Twisted by Laurie Halse Andersen

It starts with a note : this is not a book for children.

What’s this, some sort of Lemony Snickett gimmick, considering it’s very much a high school story. That’s before the progress in the sex, violence and language issues.

Nerdy Tyler Miller, “the pimple on the bottom” of the popular crowd spray-paints his high school at the end of his junior year and gets caught. Mandatory community service for defacing public property means hard manual labor with the janitors. Muscles, suntan and a growth spurt later, Tyler starts senior year and catches the eye of  “alpha female”  Bethany Millbury. When naked photos of Bethany are posted after a big party, the police head straight for Tyler, and life spirals rapidly downward.

I highly recommend this book for the parents to take note of the cyberbullying issues.

Sorted

Which Hogwarts house will you be sorted into?

Spelling with Flickr

Thanks for the link, Lotus.

And so it goes

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

Kurt Vonnegut passed away last night at 84.

The Traveller

It is set in the present and takes a lot of material from today’s headlines to create a world that could conceivably exist, a world where “big brother” is a reality, where everyone lives in a virtual prison of being watched by someone else. In the tech community there have been discussions of this at length that say that in truth, privacy is an illusion.

The Traveler functions mainly as an Orwellian cautionary tale with some Matrix fight scenes and metaphysical speculation thrown in. An Illuminati-like shadowy organization known only as the Tabula controls modern society through technology. They’re influenced by Bentham’s idea of the Panopticon—a prison in which the prisoners couldn’t see their captors, and thus had to assume they were always being watched. Their methods are fairly plausible, which I’ll admit is quite scary.

Harlequins represent the other group, they are the protectors of the Travelers, or rather, people who can have outer body experiences and travel to other realms, which is totally Lobsang Rampa. When we catch up to the story, it surrounds mainly two brothers who are the sons of a traveler, and as such, could have the same power their father has, and a Harlequin who tried unsuccessfully to blend into the “vast machine” of mundane culture. Unfortunately for her the Tabula, still want her dead. After her father is killed, the Harlequin, Maya, flees Europe and goes to the only place she can go to, to see if the rumors of a Traveler are real and if so she will do as all Harlequins have done in the past, that is protect the Traveler.

Michael and Gabriel Corrigan are the two brothers. Gabriel has taken great pains to be off the grid in his life. He is a courier, rides a motorcycle, and when he is not delivering packages around Los Angeles, he skydives. Michael on the other hand is the older brother and sees himself as the more responsible one. He is in real estate, and is firmly plugged into the vast machine. The vast machine, as a result, knows exactly where he is and they capture him.

Nathan Boone and a General Nash are the faces we see of the Brethren, and the legitimate front corporation they represent, the Evergreen foundation. They convince Michael to help them by becoming a traveler. It turns out that they need Travelers now because they will help the Evergreen foundation to map the entrances and exits to the different realms. On the other side of the that is an alien civilization that will trade them designs for a quantum computer for this road map of different dimensions.

All set for a trilogy, folks.

Jai Google Ki

I thought that this blog had reached the nadir of its existence when Google turned it up for the query, “Do Bollywood actresses have hair in their armpits?” but I was optimistic. A look at the stats this bright Saturday morning reveals that apparently someone has accessed this page for the question “Why do old men’s balls hang?” *sob* Oh G-! Why me??? Seriously, my gentle readers – and other perverts – what in this innocuous little book log is there that suggests it is remotely connected to the physiognomy of geriatric males?

Superhero

Niranjan did this quiz, and I thought it would be good idea to tag someone like me who still gets excited about Marvel and DC, and secretly hankers to rip off the baniyain and reveal a superhero logo underneath. I tag you Parth, Extempore, Lotus. I also tag you Sitara, and Amar Akbar Anthony get tagged because they are super.

You are The Flash

The Flash 85% Green Lantern 80% Supergirl 75% Wonder Woman 60% Batman 60% Iron Man 55% Hulk 50% Spider-Man 45% Robin 42% Catwoman 20% Superman 15%

Fast, athletic and flirtatious.

Which Superhero are you?

Plus ça change, plus c’est le meme

Thank you, Cereal Girl for the tag, and the opportunity to spread the weirdness through the blogosphere like a virus. Here are 6 weird things about me!

 

1. I’m a booksniffer.

2. I have to read something before I can sleep. Even if I’ve run a marathon, lifted weights for 3 straight hours before drinking 8 shots of tequila and dancing till 3 a.m. – something that unfortunately seems to happen less and less as age advances – I have to read at least for 10 minutes before I can finally drift off.

 

3. I hate lists like the Best 100 Books / Movies / Rock Shows / Swimsuits, and so on. They only serve to remind me of how many great books, movies, concerts, lingerie, etc. I missed while I was probably reading something crappy, watching a lousy show, and stripping diapers or drippy underwear.

 

4. I’m paranoid abut bookmarks. I’ll never let one go out of free will, and you’ll have to saw off my clutching, cold dead fingers from the good ones. But I still tend to lose a lot of them. Get orf, you lying, scheming, bookmark thiefs!!! I have a similar obsession about coffee mugs, but at least I know I dropped it on the floor and chipped, nicked, or shattered it.

 

5. Punctuation and grammatical errors give me hyperacidity. Spelling mistakes make me foam at the mouth. When I receive SMS abbreviations in my email, I wake up in a padded cell with blood under my fingernails.

6.

 

 

All you weird people out there, if you make the mark – or are inventive enough – consider yourself tagged.

“tried to talk to the senior officers, explain some of the problems and She  picked up her pack and planted her bottom on the wall, swung her A big fat red slob! I shouted. A hairy conman. There was no answer. I rose and brushed off my shorts.”

Don’t you just love spam?

Evil is by nature easy. Because good is a wholeness, whereas evil is a deficiency, and because evil does not act through itself but through the good it preys upon, it takes but a small amount of good to succeed greatly in evil, whereas it takes a great amount of good to succeed but a little in good.

“Some Reflections on Religious Art”

appendix to Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism