Tuesday, August 16, 2005

new books & panties

New Books

As Carol Vorderman's How to Do Sudoku continues to sell by the shitload, one has to marvel at her Cartlandesque ability to be such a prolific author. The same pen brought us Carol Vorderman's Detox Recipes and several other detox books.

Before that, when the craze for home improvement TV shows kicked in, we got Carol Vorderman's Better Homes, and before that there was - surprisingly missing from the Waterstones Top 100 books of the 20th Century list - Carol Vorderman's Guide to the Internet.

As with detox, the sudoku fad is going on long enough for her to squeeze out several books, so next month sees the publication of Carol Vorderman's Massive Book of Sudoku, followed two weeks later by another one. Soon after that there'll be Carol Vorderman's Guide To Having A Manager Who Gets You Fifty Grand For Having Your Name And Face Put On The Front Of A Book Somebody Else Wrote.

And after the success of The Little Book of Calm, The Little Book of Confidence, the Little Book of Feng Shui and - fad on fad - The Little Book of Sudoku, this autumn sees the publication of The Little Book Of Publishing Books So Physically Small That They Don't Go On Normal Shelves And So End Up By The Till Like The Chocolate In A Supermarket Checkout Where Believe Me Any Old Bollocks Will Shift A Fuckload Of Copies.

Credited author; Carol Vorderman. Probably.

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Panties

Another new blog added to the sidebar: Shot By Both Sides. I was nudged towards this by Jim Bliss, and its inclusion was clinched by two sections in particular;

Firstly,
Saudi Arabia and Pakistan have criticised the UK for 'not doing enough to stop Islamist terrorism'. In other news, Jim Davidson has criticised Bill Hicks for 'not being funny'.

and;
The death of people's right to say bloody stupid and offensive things in Britain without being arrested for them seems to be increasingly imminent. For fuck's sake, people: people like Omar Bakri had absolutely nothing to do with the terror attacks on London - if they had had anything to do with the terror attacks on London, we could charge them with that.

If you seriously think people should be locked up for treason for not liking our country and its values, then you should probably be locked up for treason for the threat that you represent to our country and its values.


(Oh, there's no panties in this post, I just wanted to do the Ian Dury pun in the title and couldn't think of something to do with a new link that is phonetically similar to 'panties')

7 comments:

Jarndyce said...

That's a vicious slur on Carol. I know (professionally - though it seems so long ago now) that she wrote the entire preface for Carol Vorderman's Guide to the Internet.

Psychbloke said...

What does the Carol Voderman brand actually mean? - 200 words - discuss...

merrick said...

The Vorderman brand is about being ever so clever but in a nice non-smug non-threatening way. Her management clearly get interviewers to mention her high IQ, yet che's at ease and smiley so you'd trust her to explain tricky new fangled things like the internet, or have her head round sudoku and suchlike.

Quite how she gets into the detox thing baffles me, though I suppose she advertised Benecol (cholestrol reducing margarine) using her 'scientific' persona, so maybe it comes in from that angle.

Anonymous said...

If I can put in a word for panties....back when I was at school and had a jazz band, the clarinet player lived in a bungalow whose gate had on it the name 'Pantiles' in individually screwed-on letters.

Naturally, one Christmas, we got a screwdriver........

Anonymous said...

"New Books and Ranties"

I thank you.

merrick said...

Curious Nick, you are a genius. The question is now raised; can I change the title, or is that a Stalinist airbrushing job.

And further, is 'new books and ranties' too far removed from the Dury title to be an effective pun? Is Dury even commonplace enough for anyone to have got the pun in the first place?

Anonymous said...

Really Merrick. Do I have to hit you with my rhythm stick?