Not such a silly question

John Redwood asked the Minister for Energy & Climate Change, Ed Miliband a question in Parliament. It was this; "Why is the Northern hemisphere winter so cold, and which climate model predicted this?”
Hit the link above to go to John's blogsite for more.
http://www.johnredwoodsdiary.com/2010/01/08/not-such-a-silly-question/


It's not a bad question is it? Perfectly reasonable I'd say. It ought to deserve a reasoned answer.
However, the scaremongers were out in force today, calling him every kind of name, saying that the science is settled.
That's what they told Columbus. The earth is flat.
That's what they told Galileo. The earth is at the centre of the universe.


The current spin/lie is that weather is not climate. Just because all the recent winters have been colder than the one before doesn't mean that the earth is getting colder. As if.
Next time someone tries to spin that lie, reply in this way
Just because a couple of summers were warmer than previous years it doen't mean that the earth is getting warmer.
They try to say that climate is measured over a long period, say, 30 years or more.
OK. So the global warmers started screaming about 19 years ago. Isn't that a bit soon to start claiming that the current weather is in fact climate?


They can't have it both ways.

Daily Mail headline from 11 months ago

Just check the date on the link above. It's from the Daily Mail of Feb6th 2009. That's right. Eleven months ago. And what does it say?
"
Roads are becoming 'death traps' as supplies of grit run perilously low, motoring organisations warned last night.
The failure to provide enough salt to keep roads ice-free is turning some into 'no-go areas', they said.
The worsening situation follows five days of chaos caused by snow and freezing weather in which schools have closed, postal deliveries have stopped and rubbish has been left to pile up."

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1136093/Grit-supplies-run-days-Roads-turning-death-traps-says-AA.html#ixzz0bxiVtlWE

The goverment is so obsessed with AGW that it refuses to countenance that it snows in the winter and the best way to deal with it is to be prepared. That means getting stock in during the summer. I understand that the only mine that supplies road salt was on short time during the summer because the local authorities wouldn't or were forbidden to buy in stocks. Now we've run out again.

Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle & Flynn

I recommended "Fallen Angels" by Niven, Pournelle & Flynn a couple of weeks ago.
Whilst on Samizdata's excellent site today he also recommended it, and supplied a link so that you can read a chapter of it for yourself.
As I said before, you'd need to be a sci-fi fan to get all the nuances of the plot, but it's a great read all the same.
One of the authors, Larry Niven in another book came up with the concept that excess heat is a by-product of civilisation. The temperatures are always higher where large populations of humans live. It's called the "heat island effect".
Industrialisation brings heat in the form of chimneystacks and heat exchangers. I leave my computer on all the time and it keeps this part of the room nice and warm.


Here's an idea for the fans of Gaia; could the global cooling of the last ten years be the planet's response to the heat caused by our civilisation?


The global warming fanatics tell us that one can't say that AGW isn't happening because we've had a couple of cold winters. The opposite is as true, of course. They can't insist that the planet is warming just because we had a heatwave or two about ten years back.


We can't all be right. BUT we can all be wrong.

Met Office chief tries to defend their performance

Andrew Neil on the Daily Politics show tears into the chief of the Met Office and asks a lot of inconvenient questions like
"How can you get your forecasts so wrong?"
"How can you justify your performance related pay bonus"
"How can you justify being paid more than the Prime Minister?"
"If you can't get your short term forecasts right, why should anyone believe your forecasts for 2050?"


Click on the link above and watch him squirm

We have more to fear from the cold than the warm

Despite what the global cooling denialists are saying, we have much more to fear from the cold weather than we do the warm. There was a lot of fuss made about ten years ago when the French suffered about 3000 deaths due to the heatwave, but the cold kills far more, especially when you factor in the treacherous road conditions caused by laying down too little salt and grit stocks, and basing your winter salt needs on outlandish forecasts from the Met Office.

On Wattsupwiththat.com, they quote the following figures of deaths caused by winter cold, and it makes for sobering reading. Even the BBC has an article on it (Please hit the title link for more)
I keep saying, we have nothing to fear from global warming. We have plenty to fear from its adherents.

United States. 2001-2008

 

The iceman cometh

Over at Big Brother Watch, Alex Deane reports that he was speaking to someone who'd fallen on an icy pavement
"A man who recently slipped on some ice and hurt himself very badly told me tonight that when he asked why the pavement hadn't been gritted, the answer he received was that the council feared litigation if pavements were gritted and people nevertheless fell."

So there you have it. Your council won't grit the pavement in case they get sued. Their reasoning is this. If you grit the pavement you are assumed to have taken control of it. According to this twisted logic, if I clear the ice and snow from outside my house and some fool slips over on the cleared path, they can sue me. If the ice is not touched they can't.
How twisted is that?

Cazzy Jones has blogged it as well
http://cazzyjones.blogspot.com/2009/12/blog-post.html

Burning books to stay warm

Over at Wattsupwiththat.com there's a report that pensioners in Swansea are buying old encyclopaedias and hardback books to burn in their fires. At 5 or 10p a volume, they're cheaper than a bag of coal.
Read this
"
Metro News, 5 January 2010
Excerpts:

Hard-up pensioners have resorted to buying books from charity shops and burning them to keep warm.

…

Temperatures this week are forecast to plummet as low as -13ºC in the Scottish Highlands, with the mercury falling to -6ºC in London, -5ºC in Birmingham and -7ºC in Manchester as one of the coldest winters in years continues to bite. Workers at one charity shop in Swansea, in south Wales, described how the most vulnerable shoppers were seeking out thick books such as encyclopaedias for a few pence because they were cheaper than coal.
A lot of them buy up large hardback volumes so they can stick them in the fire to last all night.’
A 500g book can sell for as little as 5p, while a 20kg bag of coal costs £5."

Unfortunately we don't have a fireplace so it's the gas central heating for us. The current freeze is having an effect on supplies, so I'm hearing that we'll have to import more gas, and pay more for it as well.

The wind farm at Burton Latimer hasn't turned a blade in days or even weeks, just to prove how unreliable wind power is. So the coal fired power stations are keeping the country's electricity supply going. And the greens want to shut them down.

We have nothing to fear from global warming, only from its adherents. It's the cold that will kill us.

Too many chiefs, not enough indians

I saw this article in the Mail the other day. It makes sobering reading

"The number of generals in the Army has swelled dramatically under Labour, leading to claims that too much money is being spent on top brass rather than frontline troops.

Britain now has 255 senior officers ranked Brigadier or higher, 27 more than in 1997.

That means there is now a general for every 415 men in the Army."

All those overpaid and overpromoted men and women sitting behind desks. Sack them all or give them a gun and some body armour and send the lot to Afghanistan.

And while we're at it, most of the Local Government CEOs earn more than the Prime Minister. That's a scandal. Fifteen or twenty years ago they were called Town Clerks and had more responsibility and cost us a lot less. Every Chief Executive that sits behind a desk stops the council employing ten labourers who could reduce the unemployment at a stroke, and keep the pavements clear of snow and ice.

Suddenly it's global warming

Back in 2003 the BBC reported how the once "wettest place on earth" was having to bring water in by road as there was a drought. The reason? Deforestation, plus an increase in population from 7,000 in 1960 to 15 times that today. Oh, and a cement plant was built nearby, which polluted the environment and which uses water in the production process.
So, three reasons why the rainfall has decreased. Deforestation, population increase and pollution. All reported on the BBC website (hit the link in the title bar)

Now fast forward to December 2009. The same journalist revisits the area and reports that the lack in rainfall is down to "global warming". here's the link:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/8378327.stm.
Talk about making the facts fit the latest scaremongering!

As I said repeatedly, the climate is changing. It always is. Cutting down the world's rainforest may have a lot to do with it. The undeniable fact that there are three times more people alive on this planet than there were when I was born might also have something to do with it. There is also a correlation between sunspot activity and the earth's temperature that scientists have proved beyond doubt.

I just get so pissed off when rich businessmen out to make a killing at our expense try and blame it all on our cars' exhausts.

thanks to http://biased-bbc.blogspot.com/ for the tip

The world of work

30 years ago I worked for an independent retailer that was gaining market share at an incredible rate. They did it by keeping costs under control, and boy do I mean under control.
For example, the manager had to use a payphone to call head office. He was given a small coin float to last a week. The Area Manager had the key.
When I joined they had about 80 stores and five years later they were listed on the Stock Exchange with over 200 stores. They did all this against a background of high inflation and a recession.
During that time they overtook Boots and Woolworths and became the country's number one toiletries retailer.
I once visited their head office and it was tiny. There were no spare desks. Even the Area Managers had to book office space in advance if they came into the head office. The reason was that the Company needed them out on the road, not behind a desk. There was no duplication of effort or admin. It was a tight ship.
I was a manager and very often the only male member of staff. This meant that I was also the warehouseman and security officer. Whatever needed doing, I did it.
We worked hard but were well paid. There was no pension plan or any perks. Not everyone liked it. In fact, I hated working there, but it was a job and I was grateful for it. The firm provided well paid work at a time when businesses were closing down all around.
I noticed today that the Times reports that public sector workers now earn up to 7% more than those in the private sector. And my experience is that they don’t have to work very hard for their money.
I’ve done hundreds of different jobs in my life. I’ve worked in almost every sphere of business. I’ve been in management and I’ve been a wage donkey. I’ve stood in line as the supervisor chose his workforce for the day and then been sent home without pay.
I’ve worked as a temp in a government department and seen first hand how inefficient they are.
I recognise that the problem is generational. It goes back to the very dawn of the Civil Service. The Civil Service has a hierarchy and a pecking order. Your position in the order depends on two things:
One: the size of the budget that you control. The bigger the budget, the more prestige you have.
Two: the number of staff under your control. The more staff you have, the more prestige.
Given these two facts, it’s not hard to see that no Civil Service chief will willingly allow his budget or workforce to be cut. The unions see to it that roles are clearly demarked, so any change in work practice is resisted. Add in generous sick pay and other perks like maternity leave and anyone can see that it’s a great job to have.
When I left school I worked in a bank. It was in the sixties, and one of the revolutionary ideas that they introduced while I worked there was paid sick leave if you had a day off with a cold for instance. I hated the job. I’ve hated a lot of jobs but this was awful. So I’d phone in sick if I couldn’t face going into work, and still get paid. I expect there are a lot like me in the public sector.
Public sector bosses factor in the number of man hours lost to sickness when setting staff levels, so most sectors are overstaffed to begin with.

What makes me most angry is that these people produce nothing. Robert Heinlein said the world is made up of three types of people- makers, takers and fakers. Ayn Rand said much the same thing. The Public Sector doesn’t create wealth, it only spends other people’s.
It’s becoming a luxury we can’t afford.

Nicki Gillis

I had a lot of fun touring with Nicki Gillis in 2009. We're doing it again in 2010, during June and July. Here's footage of the band performing the old Everley Brothers song "Price of Love" at a festival in the UK last summer.


here's another video taken at a different festival. This time it's our version of the Eurythmics "Thorn in my side"


We've still got a few spare dates, so if you're looking for a great band for your venue, give us a call.

Fallen Angels by Niven Pournelle & Flynn

Can I recommend a book by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle & Michael Flynn? It's called "Fallen Angels" and was published by Pan in 1991. I got my copy via Ebay. Here's the blurb from the back cover-

"2073... and Earth falls victim to the advance of a new Ice Age. As the ruling Green Party outlaw the technology that can save the planet, a spaceship crashes in the frozen wastes of the American mid west."

The authors wrote the book just as the global warming conspiracy was getting under way. They saw it for what it is, bad science used to advance a political agenda.
Almost twenty years on, and what they wrote about, and warned us about via a drugstore paperback novel is coming true. It's good story, but you have to be a Science Fiction buff to get all the sub plots.

George Orwell wrote "Animal Farm" and "1984" as a warning to us about the dangers of socialism. He could have stood on a soapbox and preached to us but I doubt if many would have listened. However, like Robert Heinlein, Ayn Rand, Aldous Huxley and others, he understood that he could get his ideas over if they were presented as a work of fiction.

My main concern about Orwell's work is this- far from being a warning to us, his words have been adopted by the left as a training manual.

It can't all be down to global warming.

Over at Wattsupwiththat.com I read that the Swiss mountain glaciers were melting at a faster rate in the 1940s than they are today.
"The most recent studies by researchers at ETH Zurich show that in the 1940s Swiss glaciers were melting at an even-faster pace than at present. This is despite the fact that the temperatures in the 20th century were lower than in this century. Researchers see the main reason for this as the lower level of aerosol pollution in the atmosphere."
By aerosol pollution they mean soot and other small particles in the atmosphere. These can be caused by volcanic eruptions among other things. They're not all down to man made global warming.
The earth's climate may be changing. The glaciers may indeed be melting. But it's just wrong to put it all down to man made global warming. We need honest study; study where the results are not controlled by a cheque book or vested interests. I have no axe to grind other than a genuine desire for the truth.

We have more to fear from the cold than from the warmth. It's possible that we could still be in the grip of the Little Ice Age, when the Thames would freeze over and fairs be held on the ice, were it not for the effects of the Industrial Revolution, where the atmosphere was heated by countless factory chimney stacks. But that could also have been a coincidence.
Apparently they can grow potatoes in some parts of Greenland again. But remember, when the Vikings discovered it over a thousand years ago, they named it because it was green with vegetation. That was during the Medieval Warm Period.
The climate changes. It always has. It's not all down to man. Perhaps the sun has something to do with it?

How the UK met Office got hijacked by the global warming conspiracy

At last the mainstream press are waking up to the global warming scam. Today Mail on Sunday carries an article about the Met Office, which has 1500 staff, a £170million GBP budget, and a supercomputer and how it consistently gets the forecasts wrong.
As I read the article it is revealed that the Met Office is led by a former head of the World Wildlife Fund who have bought into the whole global warming/climate change agenda. And it can be argued that the Met Office has become part of the conspiracy. They supplied the data for the Copenhagen fiasco last year.
So, instead of being impartial and reporting whqat is happening with the weather, the Met Office insists on reporting what it wants to happen- that is- tell lies.
Last spring we had a very warm Bank Holiday and Bournemouth beach was empty. Why? because the met office got the forecast wrong and people stayed at home.
Each year they say the summer will be hotter and drier, and each winter will be warmer and wetter, but the reality is the opposite. I no longer trust them.
The computer they use to forecast next week's weather is the same one that they use to forecast what will happen in 20, 30, 50 years time. Can we believe what they say?

The only serious rival to the Met Office, an amateur forecaster from Yorkshire, who used pine cones, seaweed and kept accurate records and used common sense died last month. For all the money and staff, the Met Office was no more accurate than he was.

Richard Thompson guitar genius

I've been a fan of Richard Thompson all my adult life. The first "proper" concert i went to back in 1967 featured fairport Convention as the opening act, and from then on I've been a fan. His guitar playing has the ability to send shivers down my back, and also to want to pack it playing altogether. He is the standard by which I measure my progress as a player, and 40 years on I'm as far away as I ever was.
Last year he toured the UK with his "1000 years of popular music" show, and I couldn't go for one reason or another. I may have been on tour myself, or more likely been broke, but I do have the dvd of the show, featuring Richard on guitar and vocals, aided and abetted by Judith Owen on vocals and keyboard, and Debra Dobkin on percussion and vocals.
I found this video on Youtube of a recent concert performance.

I was reminded of the song when I visited Wrinkled Weasel's blog site today. The original version of this song is by Julie London, and he was waxing lyrical about her. This version features Judith Owen on vocals, but it appears that the cameraman has a fixation with Richard Thompson, so we hear her and see him. The guitar arrangement is the original Barney Kessel one I believe.

More Ayn Rand

I'm reading "Atlas Shrugged" for the second time and enjoying it even more. Although the book is over 50 years old it really resonates with the times, and I thoroughly recommend it to you.
Without giving any of the story away, there's a sub plot regarding the government's passing into law the "Equalisation of Opportunity Bill", designed to prevent any one company or organisation gain an advantage in business, even when the other companies are inefficient or useless. Sound familiar?
Here are two small speeches given by the champions of the Bill. First of all we have a professor of philosophy Dr Pritchett:
"..I made it clear that i am in favour of it (the Bill), because I am in favour of a free economy. A free economy cannot exist without competition. Therefore, men must be forced to compete.Therefore, we must control men in order to force them to be free."

Then another character is asked his view of the Bill.
"Certainly I approve of it. Our culture has sunk into a bog of materialism. men have lost all spiritual values in their pursuit of material production and technological trickery. They're too comfortable. They will return to a nobler life if we teach them to bear privations. So we ought to place a limit upon their material greed."

Doublespeak. Orwell was not the only one to warn us about it. And yet we see it everywhere about us today. Moves to restrict our movement in order to protect our liberty. Vested interest groups wishing to dictate to the rest of us how we should live our lives and spend our money. Choices that are no choice- I mean have you ever flicked through the TV channels at any given time? Ten channels, all with home improvement shows. Choice? No choice- doublespeak.
Anti-discrimination laws that by their very nature are discriminatory. Doublespeak.

Euro Madness

The world is going mad. The BBC reports that Lithuania has had to shut down its only nuclear reactor as a condition of joining the EU.
The reactor is 20 years old and is the same as those at Chernobyl. The Chernobyl reactor only blew up because the technicians wanted to test how many safety circuits they could override before it went bang. Quite a lot, it turned out. The reactors are safe, but we're not so sure about the people that operate them.
Anyway, the Lithuanians looked at the vast riches on offer from the EU and complied.
It didn't matter that the reactor provided 80% of their electricity. It didn't matter that this is the middle of winter. And it didn't matter that the Lithuanians now have to get their power from the Russians, and will no doubt be held to ransom by them.

Eurocrats. Doncha just love em?

Hit the title bar for the link to the BBC site
Here's what they say on Fox news
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,581680,00.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fworld+%28Text+-+World%29

And the Melbourne Age
http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-world/lithuania-shuts-down-nuclear-reactor-20100101-ll6s.html

Finally, consider this: the green movement hates technology, but technology is the only way forward. We cannot clothe, feed, heat or shelter ourselves without it.
This island nation was once self sufficient in all those things. We are now at the mercy of any and everyone who wishes us harm. I accept that the climate may be changing, but I fear the cold much more than the warm.

And you should too. It'll be our nuclear power stations next. Then our coal powered stations. What then? They won't let us burn our rubbish. How will we keep warm as the winters turn colder?

Big Carbon

I watched the climate talks at Copenhagen with dismay and disgust. Disgust at the hypocrisy of it all, and dismay that the BBC and most of the world's media had swallowed the lie and were pushing man made global warming for all it was worth. I wondered why and then this blogsite explained why. It was all about money. It always is. You had the wierd spectacle of hyper rich individuals like Gore fly into town in their private jets and step into hired in limos (over 2000 from all over Europe, leaving the pilots to fly the jets empty to landing strips in Norway because there wasn't enough tarmac to park them all. You had delegation upon delegation of interested parties, plus tree huggers and other eco-loons all swamp the city that was chosen because it apparently is more green than the rest of Europe, which is a laugh. They might have more wind farms than anybody else, but they're hopelessly unreliable and won't produce any electricity when it's calm or too windy. Which is most of the time. So they have to import electricity from neighbouring countries. Which exposes more hypocrisy.
Anyway i urge you to click on the title of this post, which will take you to an interesting website that exposes the whole sorry charade.
If you don't want to do that, here's some of the text from EU Referendum-

"In 2004, it was less than $300 million. But in 2005, the trade really started to soar, ending the year with $10.8 billion-worth of transactions. A year later, in 2006, the "carbon" market had grown to $31 billion. In 2007, again it more than doubled its turnover, to $64 billion. Last year, it did it again, reaching a colossal $126 billion. By 2020, some estimates suggest the annual value will reach $2 trillion.

Not only does this represent a very significant business volume, its stunning growth rate makes carbon trading the hottest item in town, with banks, financial houses and independent brokers piling in to make a killing.

The larger part of the market actually comprises the EU's mandatory Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) – and other very much smaller allowance schemes - accounting for 73 percent of trading volume in 2008. But the whole system is underpinned by what is known as "project-based transactions". These comprise, in the main, so-called "carbon credits" generated by the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

This mechanism was formally created in 1997 by the Kyoto climate treaty and started operating in a very small way in 1998 building to 78 million "credits" (or Certified Emission Reductions, CERs, as they are formally known) to 333 million this year with a projection of 1.7 billion by the end of 2012.

The "end of 2012" is, of course, the key milestone - when the Kyoto treaty lapses. And as the World Bank warned in 2008, then the gravy train could come to an abrupt halt. "Created by regulation," it observed, "the carbon market's biggest risk is caused, perversely, by the absence of market continuity beyond 2012 and this can only be provided by policymakers and regulators."

It was those policymakers and regulators who were gathered at Copenhagen for the last two weeks, their primary concern – as Booker points out in his column this week - to protect this new and very valuable business.

Thus does he say that Copenhagen was not about global warming but money. The cash that Hillary Clinton so dramatically plonked on the table, rising to $100 billion by 2020, which includes the £1.5 billion offered by Gordon Brown (money which of course he hasn't got) and which like a crazed gambler he last week upped to £6 billion (even more money he hasn't got), was merely a "sweetener" to persuade the developing countries to maintain the money-machine set in motion by Kyoto.

And that was the only really concrete achievement of Copenhagen, winning the agreement to the perpetuating of those Kyoto rules that have created this vast industry.

That much was acknowledged by John Prescott on Channel 4 News yesterday, who talked up the Copenhagen "accord" – as we must now call it – saying that we had achieved a "Kyoto II" – the essence of which is the carbon trading scheme.

Interestingly, this business has two main beneficiaries. On the one hand, there are all those Western "entrepreneurs" who have piled into what has become the fastest growing commodity market in the world. But, on the other are that small number of people in China and India who have learnt how to work this system to their huge advantage, and account for the majority of CDMs.

As can be seen from the UN's own statistics - see chart above – these two countries account for by far the majority of the registered schemes, taking a 70 percent share of the total. And, of the two, China is by far the bigger player, averaging 197,792,890 CERs as against 38,308,631 from India.

The level of China's involvement, as a major beneficiary of the scheme, makes a nonsense of the commentators at Copenhagen who were predicting that China might sabotage a deal. With so much money at stake, there was no way China was not going to fall into line, showing up the much-reported spat between Obama and Chinese premier Wen Jiabao for exactly what it was – pure theatre.

Thus does Booker conclude that the part played at Copenhagen by all the tree-huggers, abetted by the BBC and their media allies, was to keep hysteria over warming at fever pitch while the politicians haggled over the real prize, to keep the Kyoto system in place.

The only tree they were concerned with hugging was the money tree and all the vast political apparatus that now supports it, allowing governments to tax and regulate us into handing over ever more of our money, largely without realising it, every time we drive a car, fly in a plane, pay our electricity bill or carry out any of a vast range of activities that involve the emission of CO2. Compared with these sums, even the billions we all unwittingly spend on subsidies to the developers of useless wind turbines are chicken feed.

The tree-huggers have been well and truly "had" – but then so have we. It is us that are going to pay, through our electricity bills, our taxes and living expenses, in increasing amounts for this hidden bonanza which the negotiators so diligently protected last week.

Trading in what amounts to thin air, on the farcical premise that life-giving carbon dioxide is a "pollutant", they have perpetrated the biggest heist in the history of mankind, all to protect "Big Carbon”.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

I first heard of this novel a couple of years ago. Quite how I've lived this long without coming across it is a mystery. I re-read some Robert Heinlein novels last year and even he namechecks the author Ayn Rand in his prose.
I picked up my first copy in a charity store a couple of years ago and literally read it to pieces. It's a big book. The paperback runs to over 1000 pages and it's small print, about 8pt. By the time I got to the last 100 pages they were hanging by a thread.I passed the book on to my friend Jamie who managed to keep it together long enough to finish it and he too was astounded by the book.
Recent world events have prompted me to re-read it, so just before Christmas I obtained a brand new copy via Ebay, and I'm now 200 pages in, and enjoying it even more than the first time I read it.
So, it's a big book. It's over fifty years old. So why should you read it?

Well, it's a good story, an epic with a strong cast of characters led by Dagny Taggart, the female Operations Director of Taggart Transcontinental Railways, as she struggles to keep the railway open while industries close down, businesses fail, banks go bankrupt and the government passes laws to make everyone equal.
Sounds familiar?
There's the eternal triangle between Dagny and two of the male lead characters. The writing is beautiful with great descriptive passages of prose as the story makes its way to a crescendo. As they say, I couldn't put it down.
Apparently someone has the film rights and there were plans to make a Hollywood blockbuster starring Angelina Jolie as Dagney Taggart. I sincerely hope that they fail. 12 one hour episodes is the minimum that would be needed to do the book justice. Having seen the mess that they made of Heinlein's "Starship Troopers" where they entirely missed the point of the book, I shudder to think what they'd do with it. Anyone who read Harry Harrison's amazing book "Make room, make room" and then saw the film "Soylent Green" will know that heart sinking feeling when Hollywood takes a great and honest and believable story and then changes the ending to make it more sensational will know what I mean.

Anyway I urge and encourage you to get a copy of Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and discover it for yourself.

Catching up on my reading

This time last year I was ill in bed, suffering from trachyitis (croup, which meant that I coughed uncontrollably every time I tried to do anything. In the end, all I could manage was to sit upright in bed and keep still. So I caught up on my reading, starting with every Robert Heinlein short story he wrote, followed by all his juvenile novels up to and including "Starship Troopers" which had been rejected by his publisher was being too adult and was subsequently published in the mainstream to great acclaim. Please don't confuse the Hollywood film of the same name with this masterpiece. The film is just another shoot em up video arcade game, while the book deals with much weightier matters. It's in my top ten recommended books to read by the way. After about ten days I'd recovered enough to go back to work, but continued reading anyway.
After reading so much Heinlein (I think I read twenty nine books in as many days) it was time for something different. So I started on the short stories of Philip K Dick, another of my all time favourite writers. He wrote a lot of short stories and novellas, and it's not helped by the fact that many weren't published for years and years, and a lot were republished with different titles. I'm completing my collection of his work via Ebay, and I've been caught out more than once like that. Some of my older paperbacks are falling apart and won't stand another read, so I must get newer copies anyway.
Dick wrote mainstream novels as well as superlative speculative fiction, and it hurt him that he couldn't get any of his mainstream books published while he was alive. So my next course of reading involved re-reading his mainstream novels for the first time in twenty years, starting with "The man whose teeth were all exactly alike" and ending with "In Milton Lumky territory". Powerful stuff, and I can understand why mainstream publishers of the 1950s shied away. He was a man before his time.
Thanks for reading this far. I'm grateful for any comments you may choose to make.