Uncategorized

The world is getting stranger: stealing bridges.

3 Comments

What do you do with a stolen bridge?

My eyes nearly popped out of my head when I saw this article in the newspapers. A gang of thieves in the Czech Republic stole the strangest thing: a bridge. Not just any old bridge, but a bridge with railway tracks on it.  The thieves turned up to their job, complete with a crane. They also had false papers supposedly from the local council authorizing the demolition, just in case the police showed up and asked them what they were doing. The fake permit said they were building a bicycle path.

Try stealing that!

.In fact, the police did show up, the thieves showed the false papers, and the police went on their way, satisfied. The bridge, which was about 200 metres (670 feet) long, ran between the villages of  Loket and Horni Slavkov, weighed about ten tonnes. Now, I’m guessing they didn’t steal the whole 670-foot bridge in one night. I’m guessing they stole the pedestrian part of the bridge and the railway tracks. Why steal a bridge? For the value of the scrap metal. Stealing things like bridges has apparently become common in the Czech Republic, as scrap metal prices have risen in the last couple of years.

I’d heard of thieves stealing copper from church roofs in England. And I’ve heard of metal being stolen from building sites in Australia. But a bridge?

This leads me to ask, what is the strangest thing you’ve ever heard of being stolen? Please leave a comment and tell me.

Books - thrillers, Books action adventure, Novels, Novels action adventure, Novels thrillers, Thrillers (Novels)

Knowing you could have prevented your sister’s death.

2 Comments

Today I released my new novel, Fire Damage, on Amazon Kindle.

How do you get over knowing that you could have prevented your sister’s murder?
Cameron Oakwood is an intelligence analyst whose sister and nephew were killed in a car bomb explosion outside a politician’s office.  Cameron knew terrorists had made death threats against the politician. His family blames him for not warning his sister to stay away from that building. The case was never solved. Three years after her death, his family has cut him off. Consumed by guilt, Cameron obsessively re-reads documents he has hoarded to do with the case. He is becoming addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers.
Cameron is assigned to work with FBI agent Jodie Finch on threat by a Japanese doomsday cult to release a genetically engineered virus at an international sporting event in Melbourne, Australia. She is attracted to his intelligence, his humor and his honesty, but she worries about his addictions and his obsessions about his sister’s death. She wonders if he is ready for a new relationship.
As they work together, the terrorists take hostages to a remote country house in the path of oncoming forest fires. Cameron and Jodie have only hours left to prevent the biological attack. As they  race to rescue the hostages, they make a stunning discovery about the identity of the bomb maker who killed Cameron’s sister. But they make their discovery in the most frightening possible circumstances, when all their lives hang in the balance.

If you’d like to visit the site, and possibly buy a copy, you can see it here.  If you want to down the kindle app to read kindle books on your computer, you can get it here.

Uncategorized

A blast from the past…

2 Comments

I could almost believe in re-incarnation after what I’ve just come from. Well, Ok, I haven’t had a real religious experience – just a short but vivid trip back to my youth. Remember the Swedish pop group Abba? Of course you do. Even if you weren’t born when they were around. They performed in Melbourne when I was 23, and I jumped the fence at the Myer Music Bowl and got in without paying.  Well in Melbourne Australia there is an Abba tribute group called “BABBA” – except their posters print the middle B backwards, just like some of ABBA’s did. I just had a blast. This morning I noticed there was a street festival at Ivanhoe, a few suburbs from where I live. I went along and found the band performing at one end of the street was… BABBA!  They did “I do I do I do I do,” “ When I kissed the teacher,” (I’d forgotten that song even existed), “Dancing Queen,” and on and on. They just look and sound SO MUCH like Abba it was like being back in 1977.

So I took some photos. The first one below shows  Bjorn on the guitar, Agnetha in the white and yellow, Anni-Frid (Freda) in the white and blue dress, and Benny on the Piano. Then costumes are copies from a 1976 photo on youtube. Even the drummer had fun. See the last photo. Have you ever had an experience that took you back to a time that made you feel fantastic for an hour or two? A what was it? Leave a post. I’d love to hear from you.

writing skills

Two good blogs I’ve read.

2 Comments

Melissa Donovan has a very good article on whether or not writers should “write what they know” here.

Kate George drew my attention to this article on the six-stage Hollywood plot structure. Hollywood movies go in distinct stages, with a specific percentage of the story time devoted to each stage. The details are here. Her blog is here.

Best wishes from Down Under.

Weird things

Star Wars Monopoly: yes, grown-ups play it!

4 Comments

I have just returned from a meeting of the Melbourne Science Fiction Club, (the oldest science fiction club in the Southern Hemisphere) where the club had a “board games” night. I ended up on a table playing – you guessed it – Star Wars Monopoly.

Princess Leia

Star Wars Monopoly is much like real Monopoly. Instead of Park Lane and various locations around London, you buy properties from the Star Wars films. You can have Tatooine, Endor, or the Imperial Palace. Instead of houses, you buy little replicas of the Millennium Falcon to put on your properties and collect more rent. And yes, these were adults I was playing with.  The characters you move around the board can include Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia, and R2D2. I just had a crummy old Imperial Storm Trooper. I haven’t played Monopoly for 40 years, but soon remembered you have to keep a balance between buying properties and having enough cash on hand to pay the rent when you land on someone else’s properties. You can be asset rich but cash poor, and that’s not a good position to be in. I noticed that it’s “go to jail”, not “go to gaol”, and I wondered: did the original Monopoly have British or American spellings?

On another table, people were playing chess with Star Wars figures. The King was the Emperor, and Darth Vader was the Queen. That took some figuring out. Why wouldn’t Leia be the queen? I also noticed that one of my fellow players had a “Lord of the Rings” wedding ring. He had the elvish inscription about “one ring to bind them all” engraved on his band.

It was an odd night, and bought back childhood memories of playing with another family in my neighbourhood. My friend’s little brother got very upset  when he discovered  that someone had given him three tens for a fifty because he was too young to read the numbers and do the arithmetic. When he complained to his mother, she ordered the game closed down and everyone was sent home.

So what about you? Have you  ever played  a grown-up kids game? What was it ? What memories did it bring back?.

Uncategorized

Losing someone

3 Comments

I just read a very moving post on the blog by Debra Kristi http://debrakristi.wordpress.com/ about this being the 15th anniversary of the last day she saw her sister alive. There is a photo of the two of them together. She has used her sister’s name (Kristi) as part of her blog name in memory of her. It made me think of how lucky we are to have people in our lives we love, and how important it is to tell them so.

Two and a half years ago, my mother died after 3 years of being in a nursing home because of  Alzheimer’s. I lost her in little stages. The first Christmas after she moved into the low care section, she tapped the bunch of Christmas cards in her hand and said “Now, you’re, Richard, aren’t you?” By late the next year, she was introducing me to people  as her husband, or her brother, or who knows who. She gradually lost the ability to dress herself, eat unaided, and had no idea who her family were, except that we were someone she knew. She was moved into high care.

She died of heart failure as she was sitting down to dinner one night. She had a faint pulse. The nurse in charge rang me to check what the terminal care instructions were.  I was driving and pulled the car over to take the call. The instructions  had been put in writing, but i guess in the middle of an emergency they couldn’t put their hand right on the right bit of the file. I said “if there’s no pulse, don’t resuscitate.” By this time an ambulance crew had arrived and they found no pulse. I was still pulled over on the side of the road. The nurse told me over the phone “She’s gone.” later that night I had the chance to sit with her body and talk to her. That may sound strange to some people, but it helped me.

Fortunately I had told her when she was still alive that I thought she had been a good mother, and that I loved her.

Tonight’s blog by Debra made me want to remember to tell my kids regularly that I love them. They know it, but  especially my son: for some reasons males don’t say that kind of thing to other males, even sons, I think, as much as they do to daughters. He engages in a couple of high risk sports. It would be a tragedy to lose him, and a double tragedy not to have told him how much I care.

What experiences have you had of losing someone, and did you have the chance to “say goodbye” properly? What advice would you give others?

Strange news., Weird things

The world is getting stranger – marijuana from a vending machine.

1 Comment

Well, according to news items, a club in New Zealand  has a vending machine that dispenses 1 gram bags of marijuana for NZ$20 (about US$15) for “medicinal” purposes. The club is owned by the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (Normal).

Cannabis Skunk Plant

Photo from http://www.cannabis-pictures.com

This no doubt poses the police with a dilemma. Who could they charge with selling the drug? To know this, I’d guess they have to know who stocked the machine, and who collected the cash. If these activities are done when the club is closed, and the police can’t see, who do they charge? Police in the town  of Waitemata are said to be “monitoring the situation.” (New Zealand, town names are often hard for non-Kiwis to pronounce, but I’m guessing this is pronounced Why tay-mah-ta). The club founder, Dakta Green, wants to open “Daktories” in every town in the country. (Think about that for a second. His name is  Dakta??? What the hell were his parents thinking??

It opens up all sorts of other possibilities. New Zealand has recently had some devastating earthquakes and a tornado. Imagine some residents of country towns  sitting through the next cyclone, staring into space and giggling, as the sheet metal and glass shards fly around their heads. Earthquakes and tornadoes are terrifying things. I hope that doesn’t happen.

Why not introduce them onto Australian beaches? “Shark alert? What Shark? No worries mate. She’ll be right.” Instead of “Throw another shrimp on the barby,” it would  be “have another joint, cobber.” Or up in Northern Australia where fresh water crocodiles have a habit of eating tourists who ignore the “don’t swim here” signs, it might produce some even greater effects. Does a crock who ingests a stoned tourist get any of the relaxation benefits of the dope from the tourist? After all, you are what you eat.

Or what about American schools where guards use metal detectors  and search students for guns as they go into schools. Trade in your gun for some dope. Get another gram before Math class.

Maybe they should have tried this before those republican nomination debates that began last year. Michelle Bachman and Mitt Rommney with a couple of grams each in them?

“Yeah, No worries. You’d make a great president , Michelle.”

“You too Mitt.”

“Newt, wanna be my Vice President?”

“No sweat, as long as we get one of those vending machines into the White House. Foreign Policy is a real drag. It would be a lot nicer of we could have a real drag as we decide it.”

The world could be a more relaxed place if every country had a “Daktory” in every town and suburb.

“You want me to stop building nuclear missiles?” says Kim Jong-Un. “Hey dude, like, give me a thousand of those pot machines and I’ll do anything you like.”

Uncategorized

For Novel Writers, how to make a believable male a woman would want to fall in love with.

1 Comment

Over at Writers in the Storm Blog Charlotte Carter has written a simply supurb piece on how to write a male that your female character would be willing to fall in love with.

I’m not going  to reproduce the whole thing (there are 13 points) , but a couple of items jumped out at me:

(Now quoting Charlotte:)

1. The hero is great with kids; we’d all want him to be the father of our children

5. The hero has the ability to have fun, or enhances the heroine’s sense of fun.

9, The hero talks to the heroine, revealing more of himself than he ever has before. That makes him vulnerable. (end quote) 

and you can read the other 10 points here.

This post has seriously made me think I need to go back and fill in a little more background on a novel I have in final edits at the moment.

I look forward to more of Charlotte Carter next time she’s on that excellent blog.

Uncategorized

Members of “Pussy Riot” rock group jailed in Russia for 7 years over protest song.

3 Comments

I In Moscow  three members of an all-female rock group called “Pussy Riot” are under arrest for performing an impromptu performance in a Russian church. The group usually perform in skimpy dresses and  balaclavas. Their membership seems to fluctuate between 7 and 11.

Russian feminist collective Pussy Riot stages a protest in Moscow's Red Square against Prime Minister Vladimir Putin. Members were arrested and detained briefly after their mid-January protest.

Their chief offence seems to be that they were singing anti –Putin songs. Putin, as you probably know, has served two  term as president of Russia, and one term  now Prime Minister. Now he’s President again. Russia has turned into one of those states where election results seem predictable and the winner always seems to win by a big margin. Just like other states loved and knew so well in the past: The Philippines under Marcos, Malaysia for the last 30 years, Iran with Ahmadinejad today.

Pussy Riot also have a history of performing in public without a permit. Well why do you need a permit to per in public? I guess that might apply in many cities: it might depend on the amount of electrical gear you are carting around.

The act that got them into trouble recently was singing in a Russian orthodox church. The lyrics of the song called on the virgin Mary   to “chase Putin out.” The three members  of the group who did that have been charged with “hooliganism” which carries a seven  sentence. Seven years???   Seven years???      No that wasn’t a typo.

And even if they were  disrupting a religious service, why can’t they be released on bail? Amnesty International has taken up their case.

Many readers of this blog will have religious backgrounds. They may not approve of violating a religious service. On the other hand, many of those same people will believe in democracy, where oppositions have a fair chance of winning elections, ballot counts are honest, and there is freedom of the press. Russia seems a little deficient on these front.

So what do you think?  Is singing protests sings in a church an offence that should carry a seven year jail sentence? Leave a comment below

Here are some links to Pussy riot.

France 24 news article,  Wikipedia,  National Public radio

Please leave a comment.

Richard Snow

Just another WordPress.com site