Note to book designers:
No matter how pretty it looks, and you will get no argument from me that it is undeniably pretty, no matter how tempting, how clean, how GOOD it looks,
DO NOT MAKE YOUR BOOK COVER WHITE.
Most especially do not make it WHITE MATTE. Like anything white - white carpet, white dresses, white sand - they don't don't stay white for very long once exposed to the world of man.
Oh, and one more thing - don't put your titles at the bottom of the front cover. If I want to stand a single book up against one taller stack and behind another smaller stack of books, your title is lost. Your book could be about anything and none of us will ever know. All your hard work gone for nothing.
Don't say I didn't warn you!
Monday, July 20, 2009
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
the trolly wars part II...
You don't really get life until you understand the importance of shopping trolleys in a big shopping centre. They weave the very fabric of whatever civilisation exists in those woeful hellholes that some call malls, criss-crossing the various corridors, rolling helpfully here and there, and just generally making life easier for everyone.
Think about it. Just as the earliest humans leaped up the evolutionary ladder the day they realised that you can carry a LOT more food on a little cart than you can on a piece of bark balanced on top of your noggin, so we progressed several rungs further when we began to gather our food in shopping trolleys. Mothers use them as mobile cages for unruly offspring. Shop keepers take their rubbish out to the garbage compactor in them. Everybody loves shopping trolleys!
The other day, I had a one of those Where-the-heckfire-is-my-camera moments. A window dresser from one of the clothes shops had taken delivery at the loading dock of a bunch of naked half mannequins. Yes. You heard me. Not half naked mannequins. Naked half mannequins. The bottom half. She passed The Incidental Bookshop with a purposeful though slightly self conscious air about her. 'I know I look strange,' her body language said, 'but if you so much as mention it, I'll push a life size plastic foot down your throat.'
And how was she transporting these naked half mannequins? In a shopping trolley of course. She'd shoved them in waist first and it looked like a garden of alabaster feet had sprouted out of it. It was a surreal sight. Especially when she passed behind the waist high wall of the coffee shop near my place. It hid the trolley and made it appear as though she was simply striding along herding a gaggle of floating legs before her.
Yes, trolleys are indispensable - and like every other precious resource in the world, the trolley power is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the food chain. Or should I say the food chain stores. Woolworths and Big W own all the trolleys at our centre. They are, generally speaking, beneficent trolley rulers and most of the managers have no great objection to serfs such as The Incidental Bookshop staff borrowing a trolley or two now and then.
But there is 'most of the managers' and then there is...
Clayton!
Clayton, a small man, manager of fruit and veg, was temporarily promoted last Christmas when his superior had a mysterious accident. Yes. We suspect foul play. Anyhow, there was an unfortunate confluence of events around the time of Clayton's rise to power.
1) In the three weeks leading up to Christmas coming, The Incidental Bookshop suddenly began to receive four or five pallets of stock every week instead of
two every fortnight.
2) Shoppers began to shop in ever greater numbers. (as they will over Christmas. It apprently has something to do with good cheer but really, you ought to try spending about forty hours a week in a shopping centre at Christmas time and you will soon learn to say words 'Bah humbug' with feeling). And when shoppers begin to shop in ever greater numbers, ever greater numbers of trolleys are required.
3) A furore broke out in the local paper accusing trolley boys of loafing around smoking cigarettes and selling drugs instead of doing their jobs. This, it was claimed, was the reason there were never any trolleys in the Woolworths shopping trolley bay.
Can you see where this is headed? I bet you can. It has a sense of heavy inevitability about it, doesn't it? The trolley boys weren't loafing any more than usual! The missing trolleys weren't lying fallow out in the car parks!They were in the back of my shop filled with books!
As I said in Part 1 of The Trolley Wars, I had pioneered the trolley packing method of restocking The Incidental Bookshop and everyone agreed that it was a breakthrough in human endeavour pretty much on par with the discovery of fire or brylcreem. We watched sadly, guiltily, as the trolley boys bore the blame for the dearth of trolleys. We knew we were being selfish. We knew we should come clean. We knew that if we were any kind of decent human beings we would go back to carrying those books by hand and stop letting the down trodden boys take the heat for us.
But we couldn't give them up, damn it. Once you've unpacked books using shopping trolleys, you can never go back.
On stock morning, we would arrive at about 7 am and set out across the various empty car parks, ranging far and wide over the tar and cement, gathering the trolleys that hadn't made it back inside the centre the night before. Sometimes we had to bring them in one or two at a time. Sometimes we would hit a gusher and stumble upon a corral that hadn't yet been emptied. When that happened, we could fill our trolley needs in a single trip. Either way, between the the lot of us, we would bring thirty or so trolleys into The Incidental Bookshop as surreptitiously as possible and whiz them as quick as we could out through the back door into the spooky abandoned IGA supermarket where they would wait patiently to fulfill their destinies as book movers.
We even had little arguments among ourselves about it. Sir Laurence the Indispensable liked to use only Woolworths trolleys - they were bigger and brand new and so, much easier to push. I wanted to use only Big W trolleys - Big W was on the other side of the centre and their managers never got over to our part of the building; we were never going to get caught with the Big W trolleys.
I won that argument and to tell the truth, I think Sir Laurence still secretly resents it...
to be continued...
Think about it. Just as the earliest humans leaped up the evolutionary ladder the day they realised that you can carry a LOT more food on a little cart than you can on a piece of bark balanced on top of your noggin, so we progressed several rungs further when we began to gather our food in shopping trolleys. Mothers use them as mobile cages for unruly offspring. Shop keepers take their rubbish out to the garbage compactor in them. Everybody loves shopping trolleys!
The other day, I had a one of those Where-the-heckfire-is-my-camera moments. A window dresser from one of the clothes shops had taken delivery at the loading dock of a bunch of naked half mannequins. Yes. You heard me. Not half naked mannequins. Naked half mannequins. The bottom half. She passed The Incidental Bookshop with a purposeful though slightly self conscious air about her. 'I know I look strange,' her body language said, 'but if you so much as mention it, I'll push a life size plastic foot down your throat.'
And how was she transporting these naked half mannequins? In a shopping trolley of course. She'd shoved them in waist first and it looked like a garden of alabaster feet had sprouted out of it. It was a surreal sight. Especially when she passed behind the waist high wall of the coffee shop near my place. It hid the trolley and made it appear as though she was simply striding along herding a gaggle of floating legs before her.
Yes, trolleys are indispensable - and like every other precious resource in the world, the trolley power is concentrated in the hands of a few at the top of the food chain. Or should I say the food chain stores. Woolworths and Big W own all the trolleys at our centre. They are, generally speaking, beneficent trolley rulers and most of the managers have no great objection to serfs such as The Incidental Bookshop staff borrowing a trolley or two now and then.
But there is 'most of the managers' and then there is...
Clayton!
Clayton, a small man, manager of fruit and veg, was temporarily promoted last Christmas when his superior had a mysterious accident. Yes. We suspect foul play. Anyhow, there was an unfortunate confluence of events around the time of Clayton's rise to power.
1) In the three weeks leading up to Christmas coming, The Incidental Bookshop suddenly began to receive four or five pallets of stock every week instead of
two every fortnight.
2) Shoppers began to shop in ever greater numbers. (as they will over Christmas. It apprently has something to do with good cheer but really, you ought to try spending about forty hours a week in a shopping centre at Christmas time and you will soon learn to say words 'Bah humbug' with feeling). And when shoppers begin to shop in ever greater numbers, ever greater numbers of trolleys are required.
3) A furore broke out in the local paper accusing trolley boys of loafing around smoking cigarettes and selling drugs instead of doing their jobs. This, it was claimed, was the reason there were never any trolleys in the Woolworths shopping trolley bay.
Can you see where this is headed? I bet you can. It has a sense of heavy inevitability about it, doesn't it? The trolley boys weren't loafing any more than usual! The missing trolleys weren't lying fallow out in the car parks!They were in the back of my shop filled with books!
As I said in Part 1 of The Trolley Wars, I had pioneered the trolley packing method of restocking The Incidental Bookshop and everyone agreed that it was a breakthrough in human endeavour pretty much on par with the discovery of fire or brylcreem. We watched sadly, guiltily, as the trolley boys bore the blame for the dearth of trolleys. We knew we were being selfish. We knew we should come clean. We knew that if we were any kind of decent human beings we would go back to carrying those books by hand and stop letting the down trodden boys take the heat for us.
But we couldn't give them up, damn it. Once you've unpacked books using shopping trolleys, you can never go back.
On stock morning, we would arrive at about 7 am and set out across the various empty car parks, ranging far and wide over the tar and cement, gathering the trolleys that hadn't made it back inside the centre the night before. Sometimes we had to bring them in one or two at a time. Sometimes we would hit a gusher and stumble upon a corral that hadn't yet been emptied. When that happened, we could fill our trolley needs in a single trip. Either way, between the the lot of us, we would bring thirty or so trolleys into The Incidental Bookshop as surreptitiously as possible and whiz them as quick as we could out through the back door into the spooky abandoned IGA supermarket where they would wait patiently to fulfill their destinies as book movers.
We even had little arguments among ourselves about it. Sir Laurence the Indispensable liked to use only Woolworths trolleys - they were bigger and brand new and so, much easier to push. I wanted to use only Big W trolleys - Big W was on the other side of the centre and their managers never got over to our part of the building; we were never going to get caught with the Big W trolleys.
I won that argument and to tell the truth, I think Sir Laurence still secretly resents it...
to be continued...
Friday, June 12, 2009
for terminator fans only...
I saw Terminator Salvation tonight and lo! It was good. I just took a quick spin by Rotten Tomatoes to see what The Critics are saying and sadly most of them aren't saying anything too much good.
For example:
David Stratton of At The Movies
And then there's:
Sukdev Sandhu of the Daily Telegraph (the British one, I expect, with those manners)
and just for third time lucky kind of thingo, I give you:
Boyd Hilton Heat Magazine.
Well, phooey on them, I say. I must be one of those committed obsessives because I'm just lovin' it.
Mind you, I'm not saying it was a perfect film. Of course it wasn't, but name me one that is. The kid was ridiculously cute and completely unnecessary as a character. Kyle Reese left me utterly unconvinced that he would ever have the testicles to impregnate Sarah Connor when the time came. And the Schwarzenator insertion - well, that was just sad.
But who cares? Who cares? Was the plotting as obvious as some critics claim? I don't know - there were a few things I saw coming and a few I didn't. About par for the course for me. Was there zero character growth and no heart to the characters as some of the others say? Well, I'm not sure what they want out of a film that looks like Mad Max on a particularly apocalyptic day. We don't need continual characterisation here - we all know who John Connor is and what makes him tick. We all know what's in the heart of the Good Terminator whether it's played by Sam Worthington or Our Arnie.
Do I think it's as good as Number 2? No, of course not. But I didn't expect it to be. In fact, I made sure to keep my expectations very low going in. In fact, I almost didn't want to see it at all in case it was so bad it spoiled the series.
Remember The Matrix Revolutions? I was absolutely hooked on The Matrix and I waited for the next installment like a girl waiting for her first date to pick her up. When it turned out to be so very very bad, I felt personally betrayed, as if some one had promised me something I wanted very much and then switched it for a lump of coal at the very last moment. I certainly regretted going to see it. It almost took away the pleasure I felt over the original film. I've never seen the third installment. Maybe it's not so bad - but I just don't have the heart to try.
So yeah - I went along to the cinema tonight with nothing more complex on my mind than to see some robots get blown to smithereens and man, I got what I paid for!
I've loved all of these films. As the show was starting, I remember thinking 'What an epic saga this is!' Would I have liked it as much if I'd never seen the other films? What does it matter? Me and about a million or so other complete obsessives will never have to have that experience.
And, oh yeah - I was pleased to see a move away from the cute sassiness of the Terminator as Gay Stripper Leather boy back towards the the darkness of the first.
Christian Bale rocks and Sam Worthington is too sexy for his cyberdene chip. There is an actress named Moon Bloodgood in it and I want to know what drugs her parents were taking.
Overall, my rating is - hurry up and make the next one because ... I'll be back.
For example:
The ingenious plotting of the first two Terminator films, and the skill and visceral energy with which James Cameron directed them, are a thing of the past.
David Stratton of At The Movies
And then there's:
It’s a catastrophically bad movie whose aggressive dullness and dumbness can best be reproduced by picking up a brick and slamming it against one’s forehead for two hours.
Sukdev Sandhu of the Daily Telegraph (the British one, I expect, with those manners)
and just for third time lucky kind of thingo, I give you:
This latest Terminator may well please the committed obsessive, but the rest of us are left feeling simultaneously beaten about the head and yet slightly underwhelmed.
Boyd Hilton Heat Magazine.
Well, phooey on them, I say. I must be one of those committed obsessives because I'm just lovin' it.
Mind you, I'm not saying it was a perfect film. Of course it wasn't, but name me one that is. The kid was ridiculously cute and completely unnecessary as a character. Kyle Reese left me utterly unconvinced that he would ever have the testicles to impregnate Sarah Connor when the time came. And the Schwarzenator insertion - well, that was just sad.
But who cares? Who cares? Was the plotting as obvious as some critics claim? I don't know - there were a few things I saw coming and a few I didn't. About par for the course for me. Was there zero character growth and no heart to the characters as some of the others say? Well, I'm not sure what they want out of a film that looks like Mad Max on a particularly apocalyptic day. We don't need continual characterisation here - we all know who John Connor is and what makes him tick. We all know what's in the heart of the Good Terminator whether it's played by Sam Worthington or Our Arnie.
Do I think it's as good as Number 2? No, of course not. But I didn't expect it to be. In fact, I made sure to keep my expectations very low going in. In fact, I almost didn't want to see it at all in case it was so bad it spoiled the series.
Remember The Matrix Revolutions? I was absolutely hooked on The Matrix and I waited for the next installment like a girl waiting for her first date to pick her up. When it turned out to be so very very bad, I felt personally betrayed, as if some one had promised me something I wanted very much and then switched it for a lump of coal at the very last moment. I certainly regretted going to see it. It almost took away the pleasure I felt over the original film. I've never seen the third installment. Maybe it's not so bad - but I just don't have the heart to try.
So yeah - I went along to the cinema tonight with nothing more complex on my mind than to see some robots get blown to smithereens and man, I got what I paid for!
I've loved all of these films. As the show was starting, I remember thinking 'What an epic saga this is!' Would I have liked it as much if I'd never seen the other films? What does it matter? Me and about a million or so other complete obsessives will never have to have that experience.
And, oh yeah - I was pleased to see a move away from the cute sassiness of the Terminator as Gay Stripper Leather boy back towards the the darkness of the first.
Christian Bale rocks and Sam Worthington is too sexy for his cyberdene chip. There is an actress named Moon Bloodgood in it and I want to know what drugs her parents were taking.
Overall, my rating is - hurry up and make the next one because ... I'll be back.
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