10 posts tagged “book”

Another little gem from my visit to Robert and Delia’s place today. Robert forwarded me the URL to April Winchell’s blog, who blogged about some swearing the President did.
   Specifically, then-Sen. Barack Obama read the audio book version of his autobiography, Dreams of My Father, quoting his friend Ray, who had rather colourful language.

[Cross-posted from Lucire] By Lucire’s editor-at-large and Planet Green host Summer Rayne Oakes, Style, Naturally is an eco-conscious guide to fashion and beauty, with responsible brands and tips for living sustainably. It’s the most comprehensive and accessible book on the topic—we had a sneak preview a few months ago. Out now; for more information, surf to Summer Rayne’s site at www.summerrayneoakes.com. Retail in the US is US$24·95—you can buy now via Amazon.com for a lower price of $18·96.

Got in one of these at work. Very clever, and in New Zealand at $32·99 (UK at £9·99).

   No idea where we’ve put it, mind. Hopefully this means we have given it away to a child. I think our cover might be different, showing all the characters in the title, ABC3D.

This was a great find at Take Note in Lower Hutt today. Take Note is a post office and gift shop run by my friend Mandeep but I have never bought a book from there before. I was surprised to find it displayed prominently and being an automobiliac I paid the $40 for it.

   My cover differs slightly: the News Gothic-set headlines have been replaced by the same text in ITC Benguiat, while the lettering around the masthead is now Akzidenz-Grotesk. Inside, there are great Car articles from 1965 to 1974, covering the best of the first decade (I became a reader, thanks to Gary Hayvice, whose daughter was a classmate of mine, in 1981). I grew up with Llewellyn, Bishop, Setright and the rest; I remember Bulgin, and very briefly, wasn’t there a chap called James May? But some of the earlier talents appear in this compilation.
   Some articles are prescient—the warning that Honda could be a big player if it chose to build saloon cars, and the war for oil and how it might run out (from the first fuel crisis in the 1970s)—and others are less so, such as the warning that a Channel Tunnel would be a folly. Others are plain out of place in today’s politically correct world, namely the nude models that adorned cars at motor shows.
   There are even old advertisements, including one for women—flogging copies of Good Housekeeping. It was very sexist and the idea that cars were designed to pull birds was very much in evidence.
   It’s hardcover, so it should be a proud collection of 1960s’ and 1970s’ motoring journalism in my home.

Although I have finally tired of Facebook, my friend Jason Alba has co-authored one on the service, called I’m on Facebook—Now What?, to which I contributed briefly.
   I would recommend this as a how-to guide for those unfamiliar with social networks. The authors employ a lot of the tricks I use for the service. Do get it if you are new to Facebook, or even if you are not so new to it.

I found this on the Informer’s blog here on Vox. Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt, who was senior policy adviser to the Department of Education under the Reagan Administration, talks about the dumbing-down of the United States and how education has been set on a socialist path by Marxists. She has written a book called The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, which you can download free of charge in PDF format from her site.
   From the preface, with footnotes omitted and some paragraphing changed for clarity:

… Achievement of Students, Key Points: U. S. twelfth graders scored below the international average and among the lowest of the 21 TIMSS nations in both mathematics and science general knowledge in the final year of secondary school. (p. 24)
   Obviously, something is terribly wrong when a $6,330 per pupil expenditure produces such pathetic results. This writer has visited private schools which charge $1,000-per-year in tuition which enjoy superior academic results. Parents of home-schooled children spend a maximum of $1,000-per-year and usually have similar excellent results. …
   The desire by “resisters” to prove their case has been so strong that they have continued to amass-over a thirty- to fifty-year period-what must surely amount to tons of materials containing irrefutable proof, in the education change agents’ own words, of deliberate, malicious intent to achieve behavioral changes in students/parents/society which have nothing to do with commonly understood educational objectives. Upon delivery of such proof, “resisters” are consistently met with the “shoot the messenger” stonewalling response by teachers, school boards, superintendents, state and local officials, as well as the supposedly objective institutions of academia and the press.
   This resister’s book, or collection of research in book form, was put together primarily to satisfy my own need to see the various components which led to the dumbing down of the United States of America assembled in chronological order-in writing. Even I, who had observed these weird activities taking place at all levels of government, was reluctant to accept a malicious intent behind each individual, chronological activity or innovation, unless I could connect it with other, similar activities taking place at other times. This book, which makes such connections, has provided for me a much-needed sense of closure. …
   In retrospect, I had just found out that the United States was engaged in war. People write important books about war: books documenting the battles fought, the names of the generals involved, the names of those who fired the first shot. This book is simply a history book about another kind of war:
   * one fought using psychological methods;
   * a one-hundred-year war;
   * a different, more deadly war than any in which our country has ever been involved;
   * a war about which the average American hasn't the foggiest idea.
   The reason Americans do not understand this war is because it has been fought in secret-in the schools of our nation, using our children who are captive in classrooms. The wagers of this war are using very sophisticated and effective tools:
   * Hegelian Dialectic (common ground, consensus and compromise)
   * Gradualism (two steps forward; one step backward)
   * Semantic deception (redefining terms to get agreement without understanding) …
   Much of this book contains quotes from government documents detailing the real purposes of American education:
   * to use the schools to change America from a free, individual nation to a socialist, global “state,” just one of many socialist states which will be subservient to the United Nations Charter, not the United States Constitution;
   * to brainwash our children, starting at birth, to reject individualism in favor of collectivism;
   * to reject high academic standards in favor of OBE/ISO 1400/90006 egalitarianism;
   * to reject truth and absolutes in favor of tolerance, situational ethics and consensus;
   * to reject American values in favor of internationalist values (globalism);
   * to reject freedom to choose one’s career in favor of the totalitarian K-12 school-to-work/OBE process, aptly named “limited learning for lifelong labor,” coordinated through United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization.
   Only when all children in public, private and home schools are robotized-and believe as one-will World Government be acceptable to citizens and able to be implemented without firing a shot. The attractive-sounding “choice” proposals will enable the globalist elite to achieve their goal: the robotization (brainwashing) of all Americans in order to gain their acceptance of lifelong education and workforce training-part of the world management system to achieve a new global feudalism.

   There’s more at www.deliberatedumbingdown.com. It’s useful food for thought in our technocratically biased society, and I think we can see some of the same things happening in our own educational system and media.

[Cross-posted] For six years, I have been telling people how fab Stefan Engeseth’s Detective Marketing is. Now, here’s your chance to get the fourth edition for free and judge for yourself.
   Three hundred thousand people have already made this book a real success for Stefan (and most had to pay!), and if the fourth goes well, he promises a fifth. I personally cannot wait.
   The genius of the book is that you can flip open to any page, and if you allow your imagination free reign, you can get truly inspired. Stefan has made it very easy to absorb. I remember reading the whole 176 pp. in one sitting when he marketed the second edition back in the early 2000s and have returned to it and the third edition frequently to get inspired for marketing and management.

 
Fellow blogger and novelist Dawn Rotarangi has a book coming out, Ripples on the Lake, and I’d like to see it come up in the Google index, instead of restaurants in Toronto and Sydney. She writes very well on her blog, and her novel will be even more fab. So here’s a link for you, Dawn, to the highest-placed site mentioning your book so far (Real Groovy). Available June 15, and here’s a synopsis taken directly from the Real Groovy site:

A taut, tightly-written paranormal thriller about what happens when a Pakeha family unwittingly invoke an ancient tohunga’s curse. When an out-of-it Billy Delaney steals coins from a sacred rock on the shores of Lake Taupo to buy a hamburger late one night, he has no idea what he is about to unleash upon himself and his immediate family. But then Billy has always been trouble, and when the oldest of Lucy Delaney’s children, Saffron, steps in to try and take care of him yet again, trouble swarms over the Delaneys like bees on a honey pot. First Saffron and Billy’s young niece suffers an horrific traffic accident, leaving her in a coma, balanced between life and death. Then the Delaneys begin to die horribly, one by one. It is left to a disbelieving Saffron and an unlikely ally, Nick—the burnt out war photographer trying to piece his life back together in a country backwater—to try to appease the wrath of the ancient tohunga Tama Ariki, whose quest for utu for his slain mokopuna echoes down the years. Set in and around Lake Taupo, the author creates a subtle web of superstition and the supernatural, bringing together both Maori and Celtic imagery to create a paranormal adventure that is pure Aotearoa.

I was going to call the Warehouse in Petone today after getting some excellent service from a staff member, Peato. He not only helped me, but a grandmother who was ahead of me—and he put up with her demands and jokes. But I could not initially find this large chain in the telephone book—only Warehouse Stationery appears to be there.
   Finding this unreasonable, I did the unthinkable: I looked under T. For The. And there it was.
   Now, when I grew up, we were told that only morons would file things under the definite—or indefinite—article. In fact, I distinctly remember sitcoms where the manager had a ditzy secretary who would do this, and the audience would laugh at how stupid she was. But now, the phone company does it? When did we turn into a nation of assholes that would search for the Warehouse under T? The phone book was not like this when I was growing up. Whomever set the books in those days had some intelligence.
   We will eventually get encyclopædias that have a massive T volume for entries such as the Beatles and the Isle of Man.

Check out this video from Six Bucks a Monkey’s blog (pasted below for your convenience). You know it’s fictional because the help desk guy actually knows what he’s talking about.

Weird, I can read Danish now.

PS.: The video has gone from YouTube after a few short days, but remains available here.