Libro.fm + "like" + the subjectivity of history
May I recommend
Do you like audiobooks?
No, Amy, because listening to a professionally trained entertainer read me a delightful story whilst I fold laundry, mow the lawn or commute is stupid.
No, Amy, because receiving story via the evocative power of the human voice the way our primeval ancestors once did while resting on their muscular haunches around the campfire isn’t “real” reading.
No, Amy, because creating a bonding experience out of a long family car trip by listening to Hercules Poirot hunt a murderer in an English country home and then taking a break at an Irving Big Stop for a hot turkey sandwich and a milkshake where we speculate about who the killer is, SUCKS.
Audiobooks are amazing. You should be listening. You can get them from the library delivered RIGHT TO YOUR PHONE so you don’t even have to set foot in a building. Alternatively, if you’re after a hot new release, you can buy an audiobook.
This is where Libro.fm comes in.
Amazon had the lions share of the audiobook market with its ownership of Audible, so if you want to STICK IT to Jeff Bezos a little bit, you should download the libro.fm app. Its prices and stock are comparable to Audible, but it shares its profits with an independent book store of your choice. This is obviously better!
What’s this? A direct link to THE HONEYBEE EMERALDS available at Libro? Listen to an excerpt at the site and then download Libro and buyyyyyyy the book.
Do you listen to audiobooks? WHY NOT??!?
Defend your failure or gloat about your brilliance in the comments below!
A defence of “like”
Why do people, like, say ‘like’ so much?
We all use it, and we shouldn’t feel bad about it… According to this article, maybe Shakespeare got us started on it. The rage and judgement that too many “likes” in speech induces is due to - SAY IT WITH ME - sexism:
Kinzler says that “like” is a good example of a word where young women are chastised for talking a certain way even though that isn’t borne out in the linguistic data. “‘Young and female’ is often the group that is associated with a lot of these vocal features, but actually you find lots of people in the population speak this way. It’s a similar thing with uptalk, ending your sentence by going up, like it’s a question? It’s also assumed that it’s a Valley girl way of speaking when in fact it occurs with lots of different groups.”
Leave, like, a comment below!
History is entirely subjective
The People Who Decide What Becomes History
It’s all story-telling and who’s telling the story is as important as the story they’re telling. Long quote below, but I couldn’t resist this description. It is WRONG to make fun of people’s appearance, but three or four quarts of scrotum pus?!?!
Does it undermine the gravitas of the moment to know that, as Richard Cohen tells us in his supremely entertaining “Making History: The Storytellers Who Shaped the Past” (Simon & Schuster), Gibbon was obese, stood about four feet eight inches tall, and had ginger hair that he wore curled on the side of his head and tied at the back—that he was, in Virginia Woolf’s words, “enormously top-heavy, precariously balanced upon little feet upon which he spun round with astonishing alacrity”? Does it matter that Gibbon’s contemporaries called him Monsieur Pomme de Terre, that James Boswell described him as “an ugly, affected, disgusting fellow,” and that he suffered from, in addition to gout, a distended scrotum caused by a painful swelling in his left testicle, which had to be regularly drained of fluid, sometimes as much as three or four quarts? And that when, late in life, he made a formal proposal of marriage, the woman he addressed burst out laughing, then had to summon two servants to help him get off his knees and back on his feet?
Cohen thinks that it should matter, that we cannot read “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” properly unless we know the person who wrote it, scrotal affliction and all.
Top Gun’s Volleyball
Team USA Beach Volleyball Players Break Down the Iconic Scene in Top Gun
An analysis by experts of that shirtless scene - Tom Cruise is in jeans?!
Sorry, Maverick. You have some work to do on the courts. “He’s kind of spastic,” Bourne said. “A little too intense.”
“Yeah, Tom Cruise probably [has] the worst form.” Crabb added. To be fair, it could be the fact that he’s in tight jeans and the chafing has set in, but regardless, it’s not his best day.
Maybe this is why he dipped out with the score knotted at one …he knew it wouldn’t get any better.
Book stuff
First of all, I TOLD all of you that my friend Wayne Ng’s book was brilliant and now the Crime Writers of Canada has agreed with me and given LETTERS FROM JOHNNY its Best Crime Novella award.
Seriously, it’s a great, funny and evocative story set in 1970s Toronto. If you had a reluctant tween-ish reader in your life (especially if they love hockey or mysteries) then this would be a great book for them. It’s also a great grown-up read.
Secondly, I’m going to be at the Toronto International Festival of Authors the weekend of June 3-5th. Specifically, I’ll be at the Motive Crime and Mystery Fest on Saturday and Sunday and on Saturday night at 7pm I’ll be part of a FREE reading of my next book - THE FOULEST THINGS (out in the autumn). I’ll be womanning the table at the Crime Writers of Canada table Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning.
If you’re in the city and feeling literary - come out and say “Hi!” I will give you a bookmark!
I had a Tweet go a tiny bit viral. Here it is! The comments are a hoot.
TikTok
They are everywhere
This was a LITTLE too on the nose
Sam is so weird
The shrieks
Nothing in there
Zip it
I will have a post soon about Bloody Caesars
Dirtbag dog
I learned this week that Anthony Hopkins is a prolific TikTokker
The cough
This guy is never going to poop again
There’s a theme this week
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