As you probably know, phonics and early learning of sounds has been my 2009 passion. There is a page run by the British something council with the phonemic alphabet there. They do all the sounds when you click on them.
I was trying to be all educational and professional, but all I could get to was trying to make the lady sound like a gorilla by pressing the different vowel sounds. If you feel like some immature fun, give it a try
(as this title suggests, there is another of these coming soon. Possibly a little more controversial, so I wanted to warm up with this one)
As a man with young child, I don’t get to the movies much. So I was pretty disappointed when my first movie experience in ages was to see Fame. Now I was probably round when this movie was first out, and probably when the tv series followed. But I didn’t care then. And I don’t care now. So as you can tell, I went in with high hopes.
But I came out feeling ok. Didn’t mind it. The plot was pretty simple, just following the lives of all these kids as they began at this school for music and drama. I liked that there wasn’t one lead character, it was more like Dead Poet’s Society where there were heaps of lead characters. As a muso I totally had issues with the practicalities of mixing sound in a live setting so that apparently a human voice could carry easily above a drum without any mic. And it was pretty feelgood, so the theme of being yourself and living your dream no matter what is pretty strong. Mainly harmless I guess, but at another level this idea of just doing whatever you want and asking others to bend to it is very self absorbed.
I don’t know if you’d like it if you were a Fame fan of old, coz I think it has been changed and rewritten at will. But I didn’t mind it, I’d probably give it 2 1/2 High Fives (out of a possible 5 of course, just in case you are uninitiated with the Soupidis rating syste
My wonderful sister in law Amy is a librarian in Wagga Wagga. Now as a 2-day veteran of being a librarian, I have learnt they work pretty hard.
And I have a fresh understanding for the pain of one book being put randomly on a shelf in the wrong way… it is annoying!
Anyway, on her blog she was outlining a list of THE books you need to read. Apparently it’s also doing the rounds on Facebook, but I have missed it in the deluge of quizzes about things I never wanted or needed to know about people know.
Here is the list
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible -X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Bits and pieces) X
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
34 Emma – Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan X
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth X
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon BC
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt BC
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre DumasX
66 On The Road – Jack KerouacX
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt X
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry X – I hated this book!
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton X
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole BC
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor HugoX
I thought I should count up how many I have read. I’m on 19. Apparently the average person will read 6 of these books in their life. Scores please!
Here’s a novel way to waste time. Go to a person’s blog which dates back a while, and put a comment on their first blog post, or somewhere there. I did it today on Howie’s blog. It’s true, his spelling hasn’t gotten any better in 7 years.
