Sweaters for Days: Why I'm pissed off about guns in my kids' school.

Sweaters for Days: Why I'm pissed off about guns in my kids' school.: This morning, I was having my coffee, doing my normal Facebook creeping when I found  a local news story about the school that my son and da...

Chapter 5, or The Bit Where We LEarn How to Jog Ana's Memory and Make Her Think Straight

““You’re worried,” he adds, his eyes filled with concern. Is there nothing I can
keep from this man?”

Okay. We’ve established that Charlie Tango got sabotaged. We’ve learned the office fire was arson. She keeps telling him how she can’t live without him. It sort of follows that he may not need to read Bellas’ mind a clairvoyant to work out that she’s worried. And she marvels at his astounding ability to work that out.

“He… swats my behind. I yelp, startled, and realize that today we’re going back to
Seattle and my melancholy blossoms.”

Because that’s how you jog Ana’s memory. You swat her behind. I think that says it all. Also, what do melancholy blossoms look like?

Christian straps the key to my wrist.
“You want me to drive?”
“Yes.” Christian grins. “That’s not too tight?”
“It’s fine. Is that why you’re wearing a life jacket?””

Wait, back up to the start of the chapter.

“He’s dressed in his cut-offs and a gray T-shirt.”

When did the lifejacket materialise on him? And how come, given she’s practically not allowed to take a shit without a bodyguard, he doesn’t put one on her? Are we supposed to believe he would pass up on the opportunity to truss her  into something and arch his brows and make clumsy double entendres about bondage?

““Fair point well made, Mrs. Grey. Are we going to stand on this platform all
day debating your driving skills or are we going to have some fun?”
“Fair point well made, Mr. Grey.” I grasp the handlebars of the Jet Ski and
clamber on”

I’m going to assume someone programmed a macro for E. L so she can just hit Cntrl+FairPointWellMade to generate dialogue.

Then AnaBella crashes the Jetski because she is just so clumsy, and…

“The water is cold this far from the shore, but I surface within a
split second, courtesy of my life jacket.”

Oh look, another insta-lifejacket.

“See, that wasn’t so bad!” I grin as we tread water”

Why are you treading water? You have magic insta-lifejackets!

And then this story arc ends having had no point whatsoever. They did not drown. They did not get chowed on by sharks. Nobody got injured and the only result of the whole fwitterous episode is they have to shower. Because they fell  into the sea. Because they wouldn’t have had to shower if they just had a long sweaty ride in their insta-lifejackets.

Ana contemplates her melancholy blossoms and Christian contemplates the fire in the office and somehow they are in the first-class lounge ready to fly home.

“I’ll have Welch’s balls on a platter if he lets anything like that happen again.”

I thought it was arson. Most people don’t let arson happen. Given that Welch is the poor bugger who had to comb through the email servers to delete the emails Christian kept telling Ana not to send (by email), Chedward had better be wary about threats to Welch’s privates.

“I do the only thing I can think of to ease the sudden tension between us and raise the camera
and snap another photograph.
“Hey, sleepyhead, we’re home,” Christian murmurs.”

She fell asleep in the middle of taking a photograph? No wonder you have to swat her butt to jog her memory.

“His eyes melt, the color of a storm cloud, and he smiles his shy smile, my favorite
smile”

Wait. What? His eyes were burning. Now they’re melting. Edward, you need to rethink those contact lenses. And they melt the color of a storm cloud? Forgive me, I associate melting with hot stuff. Are they going to freeze the color of a volcano next time Ana annoys him?

“it’s hopeless. I’m wide-awake, my body clock on Greenwich mean time, my mind
racing.”

Why is her body clock on Greenwich mean time when they’ve just come back from holiday in a country which isn’t on Greenwich mean time? One Google click tells me that France runs on GMT+1. So her mind needs to stop racing and wait for her body to catch up.

“And now here I am, Mrs. Anastasia Grey, married to the most delicious, sexy, philanthropic, absurdly wealthy mogul a woman could meet”

Here’s the thing. When someone is described as  mogul there’s usually a bit more information attached. Say, a business mogul, or a software mogul. Without that bit of information, a mogul is, in fact, a bump in a ski slope. She is married to the most delicious, sexy, philanthropic, absurdly wealthy bump in a ski slope a woman could meet.

“My shining white-and-dark knight always trying to protect me. How am I going to make him
open up more?”

A scalpel would work. Have you considered a scalpel?

And then they have sex so mindblowing that even E.L is lost for words. Maybe she could just have a blank page, entitled “Mindblowing Sex at 3:05”. Oh, wait…

And just like that, they’re home. Hi, Taylor. Blank page entitled “Mindblowing Sex at 10:30”.

Blah don’t want to go to work meeble can’t be separated from Christian, let’s go to lunch with the family.

“I run my fingers absentmindedly over the leather upholstery of the door to distract my wandering thoughts”

What does this actually mean? Her thoughts are wandering; we know this because they are absent from her mind (geddit, absentmindedly?). Why do they need distracting as well?

“I smile at him, mostly for the benefit of his family, but my spirits take a nosedive again. Why does he make these decisions without telling me?”

Someone please point me at the last decision Christian allowed Ana to take or bothered to inform her about?

“Ana,” Kate exclaims, snapping me out of my reverie. “You still in the South
of France?”
“Yes,” I reply with a smile.”

No. No, she’s on GMT.

“Christian sits down at the shiny black upright piano,presses the quiet pedal, and starts to play a familiar tune that I can’t immediately place”

Pianos have a DAMPER pedal, a SOFT pedal and a MIDDLE pedal. There is no QUIET pedal. Again, one Google stab.

And then OMG Christian is going to let her drive home!

“My inner goddess whips on her leather driving gloves and flat shoes.”

That woman certainly has some props!

And then the Secret Service Sawyer and Taylor tell Chedward that they’re being…

“Followed! Holy shit. My heart lurches into my mouth, pounding, my scalp
prickles and my throat constricts with panic”

Well, it’s a good job her heart made it into her mouth before her throat constricted.

“I mentally slap myself to subdue the dread that’s threatening to swamp me”

How do you mentally slap yourself? Is she slapping her inner goddess? I personally hope she slaps her subconscious so hard those half-moon specs go flying.

““How do we know we’re being followed?” My voice is a breathy, squeaky,whisper.
“The Dodge behind us has false license plates.””

Um – wait. How does it follow from there that the Dodge is following you?

Ah, I get it! E.L is using a syllogism. Clever girl! It works like this :

Major premise : Ana and Christian are the most important people in the world. (she did not bother saying this because you should already know. For those just joining us, there’ll be a clue a bit further on.)

Minor premise : There is a car with false plates on the motorway

Conclusion : It must be following Ana and Christian.

“I drop a gear and floor it.”

If you dropped the gear, surely gravity will see to it that it gets to the floor?

“I weave between the two lines of traffic like a black counter in a game of
checkers, effectively jumping the cars and trucks”

Batmobile……located! Please, please let her make another reference to the Dark Knight before the end of the ride….Please!

“As I put my foot down, the glorious R8 zooms forward, and we tear down the left lane, lesser mortals pulling over to let us pass”

I hate this author so much. But there you have the missing bit of the syllogism.

“A truck lurches into the fast lane—Shit!—and I have to slam on the brakes.
“Fucking idiot!” Christian curses the driver as we lurch forward in our seats.”

“I slow, check my mirrors, signal, then move with surprising ease across four
lanes of the highway and down the off-ramp”

You move with surprising ease because the lesser mortals have all pulled over, Ana. You told us this.

“The street is quiet, with few vehicles. Where is everyone?”

Chedward, slap her butt. Jog her memory.

And then she finds out that Sawyer has a first name.

““Ah.” How did I not know this? The man has been following me to work for the last six weeks, and I didn’t even know his first name.”

You don’t know this because you’ve been too busy having an orgasm every time Chedward Grullen looks at you, Ana. Also he hasn’t been following you to work for the last three weeks because you’ve been on honeymoon. Slap her butt.

“You did amazingly well, as usual. You blow me away, Ana. You never let me down.”

I wish she would blow him away.

“Adrenaline turns to lust streaking through my body. I clasp his face, running my fingers over his sideburns”

And a few paragraphs later…

“My fingers curl into his overlong hair”

And then they have the sex in the car and it is mindblowing but unfortunately not a blank page entitled “Mindblowing Sex in the Carpark.”

“Where’s the, er . . . unsub? What does that mean by the way? Sounds very
BDSM.”

Honey, by the time an unsub gets involved it’s not BDSM any more, it’s murder.

So, Christian drives them home and then they decide to have more of the sex, this time on the car but they’re rudely interrupted by some inconsiderate bastard  who wants to park his car and get home. They meet the inconsiderate bastard at the lift, he smiles at Ana and Chedward pees on her.

“ He pushes the call button and as we wait, the driver of the BMW joins us. He’s young, casually dressed, with long, layered, dark hair. He looks like he works in the media.
“Hi,” he says, smiling warmly at us.
Christian puts his arm around me and nods politely.”

And then she rolls her eyes at him and they decide it’s time for om nom rough sex nom.

“When we burst through the double doors, Sawyer is standing in the hallway, looking expectantly at the two of us.
“Sawyer, I’d like to be debriefed in an hour,” Christian says.”

Now, see, you debrief someone who has been on a mission. They tell you what they’ve seen and done. I don’t think Sawyer really wants to know about Ana’s awesome driving skills, because he saw most of that, and as for sex in the car, if Chedward told him he’d have to kill him.

And so endeth Chapter 5.

Fifty Shades of WT double F

How is this not the most blatant rip-off of Twilight EVER?

 

“The painful recollection of how I felt when Charlie Tango was sabotaged and Christian went missing—the hollow emptiness, the indescribable pain—keeps resurfacing; the memory nagging
me and gnawing at my heart.”

 

There you have the entire summary , plot and storyline  of “New Moon” . And in that book, at least the author had the decency to represent the hollow emptiness with loads of blank pages bearing nothing but the name of the month in which Bella felt empty!

 

 ‘’Keeping the smile fixed on my face, I try to repress it.’’

 

I’m confused here. Is it her face she’s repressing? Her smile? The memory?  Subject/object agreement is clearly for pussies!

 

“Were you watching me sleep?”

 

Yes, because he is a tortured vampire Edward Cullen A CREEP!

“Yes,” he says gazing at me steadily, studying me. “You were talking.”

 

Because EVEN THOUGH NOWHERE IN ANY OF THE BOOKS HAS IT BEEN MENTIONED THAT ANA TALKS IN HER SLEEP SHE IS A BETTER VAMPIRE THAN BELLA SWAN!

“Oh?” Shit! What was I saying?”

 

Going by the rest of your dialogue, AnaBella, probably “Jeez!”  and  “Double Crap!”

 

 

Internet - good servant, bad master

When L.M.M Montgomery read a newspaper story about a young orphan girl sent by mistake to a middle-aged brother and sister (the mistake being they wanted a boy to help run the farm) she was inspired to write "Anne of Green Gables". I sometimes wonder if she would have done that if she'd first decided to pop on to Facebook and update her status to "OMG, got brilliant idea for book!" and put in a few rounds of Farmville.

Anyway, luckily she didn't do that.She went on to chronicle most of the life of said Anne, and in one of her later books she used yet another newspaper story as part of the plot. I particularly remember this one because our minister that year preached about it under the guise of "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." I thought he was plagiarising Anne, but actually, he'd turned the same newspaper article into part of his own plot.

The story goes that in the town to which Anne moves with her doctor/surgeon husband, there lives a lady who runs whatever a boarding-house was called in those days (late 1890's). She is mostly accompanied by and has to take care of a grinning shambling idiot (I use that in the descriptive rather than the derogatory sense). He's her previously charming and well-spoken husband. Apparently he charmed her parents - and her - into believing he would be a good husband and then turned into a chronic wifebeater; and one of the only reasons she's not actually badly damaged is that he was a sailor and spent long periods away from home. On one of those trips (to Shanghai) he picked a fight with the wrong crowd and some percussive maintenance on his head turned him into the useless but non-violent wreck he is now. His crew brought him home (thanks, guys!) and now he can't earn money, hence boarding-house. Meantime, a writer has come to finish off his masterpiece, taken up residence at the boarding house and he and the ex-abused wife are in love. The good people of the village look askance at this arrangement (skeevy hoor!) at the same time as not doing a whole lot to help her eke out a living.

Enter Anne's doctor husband, who enthusiastically pronounces his belief that he can cure the idiot's idiocy with surgery, and is totally taken aback when the entire village gets up in arms about the prospect, on account of where Idiot George is better than Wifebeater George. Eventually the doctor gives the wife the choice, and she tells him to go ahead. (The minister said it was because she knew it was her Christian duty; personally I think the doctor sold it to her when he started the sentence "There's a huge risk involved, but.."). Idiot George not only survives the operation, but turns out not to be George at all. Apparently he's Fred, George's identical cousin; he signed on for the Shanghai trip at the last moment and was with him when George picked the fight that ultimately caused George's death, for dead he is. Fred was trying to go to his aid when he saw someone sink a knife in George's stomach and dump him in Shanghai Harbour; and shortly after that Fred's head met something hard and he went into limbo for seven years. The crew brought him home because they couldn't tell the difference between Fred and George and at least George had somewhere to go (thanks, guys!). So the wife is a widow, George is fish poo, and the doctor is suddenly a hero. Everyone is happy, except of course the villagers, who not only have to eat huge helpings of humble pie, they also have to find another village idiot and elect another skeevy hoor. Also Fred, who is now not only jobless and homeless, but has a long and interesting gap on his CV.

The point of this long ramble is that writers have always used sources. Even Shakespeare used the rumours of Danish regicide and insanity to craft Hamlet.

So at what point does using a Source become plagiarism? See, I am fascinated by the hoohah surrounding Fifty Shades of Grey. I haven't read it and probably won't, but when last did a book provoke such a reaction? It apparently sets back the cause of women's rights by fifty years (bzuh?) and there's a mass book burning being organised by the women who run the Auckland abused women's shelter organisation (I don't approve of any book burning on principle; this more so because women have been abused for far longer than books have been around to give their abusers the notion). It is held to be responsible for increased crowds of women visiting hardware stores to buy supplies such as rope and chains (I've tried to stay away from that one).  And then there are those who are screaming PLAGIARISM.

What does it plagiarise?

Apparently, Twilight.

Now, given that the heroine of Fifty Shades apparently signs a contract allowing some filthy rich stranger millionaire to do whatever he wants with her, the only thing I can see that Fifty Shades has in common with Twilight is that it chronicles the unlikely survival of two heroines who share a total disregard for safety and common sense. At least I assume the heroine of Fifty Shades survives, given there's a Book the Second and Book the Third. We all know what happens in Twilight. Well, I do; my then-eleven-year old wanted to read it and I read it first so I would know how much please-explaining I would need to do (the answer is none, though I did emphasize that when you find a creepy stalker of any species lurking in the corner of your bedroom and watching you sleep, the appropriate course of action is to take a nine-iron to him. Or possibly the fairway wood).

So, suicidal heroines and filthy rich weirdos. What else do the books have that support the cries of plagiarism?

So, yes, I did it. I asked Google.

Do you know, there's a blogger out there who collected fifty (heh!) instances of plagiarism between the two? Well, she and her friends.

http://www.fiftyshadesofplagiarism.blogspot.co.nz/

I can't comment, not having read Fifty Shades; but it does strike me that in order to do this they all would have bought copies of Fifty Shades. No such thing as bad publicity, evidently.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2012/05/the-origins-of-50-shades-of-grey-go-missing.html talks about  "romance-focused site Dear Author, which compared the two works side by side. In one test, using the plagiarism-checker TurnItIn, the texts had 89% similarity." There's a plagiarism checker?
Yes, there is. And here we have the good servant/bad master factor in a nutshell.
For all of this fascinating research time, I WAS NOT WRITING!!!
And so I am writing this, so I will see it and remind myself of what I am supposed to be doing when I get behind my computer. Writing - and using the Internet for that purpose.

Sadface

Neil Armstrong died.That is all.

Gobsmacked. The man speaks fluent crazy.

http://amarillo.com/news/latest-news/2012-08-20/senate-candidates-comments-rape-stir-outcry


Todd Aiken, Missouri Congressman and rabid anti-abortionist, was asked in an interview broadcast Sunday on St. Louis television station KTVI if he would support abortions for women who have been raped.

"It seems to me first of all, from what I understand from doctors, that's really rare," Akin said. "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down," Akin said of a rape victim's chances of becoming pregnant.

While my mind is flailing desperately around the notion that it follows if a rape victim does become pregnant, then it wasn't a legitimate rape, it occurs to me that possibly the flailing comes from the fact that 'legitimate' and 'rape' don't belong in the same sentence or even in the same thought.

My relationship with the nice young men from Vagabond..

... let me tell you about it.

Vagabond, for those just joining us, is a shop supplying all the needs of wargamers young and old, from models and paints to trading cards and scenarios for said wargames. The paints come with wonderful names like Ratskin Flesh, Screamer Pink and Incubi Darkness. Every now and again when Honourable Son needs something, he writes it on a piece of paper, and I go to Vagabond and hand over the piece of paper, and they glance at it and go and get boxes with horrifying things on them and I hand over my card and pay and leave. Scarily, they seem to be able to read his writing. One time in the school holidays I was given a list of paints with names I couldn't decipher - possibly just as well - and the nice young man frowned, looked at me  and said something that might have been "They don't use Bleached Bone white in the new coda; it's supposed to be Maggot Shit white" or possibly not. We stared at each other for a few seconds, then I fished out my mobile, selected Honourable Son from my contacts and meekly handed the phone over. They spoke Vulcan for a short while, or possibly Klingon, and then the nice young man disconnected and gave me my phone back. He went off and came back with several tiny paint pots and a Thing I don't even want to think about and I paid and departed.
Me and the nice young men at Vagabond understand each other perfectly.
So, Honourable Son's birthday is coming up and today I Googlemapped the store (it's moved), printed the map and stuck on the post-it note on which Honourable Son had scrawled what is probably StormRaven. I did have verbal confirmation from him that this is what he wanted.I set off for Queen Street at lunchtime, found the shop, marched in and cheerfully asked for a StormRaven.
The two nice young men glanced meaningfully at each other. One of them stuck out his hand and I meekly handed over my map. He unfolded it, found the post-it note, then looked back at the other one and nodded. The other nice young man disappeared and came back with a box. It has a seriously ugly gunship thing on the cover, bearing no relation at all to any raven I have ever seen. He put the box together with my note into a bag, I paid and left.
Nice young men clearly know better than to believe me, obviously. Wonder what would have happened if I had gone in without my note? Oh wait, I know the answer to that one.
I'd have had to hand over my phone. 

Stormraven. On no account hand one over to an unaccompanied mother.