• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

FT453

Oi, @lordmongrove , we're the bloody biscuit correspondents! Biccies come under the couch potato brief, and well you know it.
 
Last edited:
Interesting letter (Bookshop Peculiarities, p66) about the tendency of people in bookshops to unerringly go for a new title, recently shelved. Maybe the simple explanation is this: people in bookshops and libraries are people of habit who will have their "beats" that take them to the shelves they have most interest in. In my experience, you get a "feel" for the layout of familiar shelves and the visual look of familiar titles and the shapes of spines, thicknesses and colours of covers, et c, shelved in author order. This doesn't change much. it becomes a familiar landscape.

Suddenly, something new is in there. Something unfamiliar, which disrupts the picture you're familiar with. Of course you get curious and investigate. Even if it's on the Fantasy shelf and it turns out to be nothing more than another Clone of Shannara book by Terry Bloody Brooks.
 
AgProv said:
Clone of Shannara book by Terry Bloody Brooks.
Click to expand...
I know this shows my age but I bought all the Shannara Books by TBB as they were released. They were a good read back then, but as you correctly pointed out, they were heavily cloned, to the point that I stopped reading fantasy fiction.
 
Tempest63 said:
I know this shows my age but I bought all the Shannara Books by TBB as they were released. They were a good read back then, but as you correctly pointed out, they were heavily cloned, to the point that I stopped reading fantasy fiction.
Click to expand...
I still wonder how he got away with the first one, which was basically The Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off and the character names changed! As Terry Pratchett pointed out, the most fearsome form of Lawful Evil in the fantasy realms are the dread legions of The Lawyers of the Estate of JRR Tolkein.
 
AgProv said:
I still wonder how he got away with the first one, which was basically The Lord of the Rings with the serial numbers filed off and the character names changed! As Terry Pratchett pointed out, the most fearsome form of Lawful Evil in the fantasy realms are the dread legions of The Lawyers of the Estate of JRR Tolkein.
Click to expand...
I never got further than the first one precisely because of that, and never read that author again.
 
I'm still not sure how Terry Pratchett managed to slip a parody/pastiche of LOTR into Witches Abroad without the lawyers complaining. (There's a scene where the Lancre Witches are negotiating a fast-flowing major river in a boat, and a suspiciously Gollum-like entity tries his luck with them; they whack him over the fingers with an oar and chuck him back in.)

"Cheeky little bugger." said Nanny Ogg.
"I wonder what he wanted?" Magrat Garlick said, curiously.

There must have been something said, as in a later book, Terry has the swords of the NacMacFeegle glow blue in the presence of lawyers, who they view as a potent kind of evil.
 
Back to 453: the article on the overlap of (arguably) irrational government with (definitely) irrational religion is pretty good - and worrying. For people to be elected who think like that - pre-mediaeval mind-set with access to high-tech modern weaponry - is something anyone should be worried about. and for them to be elected into positions of power at all, it suggests a significant part of the electorate is onside with that sort of thinking. And the whole concept of the human psyche being so frail that it can be continually manipulated by sinister external forces and hordes of demons, as if we have no free will or strength of mind (the implication being that we can't think for ourselves and need God or Satan to continually push our buttons) is a Fortean area all of its own.
 
Interesting article (p51) By Matt Salusbury, on "Black Government Wagons". MS talks about a panic in the late 1800's, concerning Fenian activists ambushing police lock-up wagons in order to free Irish republican prisoners, and that panic about the Fenian Peril was a contributory factor to the establishment of Special Branch. (To monitor and spy on disaffected Irish immigrants in Britain and stamp this sort of thing out at the root).

Could I mention here that this wasn't completely a groundless panic, that the heathen Irish would rise up and slaughter innocent British people in their beds, or something alike? (As, after all, every right-thinking British person at that time would have known - these people are not quite fully human, a long way beneath the rest of the white race, and are addicted to irrational bloody violence against their betters, in much the same way Tolkien's Orcs saw the cultured and cultivated Elves as some sort of living insult, a continual reminder of their own inferiority.) Hence, Special Branch came into being.

There's a memorial in Manchester to a successful ambush, by Fenian volunteers, on a police black wagon that was transporting convicted Irish people to prison, in November 1867.

https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/statues/fenian.html

You have to look hard to find it, as not even Manchester City Council cares to admit too publicly that it maintains a memorial to an action carried out by a precursor of the IRA, but the memorial plaque is tucked away to the right of this railway bridge (that replaced a previous structure there in 1867).

1735770240198.png


1735770408671.png
 
AgProv said:
Interesting article (p51) By Matt Salusbury, on "Black Government Wagons". MS talks about a panic in the late 1800's, concerning Fenian activists ambushing police lock-up wagons in order to free Irish republican prisoners, and that panic about the Fenian Peril was a contributory factor to the establishment of Special Branch. (To monitor and spy on disaffected Irish immigrants in Britain and stamp this sort of thing out at the root).

Could I mention here that this wasn't completely a groundless panic, that the heathen Irish would rise up and slaughter innocent British people in their beds, or something alike? (As, after all, every right-thinking British person at that time would have known - these people are not quite fully human, a long way beneath the rest of the white race, and are addicted to irrational bloody violence against their betters, in much the same way Tolkien's Orcs saw the cultured and cultivated Elves as some sort of living insult, a continual reminder of their own inferiority.) Hence, Special Branch came into being.

There's a memorial in Manchester to a successful ambush, by Fenian volunteers, on a police black wagon that was transporting convicted Irish people to prison, in November 1867.

https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/statues/fenian.html

You have to look hard to find it, as not even Manchester City Council cares to admit too publicly that it maintains a memorial to an action carried out by a precursor of the IRA, but the memorial plaque is tucked away to the right of this railway bridge (that replaced a previous structure there in 1867).

View attachment 85686

View attachment 85687
Click to expand...

 
AgProv said:
Interesting article (p51) By Matt Salusbury, on "Black Government Wagons". MS talks about a panic in the late 1800's, concerning Fenian activists ambushing police lock-up wagons in order to free Irish republican prisoners, and that panic about the Fenian Peril was a contributory factor to the establishment of Special Branch. (To monitor and spy on disaffected Irish immigrants in Britain and stamp this sort of thing out at the root).

Could I mention here that this wasn't completely a groundless panic, that the heathen Irish would rise up and slaughter innocent British people in their beds, or something alike? (As, after all, every right-thinking British person at that time would have known - these people are not quite fully human, a long way beneath the rest of the white race, and are addicted to irrational bloody violence against their betters, in much the same way Tolkien's Orcs saw the cultured and cultivated Elves as some sort of living insult, a continual reminder of their own inferiority.) Hence, Special Branch came into being.

There's a memorial in Manchester to a successful ambush, by Fenian volunteers, on a police black wagon that was transporting convicted Irish people to prison, in November 1867.

https://manchesterhistory.net/manchester/statues/fenian.html

You have to look hard to find it, as not even Manchester City Council cares to admit too publicly that it maintains a memorial to an action carried out by a precursor of the IRA, but the memorial plaque is tucked away to the right of this railway bridge (that replaced a previous structure there in 1867).

View attachment 85686

View attachment 85687
Click to expand...

The murdered policeman, Sgt. Charles Brett, married with four children:

440px-Charles_Brett.jpg


https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Brett_(police_officer)

I wonder where his plaque is?

maximus otter
 
Thanks for adding that, Maximus. It adds a different perspective to the same event. A reminder that these things didn't come out of nowhere in 1969, nor indeed in 1917, and inevitably a lot of people got hurt just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Going to the Elvis article: I found it interesting to read about the sheer extent of the Messianic aura that other people attached to Presley even during his life. The most remarkable thing is that the comparisons to Jesus Christ were so frequent and so blatant, as if the "Bigger than Jesus!" business was playing itself out long before John Lennon uttered the words - yet no preacher demanded that people brought their Elvis Presley trash out and piled it up in a bonfire for disposal. (could it be because Lennon was a foreigner?)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top