I saw a full page ad today that told me Dan Brown’s new book Inferno is out today. I also happened across this article in The Telegraph via the Passive Guy warning me not to make fun of the Renowned Dan Brown. Humorous as that article was, I wouldn’t do that. I enjoyed Dan Brown’s books.
Well, the ones I remember.
The Da Vinci Code was great but I still think there was a point people missed which was that the whole purpose of the trail-following caper was to reunite Robert Langdon with his Grandmother. Maybe it’s just me.
I read Angels and Demons immediately after and ranked that as a better story simply because it was written first and had some very similar ideas as the Da Vinci Code, exposing the latter as a partial copy. A&D for originality.
Digital Fortress is a bit of a blur to be honest. And not because an old colleague lost my copy of DF so I can’t refer back to it. Ditto with Deception Point. The blur, not the loss.
One of the comments in PG’s post described The Lost Symbol as “bad”. I remember reading that but I don’t remember thinking it was bad. What was it about again? For the life of me I can’t recall. Did I actually read it? I certainly bought it. There’s the book right there on my shelf. It’s definitely been read by someone. It’s got the dirty marks of finger-flipping on the edges of its pages. I must have read it. No one else in the family reads Dan Brown. Hmm.
I remember hearing this on the radio when I was a young tacker and loved it. Back then it was the rolling rhythm that sucked me in but later I began to appreciate the lyrics. Come on, what red blooded boy doesn’t like the imagery of a hot girl? Often exaggerated imagery projected by an over-excited mate describing a girl he can’t have but wishes he could.
Such imagery is created with perfectly placed, tight rhyming syllables found in Oh Carol, by Smokie (co-written by Australian songwriter Mike Chapman), from the 1978 The Montreux Album.
The guy makes Carol sound pretty damn desirable if you ask me!
Well, I was out cruisin’, gettin’ late
And I was losin’ when I saw you walkin’ my way
So nonchalant I bet you get what you want
But so do I and I ain’t losing’ today
Well your hips were swinging
And your jeans were clinging
You were driving me out of my mind
On a hot afternoon when there’s nothin’ to do
You’re not the sort of thing a fellow should find
So I pulled on over, you tossed your hair off your shoulder
As you turned and looked my way
Oh you would have died or you’d have skinned me alive
If I’d said what I wanted to say
So, being polite, said “What you doin’ tonight?”
You said “Just so happens I’m free.”
You got all the right curves and all the right words
And that’s alright by me.
Oh, Carol, you got me eatin’ my heart away
You got me countin’ my nights and days
Oh, I’m floating on the Milky Way
Oh, Carol, nobody’s done it before
Oh, baby, you’ve opened the door
Oh, Carol, you can do it some more
Well, if you’re ready for this
When we started to kiss
She said “Hold on a minute or two.”
Well, nat’rally I knew it couldn’t be me
I said “Oh, baby, what’s troublin’ you?”
She said “I’m not sixteen, if you know what I mean.”
So we sat and talked for a while
And when we finally kissed, you know she didn’t resist
And I must say she did it with style
Oh, Carol, you got me eatin’ my heart away
You got me countin’ my nights and days
Oh, I’m floating on the Milky Way
Oh, Carol, nobody’s done it before
Oh, baby, you’ve opened the door
Oh, Carol, you can do it some more
All right!
Well, I was out cruisin’, gettin’ late
And I was losin’ when I saw you walkin’ my way
So nonchalant I bet you get what you want
But so do I and I ain’t losing’ today
Oh, Carol, you got me eatin’ my heart away
You got me countin’ my nights and days
Oh, I’m floating on the Milky Way
Oh, Carol, nobody’s done it before
Oh, baby, you’ve opened the door
Oh, Carol, you can do it some more
Oh, Carol, you got me eatin’ my heart away
You got me countin’ my nights and days
Oh, I’m floating on the Milky Way
Oh, Carol, nobody’s done it before
Oh, baby, you’ve opened the door
Oh, Carol, you can do it some more
Oh, Carol, baby, you can do it some more
Oh, Carol, baby, you can do it some more
Surfin’ USA by the Beach Boys (music by Chuck Berry), isn’t this the best surfing song? The Wilson brothers were said to have liked the Chuck Berry song Sweet Little Sixteen so much they thought it’d be a great idea to put some surfing lyrics to the music. That led to listing all the popular surfing locations in America, throw in a simple but clever little rhyming story about having no excuses for not surfing if there was an ocean nearby, and the rest is this very catchy song.
But that’s not the best part. Despite being a surfing song featuring American surf beaches, they felt the need to drop in a location from another great surfing country. 4th line, second verse. Australia’s Narrabeen! Whoo-hoo!
It’s not often the Yanks acknowledge Australia so when they do we all whoop and cheer. Well, not really. Only down side is that Narrabeen is in Sydney. Brian and Co. probably had trouble getting Victoria’s Bells Beach to fit nicely. Yes, that’d be the reason.
Still gotta love it!
If everybody had an ocean
Across the U.S.A.
Then everybody’d be surfin’
Like californ-I-A
You’d see ‘em wearin’ their baggies
Huarachi sandals, too
A bushy bushy blonde hairdo
Surfin’ U.S.A.
You’d catch ‘em surfin at Del Mar (Inside, outside, U.S.A.)
Ventura County line
Santa Cruz and Tressels,
Australia’s Narrabeen,
All over Manhattan,
And down Doheny way
Everybody’s gone surfin’
Surfin U.S.A.
We’ll all be plannin’ out a route
We’re gonna take real soon
We’re waxin’ down our surfboards
We can’t wait for June
We’ll all be gone for the summer
Were on safari to stay
Tell the teacher we’re surfin’
Surfin’ U.S.A.
At Haggerty’s and Swami’s
Pacific Palisades
San Onofre and Sunset
Redondo Beach, L.A.
All over La Jolla
At Waiamea Bay
Three years back I bought a Nokia E71 phone because I couldn’t be bothered researching phones, didn’t want an iPhone and several colleagues had an E71 and liked it. I know it was already old at the time but I eventually got one anyway. But that wasn’t my regret.
Not mine. Someone else’s.
I quickly discovered that the equaliser didn’t work with the headphone plugged in. That was pretty crap, I thought. Maps were okay but not spectacular. Even though we did find them useful navigating Tasmania in December 2010. Web browsing was quite average on the smallish screen but I could put up with that. Besides that, I liked the phone.
Maybe a software update would fix some of these little short comings. I’ll do it one day…
Not long after, I heard that Nokia were going to provide all their Map products free of charge to selected mobiles, not including the E71. Bummer. Ah well, the maps I’ve got are okay…
Then apparently after some heated backlash from some very vocal E71 fans worldwide, Nokia decided to provide this for the E71 as well. Cool! I better update soon…
A couple of years ago my mobile service provider sent me an urgent SMS saying that after testing their network upgrades (presumably for 4G), my phone might behave strangely and freeze and crash if I don’t update the software on it. Yeah, one day I’ll get around to it…
Then late last year the WordPress login screen stopped working on the web browser. It would bring up a blank page with “fastinnerhtml” in the top left corner. I must update the phone one day…
The battery’s been dying too. Having to charging it more than once a day was the trigger. I bought a new battery, then today I upgraded the phone. Finally. The new Ovi Maps are a vast improvement on the old map app. I downloaded the voice direction and I’m going to use it tonight to find a party my daughter and her friend attended and bring them home.
The equaliser works with headphones so I can get into the bass properly now instead of listening to the tinny crap with too much mid-range and and no thump.
So my regret in this case was not updating the phone’s software when I should have. Waiting literally years to do it. Slack and lazy. I hang my head in shame.
One thing wasn’t fixed, however. I still can’t log into WordPress. Same old problem. I think I should just get a new phone…
I came across this book thanks to Richard’s promotion via Twitter and his blog. The power of social media is a win for indie authors!
I have read a lot of crime thrillers but I enjoyed it. On with the review which is up on Amazon, too.
* * *
Grind His Bones by Richard Newell Smith is an action packed crime thriller featuring lawyer Jack Scully. While defending a woman accused of attempting to murder her husband, Scully finds himself defending his penniless cousin who is accused of murdering several young women. Having serious doubts about his cousin’s ability to commit the murders, Jack begins to find holes in the evidence presented against him. With the help of his medical examiner girlfriend, he embarks on a frantic race to clear his client’s name and find the real murderer and his financier. But are they too late?
This was a very well constructed story with enough changes of pace in all the right places. There were some great characters whose morals really were toward the extreme low end of the spectrum and despite leading me to wonder on a few occasions, “why would they do that?”, they provided much twisted and morbid colour. Interesting characters include a psychopathic father and son, a sexy high class prostitute and a mother who couldn’t care less about her no-hoper of a son. An excellent mix.
Looking past the very few glaring editing flaws, this is well worth a read. If you enjoy crime fiction, if you enjoy fast paced thrillers and warped minds performing despicable acts, I think you will thoroughly enjoy Grind His Bones.
From the 1987 Album , The Joshua Tree, easily their best album in my opinion, the final track, Mothers of the Disappeared, has to be one of the saddest songs ever written. Argue with me if you like. I’ll just nod and say “yeah, probably” but I really won’t care.
The title and the soft droning music invoke a desperate sadness that even an emotionally inert blockhead like me can’t fail to pick up. On first hearing the lyrics I figured it was about soldiers lost at war described from their mothers’ point of view.
The first two lines alluded to this – “Cut down, taken from us”. The second verse I thought was about the reminders of lost children mothers would see everywhere, especially of their earlier years. The third verse suggests soldiers captured by the enemy and tortured. I imagine at night after the distractions of a busy day, when a mother goes to bed, would be a time the loss of a child would come to the forefront of her mind – if it isn’t there already. Verse 4 brought up images of a prisoners of war in a concentration camp.
Midnight, our sons and daughters
Cut down, taken from us
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
In the wind we hear their laughter
In the rain we see their tears
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
Night hangs like a prisoner
Stretched over black and blue
Hear their heartbeat
We hear their heartbeat
In the trees our sons stand naked
Through the walls our daughters cry
See their tears in the rainfall
But it didn’t really fit. Not snugly, anyway, so after a small amount of research I found I had it all wrong. It was really about the children who had been “disappeared” by the dictatorships of Argentina and Chile in the 1980′s. Even worse than losing a child to war would be trying to deal with not knowing where your dictatorship-government has taken your children, what happened to them and what horrors they went through in the process. This song is permanently etched into my psyche. Good job, Bono.
The unofficial video of Mothers of the Disappeared from the The Joshua Trip The Movie:
Okay, long story short. A small percentage of computer users run Ubuntu Linux instead of Window or Mac. An even smaller percentage run 64 bit versions. But I guess many of them want to use 32 bit apps like LibreOffice (many) and Scrivener (fewer).
The 64 bit Ubuntu 12.10 apparently doesn’t have 32 bit support out of the box. I’d bet 13.04 doesn’t either. Maybe some upgrade will give it to you but I haven’t tried yet. This is my experimental system I’m talking about here. So when you remove LibreOffice 3.6 that comes with it and install LibreOffice 4.0.x, it won’t run. Same with Scrivener and probably any other 32 bit apps.
You have to explicitly install the 32 libs to make it work. Who knew? (Maybe the non-lazy people who RTFM – I just didn’t look hard enough!). To get the 32 bit libraries, try this:
sudo apt-get install ia32-libs
It will download couple 100 MBs but it worked for me. Good Luck! Here’s the source of that little gem of info:
Alternatively, if you can get the 64 bit versions of the apps, do so. LibreOffice is available in 64 bit but I don’t think Scrivener is. The only reason I put a 32 bit LibreOffice on a 64 bit Linux was because my other Ubuntu is 32 bit and I CBF downloading another installer.
Sanitised Glossary (for those not in the industry and are curious):
CBF – A highly technical term that means Can’t (or Couldn’t) Be Bothered.
Everyone slags off our train system. Even when it isn’t too bad. A given train might be cancelled 1 out of 10 days and you’ll still here “F—ing trains! They’re ALWAYS cancelled, ALWAYS late. Can’t they get anything right?…” and on and on it goes.
It’s obvious that Melbourne’s train operator probably gets less respect that it deserves. And it certainly deserves less than its predecessor, Connex Trains. Largely the same staff with a different head.
Ironically I couldn’t find a photo of a Metro Train with “Not In Service” on the front. This is one from the previous incarnation of the company, Connex.
Why? Because of money. Their desire for money are painfully obvious now. Think of any company that provides good service. The service comes first. And you’re happy to pay for it.
Not Metro Trains. Since taking over from Connex, they stripped away any façade that suggested a respectable service provider.
For as long as I can remember when I boarded a train, I was a passenger. The train company provided me, the passenger, with a service. They took me from A to B in a reasonable time. Not any more.
According to Metro Trains we’ve all been demoted to Customer. All the online service updates, PA announcements, everything, refer to us as customers. A source of money, nothing more. I can feel their disdain as they look down their nose at me when I get on and off their trains, as if they are only letting me travel because they have to and not because they are there to provide the service.
Very disrespectful.
Metro Trains pays fines to the state government if their performance targets are not met. Too many late and cancelled trains in a month and the Government has their hand out for a penalty. How do Metro Train handle this? They cheat the system. Apparently legally.
At the last minute, often after a train has begun its run, they will change a stopping-all-stations train to run express some of the way so it will reach the destination on time. Or they will stop and turn it around before the end of the line so the return trip isn’t late as well. Never mind the passengers, sorry, customers, who wanted to get off at the stations it missed.
Again, very disrespectful.
So, Metro Trains, you have little respect and you wonder why people, sorry, customers, fare-evade. it’s of your own doing. Treat your customers – no, damn it, passengers – a little better and you might get some more respect and maybe, just maybe, fare evasion might actually go down. Just a thought.
No, the movie of Imminent Danger by Michelle Proulx has not yet been produced but if it was to be shot in the near future here is who I’d like to see become involved:
This is what to look for in real and online book stores everywhere. Clicking the image will take you to the Amazon page.
Eris Miller – Jennifer Lawrence (quickly, while she can still pull off 17!)
Miguri – Andy Serkis (Motion capture) because he does it so well.
Varrin – One of those Hemsworth boys because they’re Aussie and apparently easy on the female eye.
Director: J J Abrams because he currently owns this genre.
Producer: Steven Speilberg, of course!
Special FX: The Mythbusters Boys because they rock!
Oh by the way, I wrote up a review on Amazon. Check it out. To save you a click here it is:
Imminent Danger (And How to Fly Straight Into It) by Michelle Proulx, is a fun young-adult sci-fi adventure featuring the feisty 17 year old student Eris Miller who is abducted from her university campus by a scaly blue alien. After being imprisoned she must fight for her survival after being sold as a slave, used as a lab rat, pursued by the Galactic Government as a criminal with her furry little alien friend, all while being distracted by a certain attractive male humanoid, the subject of her confused feelings.
Ms Proulx does a great job drawing in the reader. While there are few direct comedic episodes, there is an overall air of fun amongst the perilous and hair-raising situations Eris encounters frequently throughout the story, some of her own doing. Despite bordering on the unbelievable at times, Proulx manages to create a very rich and entertaining storyline with vivid characters and a menagerie of fascinating aliens. Quite frankly I’m amazed Eris is still alive!
At the price of $2.99 I paid at Amazon, Imminent Danger was well worth it. A great read. It had me wanting to read it when I don’t usually read. I can’t wait for the sequel.
April 25 is the day Australia and New Zealand pause to remember the brave diggers, the men and women who sacrificed all on that fateful day in 1915 when they came ashore at Gallipoli. It was the wrong landing point and many, many brave soldiers lost their lives.
