“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
Wikipedia claims Decca choose The Tremeloes over the Beatles at that time.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
Wikipedia claims Decca choose The Tremeloes over the Beatles at that time.
The who?
Some shitty band from Liverpool. Had a few hits in the 60s and then broke up. One of them went onto bigger and better things, doing the voices for Thomas the Tank Engine.
That must have scared the Bee Gees as out of the competition.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
We've got a lot of post Xmas socialising lined up, especially now that most of our social circle has had Omicron. I wouldn't be surprised if 30-40% of 20-40 year olds in London have just had or currently have it. We've got friends over tomorrow, firing up my new outdoor pizza oven for the first time, Wednesday we've got dinner at Ivy Asia with some of my ex colleagues that we're really good friends with, Friday we're going for a scummy night in the Black Heart in Camden with the same people as tomorrow, Saturday brunch at Lantana and back out in the evening in Camden.
Feel like we're doing our bit for London's economy!
That was the feeling I got today. A lot of people thinking: Phew, Christmas is over, we stayed at home for a week beforehand to keep the lurgy away from granny, now let's have fun (and without the intense family pressure of Xmas itself). And yet the grannies were out, in droves, as well
Plus a LOT of young people who have clearly had Omicron and now, quite frankly, don't give a fuck. And nor should they. Go forth and multiply!
Perhaps January won't be quite the nightmare for hospitality that has been feared? We shall see
One of the reasons there wont be a lockdown announced next week after some kind of crisis COBRA meeting with Gove drooling and wailing about death is that no one will bloody do it.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
If my circle of leftie friends is anything to go by, the mood has shifted sharply against restrictions. We partied hard over Christmas and most (not quite all in the group yet) now fear restrictions far more than the virus.
The NS piece you posted earlier was excellent and reflects the mood in my group.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
It’s a fascinating melange of loads of stuff that forteans etc will have devoured. Holy grail, knights Templar, conspiracy, Roslyn chapel and on and on. But parcelled up and sold to a mass audience who don’t read endless recycled books about why Jesus is buried at Glastonbury or whatever.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
The way the world works: ludicrous plotting == squillions in earnings.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
First, thanks much to Mr. Gower for tackling this difficult subject, and providing so much information. (I have long thought that, whoever said that "demography is destiny" was right, so I believe there is no more important subject.)
Whenever I go by Tot Lot Park, I see several mothers jointly watching a number of children and I admire the genius who thought this up. (A few times I have stopped to talk to the mothers -- who agree with me on the genius. Perhaps the planner was just smart enough to listen to some young mothers.)
And, finally, a story: More than a decade ago, I read an article in the Washington Post describing how a single mother in DC, with two boys, decided to move them somewhere they would not be attempted by the gangs. She chose a town in Montana and visited there to check it out. It passed her inspection, but she did have a little bump near the end of her visit. She was in a local restaurant, and thought the people there were talking about her. Despite that, she decided to move there anyway.
After she had gotten settled and gotten to know some of the people, she asked them about the restaurant scene, and learned that they had been engaging in one of a small town's favorite activity. There was a single black guy living in the town -- and they were trying to decide whether they should call him, so he could come in and meet this single lady.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
We've got a lot of post Xmas socialising lined up, especially now that most of our social circle has had Omicron. I wouldn't be surprised if 30-40% of 20-40 year olds in London have just had or currently have it. We've got friends over tomorrow, firing up my new outdoor pizza oven for the first time, Wednesday we've got dinner at Ivy Asia with some of my ex colleagues that we're really good friends with, Friday we're going for a scummy night in the Black Heart in Camden with the same people as tomorrow, Saturday brunch at Lantana and back out in the evening in Camden.
Feel like we're doing our bit for London's economy!
That was the feeling I got today. A lot of people thinking: Phew, Christmas is over, we stayed at home for a week beforehand to keep the lurgy away from granny, now let's have fun (and without the intense family pressure of Xmas itself). And yet the grannies were out, in droves, as well
Plus a LOT of young people who have clearly had Omicron and now, quite frankly, don't give a fuck. And nor should they. Go forth and multiply!
Perhaps January won't be quite the nightmare for hospitality that has been feared? We shall see
One of the reasons there wont be a lockdown announced next week after some kind of crisis COBRA meeting with Gove drooling and wailing about death is that no one will bloody do it.
The other reason is that it's too late.
Hasn't stopped them introducing new, highly damaging and completely pointless restrictions in schools.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
Even if one accepts the premise that they were crap (bear with) the fact is that aspiring musicians and bands all over the world in mid 60s heard their records and tried to do something either similar or as an artistic response.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
First, thanks much to Mr. Gower for tackling this difficult subject, and providing so much information. (I have long thought that, whoever said that "demography is destiny" was right, so I believe there is no more important subject.)
Whenever I go by Tot Lot Park, I see several mothers jointly watching a number of children and I admire the genius who thought this up. (A few times I have stopped to talk to the mothers -- who agree with me on the genius. Perhaps the planner was just smart enough to listen to some young mothers.)
And, finally, a story: More than a decade ago, I read an article in the Washington Post describing how a single mother in DC, with two boys, decided to move them somewhere they would not be attempted by the gangs. She chose a town in Montana and visited there to check it out. It passed her inspection, but she did have a little bump near the end of her visit. She was in a local restaurant, and thought the people there were talking about her. Despite that, she decided to move there anyway.
After she had gotten settled and gotten to know some of the people, she asked them about the restaurant scene, and learned that they had been engaging in one of a small town's favorite activity. There was a single black guy living in the town -- and they were trying to decide whether they should call him, so he could come in and meet this single lady.
Do you mean, there was a single (one) black guy, or there was a black guy who happened to be single?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Just having a look through the hospitalisation data and comparing it to last year. At the same point last year in hospital numbers rose from 7k to 11k in 9 days, this time it's gone from 7k to 13k in 9 days. That seems bad yet looking at the mechanical ventilation stats last time it went from about 1500 to just around 2200 over the same exact period, so no lag at all in that rise, this time it's not really moved at all, staying at around 750-780.
This is real time evidence that Omicron severity in a vaccinated population is significantly lower than Alpha was last year in an unvaccinated population (which seems obvious, but I've seen plenty of blue tick wankers still try and cast doubt on it). The other indication (though not hard evidence, we'll get that on Thursday) is that we're seeing a very high proportion of incidental hospital admissions, that is people who require treatment but also test positive. We could be well over 50% incidental admissions at this rate, in fact if we include non-overnight stays it may even be over 70%.
Is it possible to get a total "in hospital" figure that we can compare to 2019? Start to look at hospital caseload like we do excess deaths.
Yes, NHS England has got overall occupancy and overall admissions stats released weekly, again this is one of the series that isn't flashing red like it was last year and why NHS people are much more relaxed about this than the blue tick losers and media types pushing for lockdown.
I find the ‘incidental’ admissions thing utterly baffling.
These are people who acquired a covid infection while in hospital, right? Or who went into hospital for something other than covid and who subsequently failed a covid test while in hospital?
It is not clear to me why these should be counted as covid hospitalisations at all, as by definition they haven’t been admitted to hospital because of covid.
Am I missing something here?
Do they have to be moved to covid wards or something?
These are people who are in hospital for non covid reasons, e.g. broken leg, get tested for covid and then have to be treated in a covid secure environment to ensure that they don't infect vulnerable uninfected patients.
This is adding huge strain to staff loads etc.
In addition it greatly adds to mortality. A fractured neck of femur with covid has a 38% chance of dying within 30 days, more than 4 times the controls.
Is that data from post-vaccines, or pre-vaccines? Is it controlled for vaccinated and unvaccinated?
If that data was pre vaccines then it may not be we relevant today.
First, thanks much to Mr. Gower for tackling this difficult subject, and providing so much information. (I have long thought that, whoever said that "demography is destiny" was right, so I believe there is no more important subject.)
Whenever I go by Tot Lot Park, I see several mothers jointly watching a number of children and I admire the genius who thought this up. (A few times I have stopped to talk to the mothers -- who agree with me on the genius. Perhaps the planner was just smart enough to listen to some young mothers.)
And, finally, a story: More than a decade ago, I read an article in the Washington Post describing how a single mother in DC, with two boys, decided to move them somewhere they would not be attempted by the gangs. She chose a town in Montana and visited there to check it out. It passed her inspection, but she did have a little bump near the end of her visit. She was in a local restaurant, and thought the people there were talking about her. Despite that, she decided to move there anyway.
After she had gotten settled and gotten to know some of the people, she asked them about the restaurant scene, and learned that they had been engaging in one of a small town's favorite activity. There was a single black guy living in the town -- and they were trying to decide whether they should call him, so he could come in and meet this single lady.
Sheldon Cooper had a terrible time in Bozeman, mind.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
If you want a wild and implausible conspiracy involving the Catholic Church and some rather strained theology, how about Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose?
It is at least well written by somebody very bright.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Try the Tom Knox stuff. Written by a certain Sean Thomas. Enjoyable reads.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Try the Tom Knox stuff. Written by a certain Sean Thomas. Enjoyable reads.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
Nah. That was Dylan. He opened the door.
Elvis! A person so famous he looks like a cartoon. Only about 8 people in modern history are like that.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Happiness is nowhere. Happiness is now here!
When do I get the cheque?
Not till you rise to the heights of
Michelle Ma belle Sont des mots qui vont Tres bien onsomble
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Try the Tom Knox stuff. Written by a certain Sean Thomas. Enjoyable reads.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Quite so. The other thing that gives the lie to this absurd notion is that the most dovish areas are Labour cities while judgemental curtain-twitchers generally reside in Tory market towns.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Try the Tom Knox stuff. Written by a certain Sean Thomas. Enjoyable reads.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
Just having a look through the hospitalisation data and comparing it to last year. At the same point last year in hospital numbers rose from 7k to 11k in 9 days, this time it's gone from 7k to 13k in 9 days. That seems bad yet looking at the mechanical ventilation stats last time it went from about 1500 to just around 2200 over the same exact period, so no lag at all in that rise, this time it's not really moved at all, staying at around 750-780.
This is real time evidence that Omicron severity in a vaccinated population is significantly lower than Alpha was last year in an unvaccinated population (which seems obvious, but I've seen plenty of blue tick wankers still try and cast doubt on it). The other indication (though not hard evidence, we'll get that on Thursday) is that we're seeing a very high proportion of incidental hospital admissions, that is people who require treatment but also test positive. We could be well over 50% incidental admissions at this rate, in fact if we include non-overnight stays it may even be over 70%.
Is it possible to get a total "in hospital" figure that we can compare to 2019? Start to look at hospital caseload like we do excess deaths.
Yes, NHS England has got overall occupancy and overall admissions stats released weekly, again this is one of the series that isn't flashing red like it was last year and why NHS people are much more relaxed about this than the blue tick losers and media types pushing for lockdown.
I find the ‘incidental’ admissions thing utterly baffling.
These are people who acquired a covid infection while in hospital, right? Or who went into hospital for something other than covid and who subsequently failed a covid test while in hospital?
It is not clear to me why these should be counted as covid hospitalisations at all, as by definition they haven’t been admitted to hospital because of covid.
Am I missing something here?
Do they have to be moved to covid wards or something?
These are people who are in hospital for non covid reasons, e.g. broken leg, get tested for covid and then have to be treated in a covid secure environment to ensure that they don't infect vulnerable uninfected patients.
This is adding huge strain to staff loads etc.
In addition it greatly adds to mortality. A fractured neck of femur with covid has a 38% chance of dying within 30 days, more than 4 times the controls.
Is that data from post-vaccines, or pre-vaccines? Is it controlled for vaccinated and unvaccinated?
If that data was pre vaccines then it may not be we relevant today.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
Where as a teacher am I supposed to find three hours?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
I've often wondered who writers go about this.
On the one hand I cannot imagine how any decent novel, let alone an intricate twisty thriller, can be accomplished without a detailed plot written out on advance.
Against this a lot of authors like to suggest they just write as it comes to them. Dickens was famously writing in instalments with no apparent master plan just a deadline to meet and a number of episodes to fulfill. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Charlotte Bronte had a plan when she started writing Jane Eyre - the book changes tone so dramatically after Lowood Hall.
If only we had an author on here who could enlighten us, eh?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
That always reminds me of what was on sale at Rosslyn Chapel in the field next to the car park, as I recall:
On the positive side the tourist burst at the chapel itself raised lots of bawbees for some very expensive and tricky restoration for an old building for which I have a very soft spot.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
the left have been thecdriving force behind lockdowns. Sure there are exceptions on the extreme left like piers corbyn but the owen jones type left have heavily driven lockdowns
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
the left have been thecdriving force behind lockdowns. Sure there are exceptions on the extreme left like piers corbyn but the owen jones type left have heavily driven lockdowns
Not exactly on the left, but I would suggest the virus might have been slightly more significant as 'the driving force' behind lockdowns.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
I've often wondered who writers go about this.
On the one hand I cannot imagine how any decent novel, let alone an intricate twisty thriller, can be accomplished without a detailed plot written out on advance.
Against this a lot of authors like to suggest they just write as it comes to them. Dickens was famously writing in instalments with no apparent master plan just a deadline to meet and a number of episodes to fulfill. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Charlotte Bronte had a plan when she started writing Jane Eyre - the book changes tone so dramatically after Lowood Hall.
If only we had an author on here who could enlighten us, eh?
I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Eyre right up until the ridiculousness of her becoming destitute and stumbling, by pure chance, on her cousins.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Yes, I read them when very young, and loved them. Which I find mildly incomprehensible now.
Potter's success was the richness of that world. Pure escapism.
I find it curious that my generation learnt (and shared) so much of what me know about friendship, courage and equality from those books, but now their author is now shunned by many of the same people.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
Even if one accepts the premise that they were crap (bear with) the fact is that aspiring musicians and bands all over the world in mid 60s heard their records and tried to do something either similar or as an artistic response.
Yeah, the way to determine how good music is, is by deciding how actually good it actually is, unless you think that the winner of the lottery is a really good lottery player. Most of the makers of the big time - dylan, Young, doors, lz, springsteen, hundreds of others - deserved to make it. The beatles = music for playgrounds. Music for people who don't like music. This just isn't something we are very good at as a country - LZ covered US music, the Stones benefited from being slightly less drippy than the Beatles.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
Nah. That was Dylan. He opened the door.
Elvis! A person so famous he looks like a cartoon. Only about 8 people in modern history are like that.
Elvis recorded black musicians' songs. And copied their showmanship. He did nothing new other than be white doing them. Sure he was iconic and the superstar but he was entirely derivative. Dylan was genuinely new. Not only did he record albums entirely of his own songs, virtually unheard of at the time, but he later melded the existent white and black folk traditions together with beat poetry and the newly invented Marshall amp, to make something entirely fresh. Nothing was like it before.
Just having a look through the hospitalisation data and comparing it to last year. At the same point last year in hospital numbers rose from 7k to 11k in 9 days, this time it's gone from 7k to 13k in 9 days. That seems bad yet looking at the mechanical ventilation stats last time it went from about 1500 to just around 2200 over the same exact period, so no lag at all in that rise, this time it's not really moved at all, staying at around 750-780.
This is real time evidence that Omicron severity in a vaccinated population is significantly lower than Alpha was last year in an unvaccinated population (which seems obvious, but I've seen plenty of blue tick wankers still try and cast doubt on it). The other indication (though not hard evidence, we'll get that on Thursday) is that we're seeing a very high proportion of incidental hospital admissions, that is people who require treatment but also test positive. We could be well over 50% incidental admissions at this rate, in fact if we include non-overnight stays it may even be over 70%.
Is it possible to get a total "in hospital" figure that we can compare to 2019? Start to look at hospital caseload like we do excess deaths.
Yes, NHS England has got overall occupancy and overall admissions stats released weekly, again this is one of the series that isn't flashing red like it was last year and why NHS people are much more relaxed about this than the blue tick losers and media types pushing for lockdown.
I find the ‘incidental’ admissions thing utterly baffling.
These are people who acquired a covid infection while in hospital, right? Or who went into hospital for something other than covid and who subsequently failed a covid test while in hospital?
It is not clear to me why these should be counted as covid hospitalisations at all, as by definition they haven’t been admitted to hospital because of covid.
Am I missing something here?
Do they have to be moved to covid wards or something?
These are people who are in hospital for non covid reasons, e.g. broken leg, get tested for covid and then have to be treated in a covid secure environment to ensure that they don't infect vulnerable uninfected patients.
This is adding huge strain to staff loads etc.
In addition it greatly adds to mortality. A fractured neck of femur with covid has a 38% chance of dying within 30 days, more than 4 times the controls.
Is that data from post-vaccines, or pre-vaccines? Is it controlled for vaccinated and unvaccinated?
If that data was pre vaccines then it may not be we relevant today.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
Where as a teacher am I supposed to find three hours?
Can’t you just get them to read a book in class? I’ve heard The Da Vinci code has its merits...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
I've often wondered who writers go about this.
On the one hand I cannot imagine how any decent novel, let alone an intricate twisty thriller, can be accomplished without a detailed plot written out on advance.
Against this a lot of authors like to suggest they just write as it comes to them. Dickens was famously writing in instalments with no apparent master plan just a deadline to meet and a number of episodes to fulfill. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Charlotte Bronte had a plan when she started writing Jane Eyre - the book changes tone so dramatically after Lowood Hall.
If only we had an author on here who could enlighten us, eh?
I thoroughly enjoyed Jane Eyre right up until the ridiculousness of her becoming destitute and stumbling, by pure chance, on her cousins.
Not the strongest element, I agree. I think it supports my point though - Bronte wasn't working to a plan. Still a stupendous novel though.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
On this logic, no one should be able to say that Vinnie Jones was a shit footballer because they couldn't play better. I thought Da Vinci code was a crap book, while acknowledging I probably couldn't do one better. But then I'm not an author.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
When people arrive at hospital for covid treatment, but don’t require ventilators, what treatment do they actually receive? What’s the prescription?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Yes, I read them when very young, and loved them. Which I find mildly incomprehensible now.
Potter's success was the richness of that world. Pure escapism.
I find it curious that my generation learnt (and shared) so much of what me know about friendship, courage and equality from those books, but now their author is now shunned by many of the same people.
Oddly enough I bought the very first book in hardback when it came out at the assistant's recommendation - ironically enough in the Edinburgh bookshop that used to be almost next to the Elephant House cafe where so much of it was apparently written. Hated it, something seemed deeply wrong to me as discussed here before, but I passed it to a friend for her daughter who absolutely loved it.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes I have. Wished I hadn't bothered. It's even worse than the Genesis Secret.
The San greal = sang real thing is the greatest bit of textual criticism in history, but it wasn't original.
Indeed. If you want that sort of mediaeval conspiracy theory stuff, read Foucault's Pendulum.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
Foucault's Pendulum is terrible, turgid crap compared to the Da Vinci Code, but with an air of pretentiousness that attracts middlebrow readers who are nervous of appearing plebeian in their tastes
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Any recommendations on good books in the same vein as the Da Vinci Code? I'm in the mood.
Try the Tom Knox stuff. Written by a certain Sean Thomas. Enjoyable reads.
Shall I compare thee to a Sony Walkman?
Good airport fiction.
Sounds like you got it taped.
Not sure much airport fiction has been sold in the last 2 years. There must be more lucrative markets for those stuck at home with no-one to play with.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
When people arrive at hospital for covid treatment, but don’t require ventilators, what treatment do they actually receive? What’s the prescription?
Oxygen, dexamethasone, remdesivir. Soon molnupiravir and paxlovid. There's a lot of non ventilator based treatments for COVID that will make a difference to survival rates as well as diminishing the chances of serious and life altering consequences of having severe symptoms for a prolonged period of time.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
So we now have something called "the mainstream left". Presumably that includes the Conservative MPs who supported coronavirus passports and every other piece of legislation enforcing restrictions.
To add to that we have "the public sector machine" - I presume you are referring to Councils who have to make the legislation work and the NHS who has to spend time and resources treating those who exercise their individual right not to get vaccinated and end up in hospital (for example). Like all reasonable employers, they are also trying to protect their employees from the excesses of those exercising their "freedom".
It seems to me there are plenty of voices now calling for no further restrictions but there is an understandable concern around the capacity of hospitals with reduced staff availability to deal with an increase in hospitalisations. That's the discussion to have - is there an argument for a temporary curtailing of large scale indoor social activity to prevent further hospitalisations?
First, thanks much to Mr. Gower for tackling this difficult subject, and providing so much information. (I have long thought that, whoever said that "demography is destiny" was right, so I believe there is no more important subject.)
Whenever I go by Tot Lot Park, I see several mothers jointly watching a number of children and I admire the genius who thought this up. (A few times I have stopped to talk to the mothers -- who agree with me on the genius. Perhaps the planner was just smart enough to listen to some young mothers.)
And, finally, a story: More than a decade ago, I read an article in the Washington Post describing how a single mother in DC, with two boys, decided to move them somewhere they would not be attempted by the gangs. She chose a town in Montana and visited there to check it out. It passed her inspection, but she did have a little bump near the end of her visit. She was in a local restaurant, and thought the people there were talking about her. Despite that, she decided to move there anyway.
After she had gotten settled and gotten to know some of the people, she asked them about the restaurant scene, and learned that they had been engaging in one of a small town's favorite activity. There was a single black guy living in the town -- and they were trying to decide whether they should call him, so he could come in and meet this single lady.
Interesting perspective Jim. What proportion of American children grow up within half a mile's walk of a facility like that would you say? I reckon probably about 70-80% of British children do. Certainly when deciding where to live to bring up kids the presence of a park like that was an important consideration!
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
the left have been thecdriving force behind lockdowns. Sure there are exceptions on the extreme left like piers corbyn but the owen jones type left have heavily driven lockdowns
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Very true DVC is the very definition of a page-turner. Very hard to achieve, I suspect.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
On this logic, no one should be able to say that Vinnie Jones was a shit footballer because they couldn't play better. I thought Da Vinci code was a crap book, while acknowledging I probably couldn't do one better. But then I'm not an author.
As Samuel Johnson said:
“You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
Choosing to go to bat for Marjorie Taylor Green out of all 435 members of the house of reps is not gonna be a good look for you Charles.
I’ve no idea who she is, and know nothing about her except that apparently space lasers are responsible for forest fires 😂
The principle remains is that all candidates for elections in a free country have an equal right to be heard. If they break the law prosecute then. But to prevent them using a major channel of political communication is to distort elections
You are doing the thing where you defend a general principle based on the newspaper headline of a specific case and everyone talks about the specific case that justifies the action whilst you are ignorant of the specifics.
Yes. I’m defending the principle of free elections. I don’t know who MTG is and don’t really give a shit.
This is not interfering with 'free elections'. The companies have rules - sensible rules, by the sound of it - and are hopefully applying those rules uniformly. If they applied them very unevenly you may have more of a point; but it's up to you to provide evidence of that in this discussion.
It is. Twitter is a key part of a former POTUS’s election technique. They have made the decision to ban him. How anyone can claim that is not going to impact on the election result I don’t know.
So, if it is going to impact, you are really comfortable with giving a private company that power?
Absolutely - as long as the rules are fairly implemented to all. If Trump did make Twitter a key part of his election technique, he should have looked at their rules and operated within them. If he got banned having broken those rules, then it's his own fault.
Those people who got censored or suspended for discussing lab leak as a hypothesis on Twitter and Facebook, for a year, what rule were they breaking?
Was it the rule that This Upsets China?
Or some other rule? Do tell
Can I have more details please?
Here. Tho quite why I have to spoon feed you this news is beyond me
"Facebook issued two statements in the past week relating to its treatment of “misinformation” — and they couldn’t have been more different.
The first was a single paragraph updating their policy on stories speculating that Covid-19 is a man-made virus — after almost every major media outlet, and yesterday even the British and American security services, finally confirmed that it is a feasible possibility.
“In light of ongoing investigations into the origin of COVID-19 and in consultation with public health experts,” a Facebook spokesman said, “we will no longer remove the claim that COVID-19 is man-made or manufactured from our apps.”"
Thanks, I'll have a look at it when I've put the little 'un to bed.
But a word to the wise; there is nothing wrong with asking for links, if someone apparently knows more on a subject than you do.
You sound a bit like a drunken man in a gutter: "I claim the world is run by a cartel of hungry mice." "Oh, that's interesting. Can I know more?" "NO! How dare you aske me for more information, you fetid bag of ball-cheese!"
Fair enough. I was feeling a bit feisty, apologies if I overdid it
I just get quite angry when people say Twitter and Facebook are judiciously "censoring misinformation about Covid" when for a year they were actively PURVEYING misinformation on the most fundamental level, by censoring info which embarrasses the Chinese government on the likely origins of Covid19. ie the lab in Wuhan
It is equivalent to a newspaper in the 1930s printing favourable crap about Hitler's racial policies. That kind of stuff can make a man a bit punchy
All this is a bit like monarchists complaining that they don't like Prince Andrew. The point about morachy is that you don't have any say in the head of state. The point about private enterprise is that they can do what they like within the law.
Is that problematic? Should they be constrained by rules of fairness and social conscience? Sure, as the left have said for many years. And hello to our new Corbynistas, Charles and Leon.
Excellent point. We have fervent divine rightists actually attacking the Duke fo York. I mean, he's 9th in line to the throne. If you can remove the 9th at a whim or by decision of Pmt, you can remove the 8th, and so on to HMtQ.
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
Historically, most monarchs were killed, imprisoned, tortured etc by devout monarchists.
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
Where as a teacher am I supposed to find three hours?
Can’t you just get them to read a book in class? I’ve heard The Da Vinci code has its merits...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
... in your humble opinion, which is clearly piss-poor.
Tra la, O bla di, oh michelle ma belle,let's write songs about class A drugs which are so twee and gutless they can be explained away as kindergarten singalongs.
Otherwise good point.
Between 1964 and 1969 the Beatles revolutionised popular music. There's never been such a rapid change in such a short space of time.
"The Beatles are twee and gutless"
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
I had you and your precursor down as quite intelligent until I read that.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Naah, because you need a critical mass before word of mouth takes off, and attaining critical mass without being properly published is I would have thought virtually impossible. Though I think The Martian may have managed it.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
When people arrive at hospital for covid treatment, but don’t require ventilators, what treatment do they actually receive? What’s the prescription?
Mostly oxygen, by nasal cannulae or CPAP, fluids, and other circulatory support, anti inflammatories, sometimes antibiotics if other infections, etc.
On Topic - thanks to TLG for his very informative and highly analytical (also visa versa) posts on the whys, whats and wherefores of Britain's recent population dynamics and future political & social implications.
Takes more than a quick skim to digest this one!
What I've gleaned so far, is a) decline in birthrates of very young women combined with rise among their older sisters (and aunts); and b) increase in births among higher socio-economic categories, matched by decrease farther down the ladder. Which (I think) is at least partially mirrored here in the US, esp a).
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
Where as a teacher am I supposed to find three hours?
Can’t you just get them to read a book in class? I’ve heard The Da Vinci code has its merits...
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
I won't ask why you were looking...
I found this. It appears they are nothing new. Wondering if Leon has tried camel shit as a material?
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
On this logic, no one should be able to say that Vinnie Jones was a shit footballer because they couldn't play better. I thought Da Vinci code was a crap book, while acknowledging I probably couldn't do one better. But then I'm not an author.
But QED. Vinnie Jones was obviously not a crap footballer, he was a professional for many years. I don't think teams paid him squillions because of his "lovable hard man image". They paid him because he was GOOD, and way way better than you
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
Owen Jones has moved sharply against lockdowns (if he were ever for them, I dunno)
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Surely 3D printing has killed the flint dildo napping trade?
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The NHS lent me a pulse oximeter for the duration. Hopefully they will soon be couriering antivirals to higher risk patients.
I'm glad to hear it, but that sounds like an individual example of good practise, rather than the sort of nationally coordinated approach that the NHS is meant to be good at. If all sufferers who wanted a pulse oximeter got one in the post, along with a course of immune boosting supplements, a booklet, potentially a helpline number, and some other encouraging fluff, it would be extremely useful and popular, and I really can't think why it hasn't happened. Whoever decided to do it (UK or devolved Governments) could even emblazon the treatment pack in their flag of choice and reap the benefits from a grateful public.
As I understand it, the problem with that idea is that, if your condition deteriorates past "take some Paracetamol, keep hydrated and take to your bed" then there isn't an easily identified intermediate level between that and hospital admission, for COVID.
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
God no, they're not good plots. lol
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
Owen Jones has moved sharply against lockdowns (if he were ever for them, I dunno)
Lockdown is a transfer of "life" from the young to the old. They go against everything a proper lefty should stand for and it's unsurprising that so many on the actual left have been moving away from them.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Surely 3D printing has killed the flint dildo napping trade?
London was oddly bustling today. I expected a post NYE torpor but no. Camden Market was rammed, likewise Muswell Hill. Huge queues in shops. Busy pubs and even a few busy restaurants (great to see)
Then I spent the arvo on the Heath at Kenwood with my eldest daughter and her dog, and much fun it was. Happy is the father who gets on with his kids (at least for today). That was also rammed
So an unexpectedly buoyant mood...
Obligatory mask report: almost 100% in shops now. And a lot more people are wearing masks as they walk the streets - or even the Heath - which seems insane to me, but there it is. These people were once oddities now they are 10-15% of pedestrians in North London, on the evidence I saw
I hope this does not persist. I detest the masks
Bank Holiday tomorrow so not surprising people are out and about. Are they doing inside stuff though? Like pubs and cafes or walking the heaths instead?
Plenty of inside stuff, as well. Not like a rammed Christmas Saturday pre-Covid, sure, but still quite a few
The large cafe in Kenwood House had big queues and every table taken, inside and out
I don't understand how anyone can be arsed queuing for a cafe. Never have.
The whole romance and appeal of a cafe is simply waltzing in from the cold, sitting down in the warmth, and tucking into a conversation or a book. Not waiting for an hour in a queue to have half a sandwich for £10 and then being hurried away so someone else can do the same.
It's a really big space so queues don't last long, even if they are sizeable
It is also hugely charming, and does nice food, booze and coffee, and afterwards you can walk out onto the Kenwood gardens and the wider Heath, and that superb view, or you can nip inside Kenwood itself, to look at its exquisitely tiny yet world class art collection (Vermeer, Gainsborough, Rembrandt).
It is one of my favourite places on earth. It is notably hard to be unhappy in Kenwood
Surprised you don’t mention the Van Dykes and the Landseer.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Naah, because you need a critical mass before word of mouth takes off, and attaining critical mass without being properly published is I would have thought virtually impossible. Though I think The Martian may have managed it.
The 'Fifty Shades of Grey' series started off as fan fic, was heavily rewritten, published by a small publisher, and spread rapidly by word-of-mouth. I've never been able to work out if James was lucky, brilliant, or both.
One story that amuses me is that 'The Hunt for Red October' was published by the rather worthy Naval Institute Press. From one story I've heard, when it was a success they did not know what to do with it, and dropped Clancy as an author ...
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
So go on, then, do one yourself. Should take you about 3 hours
On this logic, no one should be able to say that Vinnie Jones was a shit footballer because they couldn't play better. I thought Da Vinci code was a crap book, while acknowledging I probably couldn't do one better. But then I'm not an author.
Indeed.
Otherwise, most of us won't be able to comment about shit politicians.
People with Covid in hospital (for Covid, incidental Covid, or nosocomial) puts massive strains and pressures on health systems and services that are depleted right now coupled with staffing burn out after a very difficult two years.
Mechanical Ventilations and ICU admissions figures are of course important but not the only picture here.
I stand to be corrected, but I believe there is still a great need for a COVID treatment protocol at home that's somewhere in between lemsips and wrapping up warm, and going into hospital. Then people would be less likely to admit themselves if things got a bit squally.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
The challenge you have is that we rightly operate on the basis that prescription drugs need to pass trials that prove their efficacy. Got a feeling that's not been done for Zinc, Vit C and Vit D with respect to covid.
If there are no contraindications (ie the worst that's going to happen is that people will be less deficient in 3 vitamins and minerals that we know to be beneficial, and that we know most in the UK to be deficient in), I don't see the issue with working on a logical surmise.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
But you're missing the point. The issue isn't whether it's any good. It clearly isn't. I've given you one example there, but there could be many others.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
Yes, that is key. The action has to keep rapidly moving forward so that no one really has time to consider the cardboard characterisation or ludicrous plot holes. The same is true of the early Harry Potter books, and many action movies.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
Yes, quite
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Are we talking about different Martin Amises? Dead Babies (Quentin is Johnny? Quentin is Johnny) and Success are brilliantly plotted. It all gets flabby after that but they are Hitchcock level plotting
God no, they're not good plots. lol
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
What about those who give up liberty for a measure of sanity?
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
This quote is always trotted out. It is arrant nonsense.
We're less than 48 hours into the new year but already something seems to have changed.
Two articles in the left-of-centre press arguing against lockdowns to some extent (one in the Guardian and one in the New Statesman), and now an Observer/Guardian article saying the police shouldn't be getting involved in freedom of speech debates.
Yet it still seems to be argued from the "right" that the "left" are in favour of "lockdowns" or similar restrictions.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
Huh. Fair point. It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns. But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
Owen Jones has moved sharply against lockdowns (if he were ever for them, I dunno)
Lockdown is a transfer of "life" from the young to the old. They go against everything a proper lefty should stand for and it's unsurprising that so many on the actual left have been moving away from them.
I lost the full enjoyment of the last two years of my 20s, for which I will be forever bitter!
Marjorie Taylor Greene is a poisonous, gun-toting fascist who advocates violence in the pursuit of political ends. She's an anti-semitic QAnon conspiracy theorist, Covid-denier and anti-vaxxer. She still claims Trump won the 2020 election and had it stolen from him. She supported the Capitol insurrection. In this country, her free speech would be legally curtailed under various laws relating to incitement to racial hatred, violence etc. It's remarkable that Twitter gives her a platform at all.
She should be returned to the sewer from whence she sprang. Sod free speech, if this is what it means. She uses it in an effort to stamp on other people's liberties.
Those who would give up liberty for a measure of security deserve neither
“There is an attempt to make out that the worst is over. But, I think he is finished, in my view. I think there is a complete turnaround in how he has been perceived. He was seen as this amiable rascal, but now he is seen as a callous and sinister cheat."
Yep. Said so the other week. He always was seen as a lovable rogue. Now he isn't lovable.
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
Supply teaching anecdote. Turned up at a rough, rough school in Manchester. Told I'm teaching all the Year 8 English that day. They have to read this book. Feared the bloody worst. First class came I handed them out. And they read. No talking, no pissing about. An audible tut when the bell went. 5 lessons passed like that. Highest to lowest set alike. £160 smackers stolen that day. They aren't trash. They are perfectly pitched at their age group. That's why someone published them. Because their daughter loved the first after they had rejected it. Adults didn't. Till after they became huge.
Pity the editors at the publishers that - notoriously - REJECTED the Harry Potter books. Like the guy at Decca who turned down the Beatles
Quite right in both cases, on grounds of merit
I imagine the Decca Accounts department felt a little differently
I said, merit. I mean, The Da Vinci Code made squillions. Have you read it?
Yes, it is written really badly, but it is superbly plotted. In fact it is a masterpiece of plotting, beautifully knitted together, with puzzles and cliffhangers. It deserved to earn the money it did
Really? I would have said its plotting veered from the asinine to the merely implausible.
The first bit was a man being shot in the stomach and then spending lots of time running around leaving far-fetched clues before lying down to die having written an epitaph that made no sense at all, to be translated by an expert in French art who spoke no French.
And it got worse after that...
I hear this a lot. "The plotting was ludicrous blah blah blah"
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
Not really right, because if you look at Amazon theres literally 10s of 000s of people self publishing stuff like crazy which is intended to hit exactly that jackpot, and I would bet that in a blind tasting you couldn't pick out the D Brown from the wannabes. It's not writnig the stuff, it's marketing it
With all due respect, you don't know what the fuck you are talking about, and I do
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Is that how you sell your flint dildos?
Has to be word of mouth - I’ve looked and looked for adverts for flint dildos and there’s nothing...
I won't ask why you were looking...
I found this. It appears they are nothing new. Wondering if Leon has tried camel shit as a material?
Anyway, isn't the main creative force behind the Harry Potter books JRR Tolkien?
No. Nothing in common at all. The genesis is CS Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
Yay for me as a trendspotter: my eldest son was born pretty much the day the first book was published, and my eccentric aunt gave us a (I weep to say this) hardback copy of the first print run of the first edition, because she had read a rave review in the Spectator and thought we should read it to him. The book is lost, but when I read it at the time I thought: wtf is this snobbish 1950s crap about fantasy boarding school life, who ever thought publishing this was a good idea?
I'm kind of amazed the early books got published. They're trash. But someone wiser than me saw something in it, because the later books are really very good. Derivative and imperfect, but still very good.
A bit like the Chronicles of Narnia then.
Oh, is that so? I've only read TLTWATW, and had no wish to continue. At what point should I expect something tolerable to emerge?
I am reading them with my eldest right now. The third one (Voyages of the Dawn Treader) is much better written. The fourth is showing promise.
I remember reading them with my daughter, more than once. Dawn Treader was my favourite. Prince Caspian was hers. Later she introduced me to Harry Potter. I managed the first two.
Comments
Happiness is now here!
When do I get the cheque?
Tell you what, if the plotting was ludicrous why don't you sit down for a couple of days and knock out something better. If the Da Vinci Code is so shit it shouldn't take you more than a weekend, right?
Then you can sit back and watch as the millions roll in. Doddle.
I'm amazed that all the people who are so utterly convinced the Da Vinci Code is shit don't do this. It is an obvious route to great fortune. Just do it better than Dan Brown!
The NS piece you posted earlier was excellent and reflects the mood in my group.
In a similar vein, I once read one chapter of an Inspector Morse book. I couldn't get any further, it was just so badly written. The TV series was much better.
The question is, why it was so popular despite being ridiculous?
And actually, I'd disagree with your first point. It's the writing that made it wahat it was. The key was it went so fast from point to point that it's actually very hard to catch your breath long enough to spot the errors. It's only when you pause for a second and think 'Hang on...' that you realise it's all ludicrous shit.
First, thanks much to Mr. Gower for tackling this difficult subject, and providing so much information. (I have long thought that, whoever said that "demography is destiny" was right, so I believe there is no more important subject.)
And I would like to add a little to the discussion with a cartoon: https://fineartamerica.com/featured/a-wife-talks-to-her-husband-barbara-smaller.html
I think most young mothers would like to have a house with a small yard, rather than an apartment.
And an example showing how a local government can make raising children easier: https://www.kirklandwa.gov/Government/Departments/Parks-and-Community-Services/Online-Parks-Guide/Tot-Lot-Park
Whenever I go by Tot Lot Park, I see several mothers jointly watching a number of children and I admire the genius who thought this up. (A few times I have stopped to talk to the mothers -- who agree with me on the genius. Perhaps the planner was just smart enough to listen to some young mothers.)
And, finally, a story: More than a decade ago, I read an article in the Washington Post describing how a single mother in DC, with two boys, decided to move them somewhere they would not be attempted by the gangs. She chose a town in Montana and visited there to check it out. It passed her inspection, but she did have a little bump near the end of her visit. She was in a local restaurant, and thought the people there were talking about her. Despite that, she decided to move there anyway.
After she had gotten settled and gotten to know some of the people, she asked them about the restaurant scene, and learned that they had been engaging in one of a small town's favorite activity. There was a single black guy living in the town -- and they were trying to decide whether they should call him, so he could come in and meet this single lady.
That's why the Code outsold it by about 5000 times, but you cite the Pendulum
Or both?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-89617-2?s=09
The study was prevaccination.
I'm far from convinced - if you look at those who voted against Coronavirus passports, you'll see the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott in the same lobby as Ed Davey and the Conservative rebels.
You don't have to be a Conservative to support individual freedom or to argue against the extension of State control into people's lives.
It is at least well written by somebody very bright.
"The problem with Shakespeare is its full of clichés"
As indeed happened in the 1640s.
(I forget what that mathematical method is called. But it is so useful.)
When it comes to mega-bestsellers, there is one and only one guaranteed route to fortune for a really cracking book: Word of Mouth
No amount of sales marketing adverts whatever can match Great Word of Mouth. People saying "Hey have you read this, or this, or this, I could not put it down!"
Word of Mouth is the reason books as diverse as Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Harry Potter, the Kite Runner and the Hobbit became enormous global bestsellers. It wasn't the brilliant marketing exercise behind them. It was because people loved them, usually because they have great plots and vivid characters, and the first readers told their friends, who told their friends.... that is all you need, but it so very rare
As I say, if you think it is that simple, sit down and knock one out. Self publish, then wait for the billions to shower down
Michelle
Ma belle
Sont des mots qui vont
Tres bien onsomble
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/jan/02/man-74-dies-in-electric-scooter-collision-in-greater-manchester
On the one hand I cannot imagine how any decent novel, let alone an intricate twisty thriller, can be accomplished without a detailed plot written out on advance.
Against this a lot of authors like to suggest they just write as it comes to them. Dickens was famously writing in instalments with no apparent master plan just a deadline to meet and a number of episodes to fulfill. Similarly, it's hard to imagine Charlotte Bronte had a plan when she started writing Jane Eyre - the book changes tone so dramatically after Lowood Hall.
If only we had an author on here who could enlighten us, eh?
https://www.alamy.com/da-vinci-code-horse-manure-for-sale-at-rosslyn-chapel-image7496819.html
On the positive side the tourist burst at the chapel itself raised lots of bawbees for some very expensive and tricky restoration for an old building for which I have a very soft spot.
When a friend of mine (the first one) had COVID in Summer, I did a little research on the vitamins/minerals best suited to COVID recovery, and found that these were Zinc, Vit C and Vit D. It wasn't hard to find a good quality supplement that included significant amounts of these, so I dropped them outside their house. As it happens, the friend felt better almost immediately after starting on them, and recovered very quickly.
Not saying that the supplements were directly responsible for the speedy recovery, but even a placebo effect has a benefit. There are also relatively cheap devices for checking oxygen levels etc.
If COVID sufferers were prescribed something similar, along with a broader at home treatment protocol, it could get many people through COVID who might otherwise be hospitalised. This may already be in operation, but I don't think it is. If not, one wonders why the NHS is complaining about being overwhelmed, but also trying to keep what it clearly regards as the arcane mysteries of COVID treatment confined within its own walls.
I find it curious that my generation learnt (and shared) so much of what me know about friendship, courage and equality from those books, but now their author is now shunned by many of the same people.
Dylan was genuinely new. Not only did he record albums entirely of his own songs, virtually unheard of at the time, but he later melded the existent white and black folk traditions together with beat poetry and the newly invented Marshall amp, to make something entirely fresh.
Nothing was like it before.
It's certainly not the far left or the Lib Dems arguing for lockdowns.
But it does seem to have been anarticle of faith of the mainstream left: the current incarnation of the Labour Party, the public sector machine (nationally and locally), the BBC, Sky. Questioning it has put you very much outside the establishment consensus. Not surprising to see this challenged by the usual suspects on the right, who are generally the ones challenging the public sector consensus. More surprising to see it challenged from the mainstream left.
It is a simple formula, but a rare skill to actually do it. Like the difficulty coming up with advertising tag lines. Lots think they can do it, but few actually can.
To add to that we have "the public sector machine" - I presume you are referring to Councils who have to make the legislation work and the NHS who has to spend time and resources treating those who exercise their individual right not to get vaccinated and end up in hospital (for example). Like all reasonable employers, they are also trying to protect their employees from the excesses of those exercising their "freedom".
It seems to me there are plenty of voices now calling for no further restrictions but there is an understandable concern around the capacity of hospitals with reduced staff availability to deal with an increase in hospitalisations. That's the discussion to have - is there an argument for a temporary curtailing of large scale indoor social activity to prevent further hospitalisations?
What proportion of American children grow up within half a mile's walk of a facility like that would you say? I reckon probably about 70-80% of British children do. Certainly when deciding where to live to bring up kids the presence of a park like that was an important consideration!
“You may abuse a tragedy, though you cannot write one. You may scold a carpenter who has made you a bad table, though you cannot make a table. It is not your trade to make tables.”
People who stated that God had chosen *them* to be The One True Monarch.
Many look at this and think: oh that's easy. When they try, it is bloody hard. Formidably hard. And that goes for many successful authors of literary fiction who try to write tightly plotted (and better rewarded) thrillers. They can't do it.
Martin Amis is a genius writer. Yet he cannot plot at all, and when he tries it is bit embarrassing. That's probably why he is outsold by Dan Brown by orders of magnitude, despite Amis being a in a clearly different and superior league when it comes to beautiful prose, witty insights, and lush description
Anyway this will all quite soon be moot. In a decade or less, computers will be able to write lurid Dan Brown thrillers or pensive Martin Amis novels in about 2 minutes, and we won't be able to tell the difference, except the computer will keep churning them out for free so the human writers will be finished
I am perfectly serious. This is coming, sooner than anyone expects. I am quite glad it is happening later in my dildo-knapping career
Takes more than a quick skim to digest this one!
What I've gleaned so far, is a) decline in birthrates of very young women combined with rise among their older sisters (and aunts); and b) increase in births among higher socio-economic categories, matched by decrease farther down the ladder. Which (I think) is at least partially mirrored here in the US, esp a).
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2908415/The-sex-toys-dating-28-000-years-Ancient-phalluses-stone-dried-camel-dung-started-trend-sex-aids.html
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/dec/22/omicron-covid-restrictions-young-people?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
And that your condition can change very rapidly, so it's not just a matter of chucking some drugs and oxygen at you. You need continuously monitored professional health care. Which is why COVID is such a strain on the health care system.
You're drunk, aren't you? You always trot out this weird Beatles-phobia, with some vehemence, when you've had a few
I shall join you, with my bottle of Diez Cabellero Rioja, Reserva 2011
Absolutely delicious, and a total bargain at this price. Just £13.95. BUY
https://www.vivino.com/GB/en/diez-caballero-reserva-tempranillo/w/1316128?year=2011
The many faces of Charles I is incomparable
One story that amuses me is that 'The Hunt for Red October' was published by the rather worthy Naval Institute Press. From one story I've heard, when it was a success they did not know what to do with it, and dropped Clancy as an author ...
Otherwise, most of us won't be able to comment about shit politicians.
In fact, if those creating the packs had access to anonymised blood test data for COVID sufferers in the UK, it would be simple to formulate a supplement providing exactly the minerals that severe sufferers were most deficient in.
Zinc, magnesium, potassium etc. are not just airy fairy things invented by Gwyneth Paltrow - they are serious things that all acknowledge are vital for human health and that we therefore have recommended levels of in the UK (and all other developed countries). If you're in the HDU, it's likely that you'll be hooked in to several bags of the things.
It is arrant nonsense.
https://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous-liberty-safety-quote-lost-its-context-in-21st-century
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/science-environment-20729787