I got this from a friend via email. The pictures look genuine, as far as I can tell. If you don’t want to see, don’t scroll down, OK?
Driving at 225km/h (that’s about 140 mph) out near Mitchell (Qld) in his BMW Z4 the Driver hit a Kangaroo..
The kangaroo disappeared!
The driver stopped and wondered. Where did the kangaroo go?
Scroll down to see what he found……
If you don’t want to see, don’t scroll down.
This blog was in “freshly pressed” on wordpress. Lovely photogrpahs where he gets some things in focus and others deliberately out of focus.
http://jonathanfleming.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/walking-the-high-line/
In 1969 Katie, a girl from a large, poor, conservative
catholic family in Detroit sets off to college at Eastern Michigan University, and finds herself sharing a room with a more attractive, sexually active, upper class Janie. The action takes place just after seven murders of young, female college students in the area around EMU – an actual real-life series of killings that Whitsitt uses as the backdrop for the story. Police have arrested the supposed killer, but one of the murders was different to the other six, and some are concerned a killer may still be on the loose.
The book uses lots of contrasts between Katie and Janie to remind us of what was going on in a period of social upheavel. The book is full of references to the culture of the 60s: changing beliefs about sexuality, songs like Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension, Karen Carpenter, Catch 22, orange furniture and smoking being considered sexy. It’s hard to imagine the world of race riots in Detroit, when army tanks rolled down the streets of one of America’s largest cities, or when whites and blacks didn’t mix socially, even on a progressive college campus. The
main character does end up in danger, but I won’t give away the ending. The prose is vivid, the writing style is fluid and it’s a good week-end read. Here’s a link:
http://www.claudiawhitsitt.com/2011/01/the-michigan-murders-and-the-wrong-guy/
Here are some of the cleverest phots I’ve ever seen: Impossible pictures by Erik Johansson
(If you’re looking for my post on the Afghan woman Malalai Joya, who was expelled from the Afghan parliament for speaking out about corruption, and violence against women, scroll down. I’ll post more on her when I’ve finished her book.)
Conflict in“The Other Boleyn Girl.”
I’ve been meaning to write something on this for some time. How does Philippa Gregory keep the conflict going in “The Other Boyne Girl’?
She has at least the following conflicts going.
1-The Boleyn family want Anne to become King Henry’s lover, but she is opposed to this idea (at first).
2-She secretly weds Henry Percy, and her family and Cardinal Wolsey force her to make out the marriage never happened.
3-The Boleyn family are always afraid that the Seymour family will put one of their girls ‘in front of king Henry,’ and the Boleyn family may lose their hopes of advancement.
4-King Henry needs a male heir and Queen Catherine keeps having miscarriages, sons
that die in infancy, or once, a live daughter.
5-Anne Boleyn urges Henry to break with the Pope and form the Church of England.
6-Anne refuses to give herself sexually to Henry until he promises to make her queen,
but has to keep him interested, while not giving in to him.
7-Anne and her sister Mary end up as rivals for the King’ affections, with Henry still pursuing Anne even after Mary has just given birth to Henry’s illegitimate child.
8-Mary and Anne fear for the life of their brother, George, because he is homosexual and this may lead to his death. (It does).
9-Mary becomes disenchanted with life at court, and wants to live a simple life in the
country.
10-Their brother George is force to marry Jane Parker, for whom he feels nothing.
11-Queen Catherine knows that the Boleyn girls are betraying her and fears that Anne may have her poisoned.
12-When Anne finally becomes queen, mobs heckle her in the street and she has to return up the Thames in fear of her life.
13-Finally, after Anne fails to produce a son, she ends up in the Tower of London, taking Mary’s daughter with her as a lady-in-waiting, much to the distress of Mary.
And those were just the thirteen I could think of without re-reading the book. I wonder
what more I’ll find a a second read?
Sat 3 Sept 2011
Tonight I heard a woman who inspired me by her courage and her persistence. I went to the Melbourne Writers Festival to hear Malalai Joya, an Afghan woman who was elected to parliament in 2005, and expelled in 2007 for criticising the presence people she described as warlords and war criminals in the Afghan parliament. She has survived four assassination attempts. This going to be a very rough and inadequate first draft of this blog entry, because I’m writing it straight after returning from listening to her speech, and I will need to Google a lot of the names and groups she mentioned, since I can’t speak Pashto and don’t know the correct spellings. Look forward to a better version as I Google and read her book “Raising My Voice”.
She claimed that a lot of the ‘foreign aid” being channelled into Afghanistan is ending up in the pockets of tribal warlord and not helping ordinary people. She spoke of gang rapes committed by groups in police uniforms. And who do you complain to? The courts are run by people who are interlinked with the same warlords and religious factions that commit crimes in the first place. She described families selling babies for $10 because they couldn’t feed them. Some in the Afghan parliament, she said, were puppets of Iran, including the Minister for Electricity and Water (I couldn’t get his name down as I couldn’t get the pronunciation).
She said that the US and NATO had “pushed us from the frying pan (the Taliban) into the fire (tribal warlords.)”
She had a lot to say about the Taliban being invited to join the Afghan government for the sake of “National Unity” – and she didn’t like it.
I’ll blog more on this as I read her book.
Her Wikipedia entry is here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malalai_Joya
Her book is sold under two titles in English-speaking counties: “A Woman Among Warlords” in the US and Canada, and “Raising My Voice” in other English-speaking countries
More to follow as I read the book.
Richard Snow Writer 