I Discover What It Is Like To Be Shelled

Many moons ago, back when I was about 17 years old (I am now 73 to put this in context), I had joined something called the Territorial Army, which was a sort of British version of the National Guard, or to put it another way, a weekend soldier. The Territorial Army, or TA as it is better known, is an ancient and noble British Military Establishment, going back quite a few hundred years I believe and as such is a valiant and important part of the protection of the British Isles against any and all foreign invaders. Well at least that is the idea.

The reality – as is often the case – is rather different. Or at least back then in the 60’s of the last century that was the case. We were supposed to be valiant warriors standing ready to defend Britain with our field artillery pieces (25 pounders for those among you who know about these things) but in fact we were a rather shambolic bunch of very elderly veterans of the second word war, and me, a 17 year old, bearded and long haired kid who had joined simply to be able to ride a military motorbike around the place.

A 25 Pounder Howitzer – This is what was lobbing shells at me – Though there were about 12 of these doing it!!!

Remarkably reminiscent of the British TV series Dad’s Army….. If you have seen that program, I was definitely the one called Pike!

The regiment I belonged to was called, wait for it… Queen Mary’s Surrey Yeomanry, and had been in existence ever since (logically enough) the reign of Queen Mary sometime in the 17th Century, and had a long and illustrious history of killing people on behalf of the British Royal Family.

Every so often we all headed off in an enormous convoy of guns, trucks and other military things to the nearest artillery range to get in a bit of practise with our guns. This was of course our whole reason for existing, and was also a high point in our otherwise drab and dreary lives.

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Major US Publishers Call For End Of US Book Embargo To Cuba

About 40 of the USA’s major publishers have joined with Smashwords founder Mark Coker and Publisher’s Weekly and have set up a petition on the White House’s website demanding that the embargo on books and educational materials being exchanged between Cuba and the USA be ended at once.

This embargo, which is part of the more general embargo that the USA imposed on Cuba about 50 years ago is still in force, in spite of the easing of relations between the two countries of late, and is obviously wrong and in dire need of being rescinded at once.

This idea was first mooted at a recent visit by a contingent of major players in the USA publishing industry during an international book fair in Havana, where these visiting Americans took part in a number of panel discussions, where the idea of free exchange of ideas, literature and books was discussed.

havana.books — **Happy Young Readers At The Havana International Book Fair**

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Smart Phones Going Back………

I was amused by a headline I saw just now on a website about ereaders and other electronic devices, called PDF Devices (link below).

This headline was as follows……

Top 5 Smartphones with a QWERTY keypad

Now isn’t that an idea?

To begin with our mobile phones got smaller and smaller, and stuffed more and more of life’s seriously important requirements into them – so we became able to tell the world were we were at any moment, or quickly check online to find out what the heck the capital of Honduras is called (it is Tegucigalpa by the way).

One of the odder developments in all of this is that our mobile phones have started to get bigger and bigger again, as we attempt to cram more and more possibilities into a touch screen.

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Turn Your Google Docs Into Epub Files

Here is another great bit of news for people who write ebooks, or actually, any sort of book that they might wish to publish for ereaders.

Google have just quietly added a truly useful new trick to their Google Docs app. You can now save your Google Doc as an ePub file, which is the file format used by all ereaders except the Kindle, Well at least for now, it is on the desk top versions of Google Docs, such as you have on a Chrome Book for example, or if you use Chrome as your web browser. I gather that shortly it will be available for all Android users.

It is amazingly simple to use, simply have your document open, click on File menu > Download as > EPUB Publication (.epub), and the job is done.

Having done this, you will be able to put your document (Major Literary Work) directly onto pretty well any ereader – except of course the dreaded Amazon Kindle,, which typically of large companies, uses its own ebook format in an attempt to force Kindle owners to buy all their ebooks from Amazon.

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Nook Ereader Chased Out Of England

Once again Mighty Amazon beats one of its competitors. Great news for the Amazon share holders, lousy news for the rest of us. Whilst the Kindle is a perfectly reasonable ereader, it is definitely not the best, but owing to the enormous power of Amazon, it is steadily killing off all its competitors.

The most recent being Barnes and Noble’s Nook ereader in the UK. This ereader, which is a perfectly reasonable device, but which suffers from being an arm of a far from successful book seller (Barnes and Noble) is now pulled from the UK market. Not only the hardware (the ereader itself), but Barnes and Noble have also abandoned their various ereader apps that are made for the UK market, and what is worse, have also stopped supporting their customers to the extent of selling their entire customer support system to Sainsburys ( a large supermarket chain in the UK), which means, and I quote from a release from Barnes and Noble:-

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Images To Create Stories With

As you may have noted, I have a great affection for odd and old photographs, mainly those depicting people in some way or other. I also find old photos of people fascinating. I look at those old photos and wonder what became of the people in them. Did their lives go well, or not, were they happy, satisfied or miserable in the way their lives went? I suspect that most of us have much the same reaction to looking at photos of people who are long dead.

Curiously I discovered that Alexander McCall Smith, author of the No 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series has a similar feeling. He collects old photos of couples he knows nothing about, and creates short stories based on what the photos suggest to him. Not something I have ever gone so far as to do, though the thought always crosses my mind when looking at such photos.

So I though I would post a small collection of such photos that speak to me, in the hope that they might spark off some sort of creative surge in you guys.

So here we go, some random, but in one way or another, intriguing photos of people who are probably long dead.

This next one is really rather odd… but then, who isn’t?

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Free Ebooks For Kids – USA Follows Worldreader

Some years ago, Worldreader started their work in Africa, with the aim of bringing both free ereaders (Kindles) and free ebooks to the rural poor of Africa. This has gone from strength to strength, with active support from governments in a number of African states, local and international publishers and authors as well. These Kindles were given to kids in rural schools to start with, so the target was kids rather than adults, though of course many adults (parents etc) shared the ebooks on those Kindles. They also produced a simple app that works on any relatively simple smart phone, mainly 3G models, which allows people to download and read any of the now many thousands of free ebooks that Worldreader offers in a range of African languages and English.

This app is now being used by people all over the world, and has proven itself to be an enormous success, and also proven that the original idea behind Worldreader is correct, people want to read.

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One Remote To Control Them All – The Huis

I came across this handy – but expensive – gadget the other day. A remote than you can use to control literally ever device you have in your life that can be controlled by a remote. Has to be interesting I felt.

With the curious name of Huis E-Ink Remote Controller, which you might be forgiven for thinking meant it was made by a Dutch firm (Huis = House), but no, it is in fact made by Sony, and as I said, its purpose in life is to be able to control everything electronic in your life, be it your TV, curtains, sound set-up, lights, central heating and so on.

The idea is that you can set it up so that you can choose from a menu on its screen that you have created which device it will control. So simply a case of selecting TV from the list on the screen, setting the TV the way you want it, then selecting Central Heating from your list, and then setting that how you wish it to be, for comfortable TV viewing.. and so on with every device you have in your house.

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Mark Jenkins – An Extraordinary Artist

I stumbled across the work of Mark Jenkins a couple of days ago, and was immediately taken with the wonderful, funny, surreal and often deeply serious ideas in his work. Also the fact that it is such a public form of art. Not for him the secluded and almost religious atmosphere of an art gallery, nope, his work is placed in public places all over the world.

His work for the greater part, simply stated, consists of statues of human beings, dressed in normal clothing, but placed in some very strange situation – Leaning against a wall, with its head apparently buried in the wall such as this one below…..

With a lot of his more or less “realistic” work, it is actually pretty hard to be sure it is in fact a statue, and not simply one or more people behaving rather oddly, as you can see from the images below…

I love this one! She is not real…..

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