Ragtag Giggagon

When I was a kid, probably no older than eight, I was in my cousins' house, for a sleepover, and my cousin ate an entire apple, core and all, in our shared bedroom. I ate most of mine but I Ieft the butt. My uncle came in - I believe he was sober at the time - and my cousin pointed out that I hadn't eaten all of my apple. My uncle looked at the apple core and told me to eat it. The order at the time would almost have been as ludicrous as if he had asked me to eat a banana skin, take a shot of whiskey or light up his cigarette. Apple cores don't taste nice. Even today they're not eaten by most people. And broadly speaking, people didn't eat butts in bed back in the 80s. So I just said No, making clear that his request was ridiculously unfair, that it was not part of any apple-eating compact I had made at any point in my life, and I wasn't going to be held to ransom over how to consume apples.

First published a decade ago, John Boyne's The House of Special Purpose ( here at his site ) features the Romanov dynasty's final years at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg and their subsequent detention after the 1917 revolutions in Russia. Told via flashbacks, its narrator is Georgy, a peasant teenager who takes a bullet for the commander of the armed forces as he passes through the young man's village, and is subsequently employed as an attendant to the crown prince. Roddy Doyle covers a concurrent period of social upheaval in Dublin via Henry Smart. If both books have a failing, it's the creative flair employed in changing historical details to suit the narrative. Doyle's A Star Called Henry extends the Volunteers' takeover of Dublin's General Post Office by a day during 1916's Easter Rising, as Doyle had too much going on - or so he claimed at the time. But there's very little in the novel that he couldn't have worked around in terms

The Wire is a very rich series. Terrific characters with numerous arcs. Spoiler alert for the fifth and final season One thing I will note is that the fabulist who manufactures stories for local paper The Baltimore Sun had previous experience at two other news outlets. One of them is the Kansas City Star. The reporter goes around the spots in the city where the homeless hang out, in his tee-shirt, seeking information on a serial killer who's been picking off vagrants. The killer is himself a fabrication of Det McNulty's, who is keen to divert funds so that the police can get overtime money to catch the drug dealers. The Kansas City Star logo is printed on this reporter's shirt. Perhaps reading too much into things, or perhaps it's part of the show's beautiful poetry, but Kansas is famed for numerous things, one being The Wizard of Oz. The fantastical embellishments of Scott Templeton go a long way to forcing City Hall and others to grant the police the funds to ulti

Chocolate is poison for dogs. But if a dog eats one selection box worth of chocolate over a whole Christmas period, he might only have mild symptoms of poisoning.  By the age of four, when a dog eats chocolate, he is at "third-level".  If the dog eats chocolate at this university stage, it's the equivalent of an elephant giving live birth to a mini-van. The only human equivalent would be if there was someone hiding behind the bushes and jumped out to give you a fright. Would you feed your dog slices of processed ham, that is 20% water and lots of preservatives, and salt? Would you feed your child?  Would you feed your child to your god, as was asked of Abraham? Never, ever - Don't  feed your dog.