Rambles of a Writer

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible! The Dalai Lama

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Bye-bye tumblr

Hear ye, hear ye! This blog has moved from tumblr to wordpress.

I simply got fed up with the irritating mysteries of the interface. I have numerous posts which supposedly have comments but which I can't access. I supposedly have a message but when I click on it there's nothing there. I've contacted tumblr support - I think it was some time just after the Boer War - and was told how much they appreciated my support and feedback and they would deal with it very soon. And I was given a very impressive Ticket Number. I asked them how their engineers were getting along in early September, and was given an even more impressive Ticket Number and was told that their engineers were aware of the issue and would deal with it very soon.

Well, the mounting anticipation and excitement has proved too much for my constitution, and I've now packed my bags and moved wordpress. Same blog name:

http://ramblesofawriter.wordpress.com/

All welcome for a blog-warming!

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Mobile Phones...

...are useful devices because they enable people to communicate over long distances WITHOUT HAVING TO SHOUT.

Pass it on.

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More Biscuits

A complaint has flooded in regarding the Most Versatile Biscuit award and the omission of the ever-popular Custard Cream. You can dunk it, eat it as it is, prize it apart and lick or nibble the cream, and probably do a lot of other things with it too.

It will be duly considered the next time the red carpet is rolled out.

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Dangling Modifiers

I am re-reading my well-thumbed copy of Bill Bryson's Troublesome Words, and I couldn't help chuckling at this example of what he calls a dangling modifier: "Although sixty-one years old when he wore the original suit, his waist was only thirty-five."

My favourite example of how words can have an unintended, although it's not a dangling modifier, was something I spotted in the local press years ago: "Police hold man over fire".

I'm sure he soon confessed...

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Martyn's 27th Annual Biscuit Awards

Most Promising Newcomer - CADBURY'S CARAMEL BISCUITS. A little contrived, but combining a biscuit with a much-loved chocolate bar.

Best Dunker - The GINGER BISCUIT in its many guises and names. Perfect as a treat with a nice cuppa.

Best Stand-Alone Eater: THE CHOCOLATE DIGESTIVE. Can be dunked, but with sometimes melty, messy consequences.

Most Versatile: THE CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE. Hard to say whether it's better dunked or as it is - but always very more-ish.

Most Boring: THE RICH TEA BISCUIT. Slightly preferable to cardboard.

  The "Whatever Happened To?" Award: THE HOBNOB in its various guises. Innovative in its day, but messy and prone to break the teeth of the unwary.

Most Addictive: CRINKLE CRUNCHES. Once you've had one, the whole packet has to go.

Lifetime Achievement Award: (i.e. for a biscuit which you would only choose if there were no others left or as a gift for others, yet which has managed to hang around forever) THE NICE BISCUIT.

That concludes the Annual Biscuit Awards. All decisions are final and the judges are unable to enter into any discussions as to the merits of the various winners, other than with those who have paid to have an entrant mentioned.

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At last!

My forthcoming international best seller, a non-fiction book about England's last duel has a title!

It was initially to be simply called The Last Duel, which I much preferred, but I had already had a children's version published with that title and the publishers of that didn't want two books of the same title on the market even though one was for adults, so we had to come up with something else.

It seemed that every time the publishers came up with something, I didn't like it (and I can be very stubborn!) and they didn't much like my offerings. Anyway, we eventually settled on something we both liked:

A Matter of Honour - The Story of England's Last Duel

Watch the skies - it's out in November!

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It made me laugh...

In Writing Magazine there is an article on the latest Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing. This won the second prize - but in my opinion this one, which won 2nd prize, was better and I keep chuckling to myself whenever I think of it. (To the uninitiated, Bulwer-Lytton was unwittingly bad, but the entries for the prize are deliberately bad!)

"As I stood among the ransacked ruins that had been my home, surveying the aftermath of the senseless horrors and atrocities that he been perpetrated on my family and everything I hold dear, I swore to myself that no matter where I go, no matter what I had to do or endure, I would find the man who did this...and when I did, when I did, oh, there would be words."

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Why...

when you buy any sort of packet wrapped in cellophane with one of those thin red strips around it which is supposed to help you open it, you can never get hold of the end of the red strip, or the end of it it breaks off - and you end up having to hack the thing open with a knife or pair of scissors?

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Annie Lily

I tried to reblog the above link from a friend of mine about earliest memories of death, but the technological challenge defeated me. But it reminded me that the first time anyone died that I was old enough to know about came very early in my life when my paternal grandmother died. My maternal grandmother also died when I was very young but I think I was even younger and I don't recall it. She also lived further away and I had much less contact with her.

My memories of Annie Lilly Bradley are very fond ones and among the earliest of my whole life. I can recall lying on their settee and being falling to sleep as she watched over me and sang a lullaby - I couldn't have been more then two-years-old. My only other real mental image is of her pottering in from the kitchen with a jar of home-made jam for tea, made from the fruit my grandad grew in his garden.

I can also remember being taken by my dad to visit my grandad just after Annie died, and not really taking in what it was all about but seeing the tears in his eyes. They had been together since for about 60 years.

Whenever I see photographs of her I get the feeling that she is still watching over me like that day on the settee...

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Annie Lily Bradley c1908

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Why...

does the little bleep that tells you the battery in the smoke alarm needs changing always start in the middle of the night????

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9/11

Following on from my previous blog about Robert Kennedy, I happened upon a really well-written book about 9/11 and I've been whizzing through it. When I first heard the conspiracy theories about this I thought they were at best silly and at worst offensive. But I kept picking up intriguing snippets which made me want to explore it further, and I've now read quite a bit about it. After reading "9.11 The New Evidence" by Ian Henshall, I'm more convinced that ever that there are many important things about the event that have been hidden, and that there are too many fishy "coincidences" for the official story to be true.

It is a long and complex story and I won't attempt to do it justice, but among other points there is the fact that there was a hijack exercise being carried out on the same day; that the alleged pilots (who with one exception were supposedly never filmed by airport CCTV at any point when boarding the craft) simply would not have been capable of flying large passenger jets at 500mph into specific targets; and that all three towers (including, and especially the little-known WT7 tower) collapsed perfectly and uniformly in on themselves - all of which were built to withstand multiple aircraft strikes and major fires.

What really happened and why is very puzzling. To me, the theory that best fits most of the available information is that people in power wanted a major terrorist incident in order to justify an attack on Iraq and so turned a blind eye to a something about which they had advance knowledge - BUT that they expected a conventional hijacking which they felt they could deal with with little or no loss of life. Quite who turned it into such mass slaughter and why I don't know - but I'm sure it wasn't a group of amateurs, at least one of whom made his teacher so nervous that he refused to be piloted by him in a light aircraft any further.

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Weird!

I always try to be authentic with my locations when I'm writing, and today I was looking up Russell Square in London, where one of my characters lives, on Google Maps. I was just about finished when I noticed something odd on the map. At first I thought it was a glitch, but I tried zooming in and out and it was still there - a passenger plane apparently parked in the Square!

I finally twigged that the nearness to the ground was an optical illusion and that the plane just happened to be caught by the satellite as it was flying over London (still must have been pretty low though).

That made me look at Heathrow on Google Maps to see if I could catch any more, but I only came across a couple of shadows of planes.

The actual link to the map is:  http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=&q=russell+street+bloomsbury&sourceid=navclient-ff&rlz=1B3GGGL_en-GBGB356GB356&ie=UTF-8

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Robert Kennedy

Quite by chance, I've recently seen two similar documentaries about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, who was shot in 1968 - five years after his brother's death and two months after the shooting of Martin Luther King.

It amazes me that an open country with a free press like America still, after all these years, cannot admit to itself that there was more to all three murders than appeared in the official accounts. All three very efficient and well planned hits were supposed to have been carried out by lone nutcases. In Kennedy's case, he was shot by a man with a gun which held eight bullets. The autopsy showed that the fatal shots were from just an inch or two, but the man who was leading Kennedy through the room - actually holding his arm - has said that the shooter never got anywhere closer than one or two feet. Audio evidence indicates more than eight shots - as many as thirteen. The trajectory of some of the bullets indicate that they could not have been fired by the arrested man. Visual evidence shows two bullet holes in a door which aren't accounted for in the official account. A detective has stated that he saw bullets lodged inside the holes. The whole door was taken away by the police and destroyed a few weeks later. Several witnesses saw a guard standing next to Kennedy draw his gun and start shooting during the confusion.

In all three cases it's obvious to me that one or more shady organisations acted as agent provocateurs, facilitating attempted assassinations by deranged amateurs in order to allow their own more professional men to make the kill during the confusion, and to provide obvious scapegoats in order to allow the real killer to go free.

You don't need to be a conspiracy theorist to question not just the dubious official version of this and the other killings, but also highly questionable coincidence of three lone nutters bumping off America's leading public figures in such a short timespan without one of them coming even close to making a mess of it, and either being intercepted or botching the assassination.