Back to our regularly scheduled blogging

Visiting relative  has left, traveling has done, and I'm ready to devote myself to this blog again.

So thanks for  your patience!

Criminitleys

Blogger did a redesign a few months ago, now their "Schedule" function is a hit and miss affair.

Had meant to say a couple of days ago that I'd resume normal posting Saturday - I"m chauffering two elderly relatives around a RAINY Keystone, South Dakota.

Thanks for your patience!

Back to normal Sunday

Tomorrow - I hope and pray to all the gods and in particular Om - that the guy who has been doing my sheet rock one ceiling hole every Saturday, will come here tomorrow (having missed last Saturday) finish sheet rocking the final of four holes, then adding the tape and the "mud" and the textured paint. I'm fed up with the delay - he was supposed to do it last year, for God's sake! Many reasons why I let him get away with the delay, but I want it done tomorrow becausew all my furniture and books are topsy turvy and I'm in a state where I can't accomplish anything. He's promised to be here early tomorrow - I'll believe it when I see it. But I hope it's true.

Sir Terry Pratchett: Text and Twitter harming children's development

From the Telegraph: Sir Terry Pratchett: Text and Twitter harming children's development
The best-selling author said parents should consider restricting the use of mobile phones and websites, encouraging their children to go back to “old-fashioned” interaction.

Sir Terry, 64, said the new technology was restricting young people’s thoughts and said having a wide vocabulary “stops you getting frustrated”.

In an interview with the Evening Standard, he said Shakespeare “went to a lot of trouble” for the English language, only for the new generation to “knock away half of the consonents”.

He said: “Kids now seem unmotivated. Social media is not helping and texting certainly isn’t.

“You have to have interaction with other people.

“If you have the words to identify exactly what you mean, you can get your message across. I’m sure this is linked to rough behaviour.”

The author, who has sold more than 65 million books, was supported by Dr Kairen Cullen, an educational psychologist.

Dr Cullen said: “New media increases access for lots of children but it doesn’t give them the experience of face-to-face contact. We only get good at that with lots of practice.

“It does not allow children to build up patience and time-keeping.”

Sir Terry Pratchett, who now suffers from the early stages of Alzheimer’s, is said to be the second more-read [yes, that's how the author of this article wrote it] author in the UK currently and is best known for his work in the fantasy genre.

Pratchett to unveil Dodger in packed 2012

From Bookseller: Pratchett to unveil Dodger in packed 2012
ransworld is pulling out all the stops for one of its biggest stars, Terry Pratchett, as a busy year kicks off with the re-publication of his Discworld series in June. There will also be two new hardbacks from the author in 2012, including his take on Charles Dickens' Artful Dodger, plus publication of the first winners of the Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhere But Now prize.

The first five Discworld titles—The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, Equal Rites, Mort and Sourcery—will all be published as £7.99 paperbacks on 21st June with stripped-down covers, each focusing on one element from the original cover's illustration. Also in June comes the hardback release of the first novel in Pratchett's collaboration with sci-fi author Stephen Baxter, The Long Earth (21st, £18.99), set in 1915 and 2015.

The paperback of the last year's bestselling Snuff will also be published on 7th June, priced £7.99, as will The World of Poo (£12.99, hardback), a spin-off title from Snuff penned by Discworld's premier children's author, Miss Felicity Beedle. It features line-drawings, and is produced in the style of a Victorian children's book as a gift-sized hardback.

In the autumn comes Dodger (13th September, hb, £18.99), a new Pratchett title published by Random House Children's Books, and inspired by Dickens' Artful Dodger character in Oliver Twist. Set in Victorian London, it features characters including Dickens, Disraeli and Queen Victoria.

Publishing director Marianne Velmans said the packed publishing schedule was a result of "it all coming together—things that we had been working on for years. Plus [Terry] has been particularly energetic and creative for the past year." She said the aim behind rejacketing the Discworld novels was to "refresh the backlist; all the other brand authors have B-format paperbacks, not A-format, so this was an excuse to go back and refresh and clean them up a bit." She added that Pratchett has a large, loyal following, "but we feel that with Snuff he reached out to a new readership. Since he was knighted, since he has done these very visible documentaries, he has been regarded in a different way." On the publicity side, Velmans said Pratchett would do "a few select things, but big things".

However, Velmans said she did not think the current surge in the popularity of fantasy was boosting Pratchett: "He's always been a genre of his own; it looks like fantasy, but what he is really doing is satirising our recognisable world. There is a loyal readership who are not that affected by fashion."

Meanwhile, the two winners of the Terry Pratchett Anywhere But Here, Anywhere But Now prize will see their novels published as £14.99 hardbacks on 10th May. Apocalypse Cow by Michael Logan follows three unlikely heroes—a teenage vegan, an abattoir worker and an inept journalist—as they try to save Britain and uncover a government plot. Half-Sick of Shadows by David Logan follows Edward after he is visited by a time-machine in his grandmother's garden, and is described by the publisher as a "tragi-comic tale of childhood wonder, time-travelling poets and theoretical physics".

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Terry’s got it right as Lloyds sale branches into fiction

From the London Evening Standard: Terry’s got it right as Lloyds sale branches into fiction To those in the City who are of literary bent, the best book on the financial crisis is Terry Pratchett’s Making Money (he wrote it before the banking system collapsed, but then, he’s a clever fellow).

Pratchett, a comic fantasist who still couldn’t really have come up with a character so vaingloriously absurd as Sir Fred Goodwin, imagines a bank takeover that involves vampires and characters with names such as Moist von Lipwig. (There are hardly any vampires in real-life banking.)

If Making Money were required reading at the Financial Services Authority, perhaps we would all be in much better shape.

When the tyrant Lord Vetinari appoints the head of the post office to run the Royal Bank of Ankh Morpork, objections fly.

Doesn’t he realise that banks should be run by people who understand banks? Vetinari responds: “People who understand banks got it into the position it is in now. And I did not become ruler of Ankh-Morpork by understanding the city. Like banking, the city is depressingly easy to understand. I have remained ruler by getting the city to understand me.”

This storyline finds a parallel in the FSA’s handling of the sale of 632 branches of Lloyds to the Co-op, a deal that now seems unlikely to happen. The difference being that unlike Vetinari, the FSA insists that only people who have previously mucked up banks can run them in future (I exaggerate, a little).

Last week, Lloyds said exclusive talks with the Co-op had ended, and others are now invited to join the fray.

This followed weeks of suggestions from the regulator that the Co-op would not be a proper owner of the business.

It has a financial services arm with revenues of £2 billion, has never gone bust or needed a public bailout, and worst of all it doesn’t have a chief risk officer! Unlike, say, Royal Bank of Scotland, Bradford & Bingley, the Halifax and Lloyds. Which all just sailed through the financial crisis.

The Co-op board, sniffy-sounding leaks noted, included a Methodist minister, a plasterer and a nurse.

Such folk cannot be relied upon to pay themselves £2 million and blame other people when things go wrong. It would be banking anarchy.

So now Lloyds is reportedly in talks with an organisation called NBNK, a bank that doesn’t really exist yet, beyond having a board stuffed with the great and the good of the banking industry (Lord Levene, Sir David Walker, definitely no plasterers).

NBNK will need capital from Middle Eastern investors to proceed, it seems, but maybe it would do a decent job of improving competition for borrowers and savers.

Still, it is rather a pity that competition couldn’t come from a larger mutual, such as the blameless, rather likeable Co-op.

Unlike the FSA, Vetinari would have had no problem with this.

Perhaps Pratchett can persuade Vetinari to become the next Governor of the Bank of England, if only in fantasy land, so we can see what a happy ending looks like.