Tag: Books & Movies

Search String

Entertainment, Retailing

Here’s an interesting thing.  The other day I was asked by an old friend from Seffrica where she could find one of my novels on Amazon, so I just told her to do a search for “Kim du Toit Prime Target” on their website.  Here was the search result:

Errrr what?

Puzzled, I tried one of the other novels:

No problem there… and likewise for all the other works I’ve published at Amazon.

Then I tried again, using just “Kim du Toit” as the search string, and lo and behold, they all showed up, including Prime Target:

Of course, trying to reach anyone at Amazon who could look at the problem is like trying to decipher the U.S. tax code at IRS.gov: opaque,  impossible and misleading.  Amazon must be the least-friendly organization on the planet when it comes to this kind of thing.

Anyway, here’s the link to Prime Target, in case anyone is still interested in a story about a government agency spying on U.S. citizens’ private data.

Feelin’ The Noize

Friday Feature, Movies, Music

I was never a huge fan of loud Brit rockers Slade — I didn’t mind the loud, but it was really simple music, while I was getting into Yes, Emerson Lake & Palmer and Genesis (to name but some).

Still, in those pre-metal days, there were times when you just needed to kick out and jump around, and few were better at kicking-out-and-jumping-around music than the Boys From The Black Country.

“What’s that, honky?  How could they be White boys in Black Country?”

Shuddup and watch this (very) sympathetic treatment of Slade in their heyday, back when they were huge.

And yes, in retrospect, their songs were excellent.

Sadly, it seems as though Noddy has throat cancer, and hasn’t that long to go.  Raw suckage, that is.

No Shock There

Entertainment

As any fule kno, I have little time for “awards” shows for anything show business, but the headlines are pretty much unavoidable, e.g.

The first part (about Barbie):  yeah, whatever.  But the second part?

As I see it, any time the brilliant Paul Giamatti wins an award, it cannot be called a “shock”.  Simply put, he’s one of the greatest character actors ever, and the only reason he’s not won every acting award is because he is a character actor and not a leading man.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just watch Sideways (on Amazon Prime) — itself an absolute gem of a movie, and for which Giamatti was robbed blind of an Oscar, although that year he did win several non-Oscar awards for his role.

A movie for grownups, an actor likewise.  And absolutely no “shock” winner.

Reading Matters

History, Literature

For some reason, I’ve recently been reading French History, because why not?  I don’t know how it got started, but it did: and once started, I couldn’t stop.  Here’s the bibliography, so far.

The Collapse of the Third Republic — William Shirer

The Franco-Prussian War — Michael Howard

Dawn of the Belle Epoque — Mary McAuliffe

The Vertigo Years: Europe, 1900-1914 — Philipp Blom (re-read, because it’s brilliant)

The Marne, 1914: The Opening of World War I and the Battle That Changed the World — Holger H. Herwig (told from the German side)

The French Army and the First World War — Elizabeth Greenhalgh

France and the Après Guerre, 1918–1924 — Benjamin F. Martin

La Belle France: A Short History — Alistair Horne (I’m still busy with this one;  I’m only up to the succession of Henry II in 1547, so still a way to go.)

On deck:  France On The Brink — Jonathan Fenby

Yeah, that’s what’s been keeping me busy over the past three weeks.  All are well recommended except the last one (because I haven’t read it yet).

One last note:  I cannot recommend The Vertigo Years highly enough.  When people talk about the social- and psychological dislocation of the Information Age, you have to know that we’ve experienced it before:  when the Age of Speed dawned, in around 1900.  If you read no other book from the above list, this is the one.

That One Book

Literature

Onetime political prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe tells how one particular book kept her hopes up during her imprisonment in Teheran:

Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe has revealed how a copy of the novel The Handmaid’s Tale among other books allowed her to feel liberated while she was locked up in Iran’s notorious Evin prison.

Well, okay.  Considering how said dystopian novel is all about how a tyrannical government oppresses womyns, I guess that’s fair play (even though the actual Iranian Muslim government is far worse than Atwood’s).

But it does lead me to ask the question:  if you were to be imprisoned for six years and could have only one smuggled book to keep you going, which one would you choose to have?

Right off the bat, I’m going to exclude religious works like the Bible, because that’s too obvious (and easy) a choice, especially for my religious Readers, bless ’em.  But I will allow stuff like Thomas  Aquinas’s Summa Theologica  because they are essentially philosophical  works.

My own choice is a simple one, as much for its volume as for its complexity and erudition:

From Dawn To Decadence (Jacques Barzun)

List your choice (and remember, you get one and only one) in Comments, with reasons if possible.