Kiddie-Parade

The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me:
I imagine myself curled up in a squishy bed surrounded by a trio of tiny-tots. As I read aloud, their attention is captured. The scruffy l’il boy stops tugging his sister’s pigtails. She in turn stops sticking her tongue out and making rude noises. And the third one unglues himself from the fascinating sight of the family-dog licking itself, long enough to get hooked.

*Hypothetical Happy Place*.That’s what Dahl’s kiddie-books do to you. And this banana-yellow covered book is one more of his ludicrous tales. Who else but Dahl would think of a ladderless window-cleaning company being assigned to a trio of animals? So we have a giraffe (whose long neck makes ladders redundant)...a pelican (with a nice deep beak to hold the cleaning water) and a sprightly little monkey (to do the actual wiping and polishing). Flaky? Yes. Fiendishly clever as some other Dahl Books? No. And yet…it is endearing in it's simplicity.




Esio Trot:
Mr.Hoppy is a lonely,middle-aged man. And he’s in love with the attractive Mrs.Silver, a widow who lives in the apartment below him. Being painfully shy, he never musters up the courage to proclaim his devotion. Mrs.Silver, oblivious to the angst in the balcony above, is too busy showering affection on her titch of a tortoise, Alfie.

While the two neighbours exchange pleasantries, Mrs.Silver reveals that her greatest sorrow is that Alfie never grows...not a bit. The excitable Hoppy sees this is as a chance to win the lady’s affections.

Esio Trot is all about the high-falutin’ plan he undertakes. While the premise was entertaining, my grouse was with the way Mrs. Silver was projected. Woman are not as dumb as she apparently appears. And whatever happened to coming clean at the end of the tale, Mr.Hoppy??? t-ut t-ut

Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator

Oh my Sainted Pants!....Oh my Painted Ants! :)

I think the following poem, rendered by the formidable Miss.Tibbs in honour of the President deserves special mention. Dahl's comic timing and astuteness were best seen in his whacky poems. So here goes:

The Nurse's Song

This mighty man of whom I sing,
The greatest of them all,
Was once a teeny little thing,
Just eighteen inches tall.

I knew him as a tiny tot,
I nursed him on my knee.
I used to sit him on the pot
And wait for him to wee.

I always washed between his toes,
And cut his little nails.
I brushed his hair and wiped his nose
And weighed him on the scales.

Through happy childhood days he strayed,
As all nice children should.
I smacked him when he disobeyed,
And stopped when he was good.

It soon began to dawn on me
He wasn't very bright,
Because when he was twenty-three
He couldn't read or write.

"What shall we do?" his parents sob.
"The boy has got the vapours!
He couldn't even get a job
Delivering the papers!"

"Ah-ha," I said, "this little clot
Could be a politician."
"Nanny," he cried, "Oh Nanny, what
A super proposition!"

"Okay," I said, "let's learn and note
The art of politics.
Let's teach you how to miss the boat
And how to drop some bricks,
And how to win the people's vote
And lots of other tricks.

Let's learn to make a speech a day
Upon the T.V. screen,
In which you never never say
Exactly what you mean.

And most important,
by the way,
In not to let your teeth decay,
And keep your fingers clean.

And now that I am eighty-nine,
It's too late to repent.
The fault was mine the little swine
Became the President.

James and The Giant Peach

Mr.Dahl strikes again. ‘James and The Giant Peach’ begs to be read aloud...aloud to an open-mouthed, hanging-on-to-your-every-word, filled-with-awe pre-teen audience.

There’s an ill-treated orphan called James Henry Trotter who’s blighted by a pair of wicked aunts: Aunt Spiker and Aunt Sponge. There’s a musically-inclined grasshopper, an over-assertive centipede, a gloomy earthworm, a pro-active spider, a genteel ladybird, a timid glowworm and a silkworm who…well…sleeps. (Please excuse the over-use of adjectives. Dahl’s writing does that to you!) And then, there’s a giant peach.

Add to that Roald Dahl’s imagery, satire and nonsensical poems. What you have is a child’s *Happy Place*. Dahl had written this book when his baby son Theo had a terrible accident. Escaping into a fantasy-land for a few hours each day helped him through the crisis. And the grand storyteller does the same for all of us. The world he creates is fantastical and improbable. And in it’s improbability, you find a much-needed escape from the daily woes.

Percy Jackson and The Last Olympian

A Pegasus lands on the hood of your step-dad’s Prius...you have to blow up a monster-infested cruise ship...you have dreams (read: visions) everytime you take a relaxing nap……the girl you like is still harbouring strong feelings for a handsome demigod; who incidentally happens to be providing the host body for the mightiest of all villains……oh and did I mention that the evil forces are planning to take over Mount Olympus and raze Manhattan to the ground? If that's not enough, here's something to chew on : the only way you stand a fighting chance is by taking a dip in the River of Death.

Yep, Percy Jackson…the smart mouthed, teen demi-god has his work cut out. His sixteenth birthday is fast approaching and it’s time for ‘The Great Prophecy' to unfold. The Titans are advancing with a mighty army in tow. The dreaded Typhon has been freed and is slowly thundering towards New York……all set to destroy the Olympian domain.The biggest war…the end of civilization all rests on Percy’s single decision.

As he would say......no pressure.

Percy Jackson and the Last Olympian is a truly fantastic tying up of all the loose ends. Truths are revealed...mistakes are rectified...character is built...and all the protagonists come into their own. Equal importance has been given to miniscule characters (a fact which Riordan should be applauded for, since it ties up with the main message he wants to give through this series)

The war which has been looming over the past four books, breaks free in a burst of Grade-A action…special effects…fantastical creatures……and surprises being revealed at regular intervals. Olympians, Titans, Gods, Demigods, Minor-Gods, Monsters, Nature Spirits and several unexpected allies give you a panoramic war-scene that gets the adrenaline rushing.

Fine...fine book, this

A passage by Neil Gaiman (..from American Gods)

~I believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and the Beatles and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkled lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women.



~I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass.



~I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste.



~I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like Martians in War of the Worlds.



~I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman.



~I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumble bee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead)



~I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck.



~I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system.



~I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." — Neil Gaiman (American Gods)


~

Matilda

Roald Dahl is the grand-daddy of children’s fiction. And weirdly enough, I hadn’t read a single one of his books. Eventually, good sense prevailed and lo!......there’s Matilda.

Matilda is a child-prodigy. Barely five-years old, she is wise and articulate. She is blessed with a thirst for reading and is also cursed with the vilest excuses for parents. They are self-absorbed, mindless twits who could have crushed the will of a lesser child. But for Matilda, exacting revenge on the Wormwoods (aptly named) is literally child’s play.

School however is a whole new-ball game. Enter Miss.Trunchball (gnnnnnh!!!). Humoungous, horrifying to behold……she cusses like crazy …snorts and snarls like an enraged rhino and has all the students & teachers alike, crapping in their pants. There’s also the ethereal Miss.Honey, Matilda’s class teacher. Kind to a fault and poorer than a church-mouse, she hopes to develop Matilda’s astounding talent. But Miss.Honey has a secret…a sad, tragic past…a past which Matilda can rectify; thanks to her brains and a newly discovered power.

Dahl’s writing style is addictive…it is dark, humourous and non-condescending towards children. No helpless billy-goats here. Matilda may be a wee lil thing…but she displays a maturity and soundness of thought that would put most adults to shame.

Yep, loved the book. Definitely heading out for The BFG now.

Am not given to gush-fests and rantings about shoes. Not much into bling-gg either. But there’s something about this(these?) super-classy pair of sneakers in fire-proof, gold-plated kevlar.....that gets me right there. :)

Indians are world's greenest : Survey

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Indians-are-worlds-greenest-Survey/articleshow/4527041.cms

The Tao of Pooh

...it means nothing......I swear!

.....I haven’t mused and murmured in quite a while.....and my Blog is fully justified in being miffed...there is someone else! (*g-asp*) (*NO!*) (*who?*)…..oh, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Am talking about the omnipresent…the all-pervading Grand Poobah of Social Networking:FaceBook. Yes, I am a compulsive status-message changer…yep, I comment like a fiend and YES! I tag like there’s no tomorrow. There I said it…I am not ashamed…I am a FB addict.

So what…may you ask, made me turn back to my much-neglected blog? A book…a sweet, funny crackhead of a book that goes by the quirky name of BIG WOO-My not so secret secret teenage blog by Susie Day.
Getting back to the book…the title is self-explanatory, so I won’t expound on it’s many delights. (I WILL ofcourse write a long, tedious review once am through…so ya-ayy!!! something painful to look forward too.) But the book got me thinking that I should blog…I need to blog…before my poor, neglected blog gets relegated to that happy place where all the other shunned blogs romp about in mock-glee.

So here’s a few topics to get back in the loop:
NEWS THAT I CAN USE: Today is International Children’s Book Day. It usually coincides with Hans Christian Anderson’s birthday, 2nd April. So I did my bit…and went to my sweet-spot: CrossWord and picked up five, luscious books. One even happened to be Anderson’ s Fairy Tales. I took it as a sign. (am a great believer of the 'signs'. I am known to smile like a prat when I see the 'signs'. The 'signs' are the bedrock of my miserable existence.) So imagine my surprise when I look up a review on GoodReads which claims that Hans Christian Anderson DID NOT write any children’s stories. His books were meant for adults and he would most probably have a hissy-fit at the comment that his books were meant for children!!!.....go figure

NEWS THAT MAKES ME SWEAT (literally and profusely) : The heat: it is bad…it is hell-filled-with-sweaty-ill-mannered-tourists- BAD!! I would have gotten all whiny and cribby and crotchety…but I am slowly but steadily wiliting…and *g-asp*…can’t………talk………anymore.

NEWS THAT IS TOTALLY IRRELEVANT BUT GRABS MY EYEBALLS, NEVERTHELESS :on Yahoo!Filmy Masala: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's relationship has hit rock bottom after an explosive row……AGAIN!!!. Seriously Angie baby, you make it very hard to stay a dispassionate observer. You steal a supremely fine man from his lovely wife….and then proceed to turn him into a glorified nanny. He does more than his fair share…but it’s never, ever enough for you. So the guy grabs a beer and puts up his feet for awhile. Stop acting like a twonk and give the man a break

Seriously...put her on the line. We need to exchange words!


So there you a go…a personal, filled with gratuitous -bile post at your fingertips. I feel good and virtuous and am waiting to be knighted any day now! :)