I just noticed the price of Bell Mountain in paperback has been cut down from $14 to $7. I have no idea how long the sale will last, so… get it cheap while you can!
Tell your friends, tell your family.
I don’t know how to promote the book, so, please–help me out if you can.
Let me take a day off gender choices and phony Global Warming.
It’s hard for an actor to play a well-established, popular, beloved fictional character and bring that character to life on the screen. Christopher Reeve did it with Superman. Both Basil Rathbone and Jeremy Brett succeeded in “becoming” Sherlock Holmes. David Suchet is Hercule Poirot.
And if you haven’t yet seen those TV movies from the 1980s starring Joan Hickson as Miss Marple–well, you’ve missed something wonderful. But you can find most of them on youtube, free of charge, or rent them from amazon.com for instant viewing for a very small fee.
Agatha Christie herself wanted Hickson to play Miss Marple someday–although when she told the actress that, in person, Hickson was only in her 40s and some decades away from Miss Marple’s age. Christie’s instinctive choice was right on the money, though.
No one can play Miss Marple like Joan Hickson! Anybody else, nice try, but no cigar.
Imagine–a detective who’s not a cop, not a private eye, but just a little old lady who has lived in a village all her life and has, in the words of one of her acquaintances, “a mind like a bacon-slicer.” She hunts down murderers, but she can’t defend herself physically and she can’t run away, nor does she carry a gun. It must always be born in mind that any murderer who got wise to Miss Marple could very easily bump her off.
If you can watch one of these films without thinking, at the end, that, if only you could tell your troubles to Miss Marple, she’d know what to do… well, then, the performance just didn’t speak to you.
Note: Patty and I did watch one of the Miss Marple movies made after Hickson’s death, and it just didn’t come up to snuff–not even close.
Once you’ve seen the real deal, nothing else will do.
Yes, we have almost two feet of snow on the ground, and enormous piles of snow everywhere you look–but Spring is in the air, big-time.
We have throngs of birds, all singing and calling at once, including a big bunch of robins. The trees are budding like mad. Like Helki the Rod, I always listen to what the birds and the trees are telling us. It might snow some more, but I think we’ve seen the end of sub-zero temperatures for now. (Yes, I know it sounds like famous last words.)
So here’s my prediction: an early Spring, probably a little cooler than usual, but burgeoning and busting out all over.
What hath God wrought? I love it!
I was in Barnes & Noble yesterday, picking up a Valentine’s Day gift for my wife. This freeze-your-butt-off-every-cotton-pickin’-day Global Warming is getting her down. Maybe Hercule Poirot could cheer her up.
Naturally, I paused to look at the offerings in the Young Adults section. As usual, I wish I hadn’t.
For reasons which may be supernatural, for all I know, grown-up authors are frantically churning out books about sexual confusion, social pathologies, self-destructive fads like “cutting” yourself, seasoned with depictions of teens using “magic” to circumvent adult authority and get anything and everything they want. This is what they think youngsters should be reading. Why? All we get is a lot of half-baked twaddle about “you shouldn’t try to hide from kids what the world is like.”
So again we run head-on into the sophomoric credo that whatever is evil, ugly, or painful is “realistic,” and whatever is good, beautiful, or wholesome is just a delusion. This is how stupid people pretend they’re smart.
So what have you got for your children and grandchildren to read? And maybe more to the point, what are their “teachers” and school librarians urging them to read? You’d better look into that–you might get a rather nasty surprise.
There are books out there–and have always been, so far–that offer a positive vision: books that don’t seek to fill the teenage reader’s head with toxic garbage. You ought to be looking for them.
And when you find some, please let me know.
The invention of the keyboard was a boon to communication. It was also a boon to miscommunication.
I was reminded of this last night in a chat room, when someone typed in a little family anecdote involving his moth-in-law. Did this mean he had unusually intimate relationships with insects? In-laws are acquired by marriage. Who do you have to marry to acquire a moth-in-law? But of course he meant “mother-in-law,” and his fingers garbled the message.
Recently I was trying to find out how to buy a bearded lizard online. I’ve always loved reptile pets, and these little guys have become very popular. The “beard” is a threat display that pet lizards very rarely use.
For some reason, my fingers kept typing in “beaded lizard.” This is a very serious mistake. The Mexican beaded lizard is closely related to the Gila monster, only it’s a little bigger and a little more poisonous. What a difference a simple letter “r” makes.
Then there are “the Untied States of America”–a cryptic comment on our country’s future?–and flyers for “marital arts” schools in the neighborhood, and that ever-popular song that says, “These are a few of my favorite thighs.” And I’ve always been fond of “priates” and “Indains,” and “ture or flase” questions, and “simularity,” whatever that means.
The things we type should keep us humble.
I was shocked when I discovered that my little plastic dinosaurs from the 1950s, manufactured by Marx Toymakers, now sell for anywhere from $5 each, for the really little ones, to $20 each for the big tyrannosaurs and brontosaurs.
I have an awful lot of these. Many of them came in a play set that cost $5 at the time–which my father said we couldn’t afford, it was way too much money; but then I got it as a Christmas present. Others were purchased individually, from 10 cents to 25 cents each. Quite a few I acquired by trading with other kids (“Look, I’ll give you four army men for that stegosaurus”).
Then there are the little dinosaurs that used to come free inside boxes of cereal, and the big wax ones made by the Miller Company. I only have a couple of those, because they were notoriously fragile and easily broken. I don’t know what my Miller stegosaurus would fetch on eBay.
If I sold off all my toy dinosaurs, I would probably get a couple hundred bucks for them (I can just imagine the shocked expression on my father’s face: he worked at the Ford plant, and worked hard, and here we’re talking several weekly paychecks’ worth of stupid little toys).
But then they would be gone, and I’d never get them back. The family members who gave them to me as loving little gifts, they’re all gone.
Too much is gone that was good.
I think I’ll keep my dinosaurs.