Google playing dirty with employees.

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Say my religion is peaceful or I will kill you.

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Sugar has long been a popular drug consumed and even sold in schools world-wide. But concerns over health, obesity and the risk of diabetes have led some schools in California to institute a ban on sugary snacks. In response to these candy sales bans, some students are starting to deal candy bars on the “underground market” at a marked up price. . .

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Writing and Rebellion is the title of this piece from Ward Six:

That is, writing as a form of rebellion. All three of us seemed to regard it as such, although for all of us the sentiment appeared personal, rather than as a kind of doctrine. One of us grew up in a religious southern black family; another in working-class Spanish Harlem; another in white, middle-class suburbia, and in a way, each of us, in our work, was and is reacting aggressively to the world around us.

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A Chinese ship docked in Durban harbour late on Wednesday carrying three million rounds of ammunition for small arms, 3,500 mortar bombs and mortar tubes, as well as 1,500 rocket-propelled grenades. All destined for Zimbabwe. This at the same time as the Zimbabwean government has accused the opposition leader, Morgan Tsvangirai, of treason by plotting with Britain to overthrow the President, Robert Mugabe.

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WF Frederick has a list of 10 Social Media Sites specifically for writers. Go look up Shelfari, Scribophile, Issuu and Ficlets.

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Copy write versus Copyright. Do keep up.

I met a psychiatrist once who believed that the national Irish affinity for drinking was a product of centuries of oppression/emasculation by the British.

The post goes on to review the film Kings from Tom Collins, and the play The Seafarer, by Conor McPherson

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When The Cat Kin didn’t sell enough copies, Faber decided not to publish the sequel, so Nick Green, the author, went on to publish Cat’s Paw as a print-on-demand volume through Lulu.
Now The Cat Kin is shortlisted for the Bolton Children’s Book Award and the Sefton Super-Reads Book Award.
In her Guardian blog, Ann Giles wonders how a book as good as The Cat Kin could suffer from poor sales. What kind of marketing support did the publisher give it?

Certainly, I’d never heard of it, or seen it in any shops, until a book blogger friend alerted me both to the book and the fate of its sequel. I checked on Amazon, as I always do, and followed it by googling Nick Green to find out what’s what. An intelligently put together website is always a plus, and he also writes a blog. Being one for avoiding the big bookstore chain, I turned to my trusted independent, hoping they might actually have it already, as they specialise in children’s books. The owner, who reviews children’s books for The Bookseller, had not come across it either, despite the torrent of review copies coming through the front door.

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100 Best Last Lines From Novels, e.g.:

Is it possible for anyone in Germany nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever the reason, and not be flooded by the memory of a dream to end all dreams?

You have to guess.

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“God bless America, land of the free, but sadly not the land of the depraved,” said Sebastian Horsley, the British author who was refused entry into the USA last week. The reason for his rejection: moral turpitude. He referred to the recent resignation of Eliot Spitzer, the former governor of New York, in the wake of revelations that he had frequented prostitutes. “I’m not a politician, I’m an artist,” Mr. Horsley said. “Depravity is part of the job description.”

Sheryl Crow’s music is the sound of soccer mom nation. It’s not just the kind of music your mother would like, it’s the kind of music your mother would make (and maybe does at the local weekly coffee house in the church basement): midtempo rock, sing-along choruses, strummed acoustic guitar (the very sound of which is enough to inspire a conditioned revulsion response in many Americans [and Europeans] below the age of 18), and, on Crow’s latest album, explicitly political lyrics.

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F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1925 novel, The Great Gatsby, with its themes of possibility and aspiration, speaks to a new generation of immigrants from China and elsewhere.
Sara Rimer in the NY Times reports on teachers who say students can see themselves in Gatsby.
Many are inspired by the green light at the end of the dock, which for Jay Gatsby, the self-made millionaire from North Dakota, symbolizes the upper-class woman he longs for. “Green color always represents hope,” says Jinzhao Wang, 14, who immigrated from China two years ago .
“My green light?” said Jinzhao, who has been studying “Gatsby” in her sophomore English class at the Boston Latin School. “My green light is Harvard.”

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Nick Fraser in The Observer writes about the rediscovery of the dark genius, Richard Yates.

My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations, Yates explains. Doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are.

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THE prototypical computer whiz of popular imagination — pasty, geeky, male — has failed to live up to his reputation.
According to Stephenie Rosenbloom at The New York Times, research shows that among the youngest Internet users, the primary creators of Web content (blogs, graphics, photographs, Web sites) are not misfits resembling the Lone Gunmen of “The X Files.” On the contrary, the cyberpioneers of the moment are digitally effusive teenage girls.

(Habib, the bookseller, walks) over to me with a massive volume, printed in 1890 and entitled Architectural Studies in Italy, number 49 out of only 150 copies, authored by William J Anderson, president of the Glasgow Architectural Association. “The Photo-Mechanical-Process and the printing are by Messrs McLure and Macdonald & Co Glasgow,” the reader is solemnly informed, and by God, they knew how to print. Not in the glossiest of architectural volumes have I seen such fine and detailed drawings. “How much do you think it’s worth?” Habib asks me quietly. I express my total ignorance. “Sometimes I sell a book and I regret selling it,” he says mysteriously. “The person who loves a book – I sometimes sell it to him at half price. If I don’t like him, I don’t sell it to him for any price.”

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My piece on Huckleberry Finn appears on Norman Geras‘ blog.

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Dick Jones‘ Patteran Pages have a sneak preview of questions from 16+ Mathematics examination papers.

Sample from the one for State Schools: Simon has 0.5 kilos of cocaine. If he sells an 8 ball to Matt for 300 quid and 90 grams to Ollie for 90 quid a gram, what is the street value of the rest of his hold?

Sample from the one for Private Schools: Fiona’s personal shopper decides to substitute generic and own-brand products for the designer goods favoured by her employer. In the course of a month she saves the price of a return ticket to Fiji and Fiona doesn’t even notice the difference. Is she thick or what?

The others are even better. Go see.

John McCain, Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith
Barack Obama, Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin – a biography of Lincoln
Mitt Romney, John Adams by David McCullough
Mick Huckabee, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? by Francis Schafer
John Edwards, The Trial of Socrates by I.F. Stone
Hillary Clinton, The Federalist Papers – the American constitution, etc.
Rudy Guiliani, The Federalist Papers – the American constitution, etc.

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CBS News also reported that Woolworths stores in Britain have stopped selling “Lolita” beds for young girls, after a parents’ organization complained because of the name’s association with Nabakov’s novel about a paedophile.
“There aren’t many people in the company, in the whole world, who know about the ‘Lolita’ book or films,” a Woolworths spokeswoman said.

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Amanda Eyre Ward writes about How Do You Become a Writer? on Cindy Bokma’s site:

I remember going to hear Joyce Carol Oates read when I was in college. I wanted desperately to be a writer, and I hung on her every word. When she mentioned that she wrote by a window, I noted write by a window. When she said she drank tea, I wrote tea. Whenever I met a real writer, I asked them where they wrote, how they wrote, and when. I wanted to know the rules, how to organize my life in order to succeed.

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The TimesOnline reports that a 37-year-old American businesswoman and married mother of three is seeking justice after she was thrown in jail by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at a Starbucks coffee shop in Riyadh.

The suspects have now been remanded in custody, among them retired military officers and the lawyer Kemal Kerincisz. The latter has been instrumental in the pursuit of a series of writers and intellectuals through the courts, filing cases against Pamuk himself as well as the novelists Elif Shafak and Perihan Magden and the murdered journalist Hrant Dink.

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What happens when you publish a blog post? Quite a lot; and almost simultaneously. There is a nice animation on Wired which will explain all.

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The New York Times reports that Amazon, busily adding digital downloads to its vast Web store, has agreed to buy Audible, the largest online seller of audiobooks for $300 million.

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Doris Lessing finally received the Nobel Prize in Fiction at a gathering in London. She told the audience: “Thank you does not seem enough when you’ve won the best of them all. It is astonishing and amazing. I would like to say that there isn’t anywhere to go from here.”
She later joked: “I could get a pat on the head from the Pope.”

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Win a bookshelf full of books from The Book Show on Sky Arts.

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The Tom Cruise indoctrination video that scientology tried to suppress is on Gawker.
The actor’s style on the video was recently compared to the Nazi propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels.
Guido Knopp, who has written a number of books on Hitler and his inner circle, said the video, which surfaced on YouTube last week, “inevitably” recalled Goebbels’ speech in a Berlin sports stadium when he asked “Do you want total war?” and the crowd thundered “Yes!”

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A goth who leads his girlfriend around with a dog lead and collar was stopped from getting on a bus in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, amid fears for passenger safety. Just another day in a small market town in England. The full story with pictures is on the BBC site.

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Ten extraordinary literary suicides in Times Online. Do you still want to be a writer?