can only hope that number 3 son, at least, will return to reading for pleasure when he starts commuting.

Of course, number one son reads for pleasure also but in his case the only book he has ever read that wasn't a set book in his English studies is the Argos catalogue, and that's a very different sort of "reading" for pleasure.


John H.

Re: Harry - not all bad

[peterbirks.livejournal.com]

One of the guys at work has three children, one of whom is a WoW fanatic. The son was playing away, chatting to another WoW, who started talking about how much time it took up, and how did Samuel find the time to play WoW, what with all the other things that impinged on life like work, the wife, DIY, etc.

"I'm ten", Sam replied.

PJ