Mark A. Rayner's Blog: Mark A. Rayner's Goodreads Blog, page 69

Remembrances of Rabbits Past

Watership Down This was one of my childhood faves, and all of my friends had read it as well. So, you'd think a bunch of 12-year-old boys would find this a laughable premise, a book about rabbits. Au contraire. For … Continue reading →

Classics of Literature — Books with Animals (#1)

Moby-Dick, or, The Whale No finer book about the 19th century whaling industry has ever been written. There are exciting passages about the flensing of whales, gut-wrenching tales of the boiling of whale blubber, and don't even get me started … Continue reading →

Beekeeping

Another clip, this featuring John Cleese and Rowan Atkinson: Is it me, or do a inordinate number of John Cleese sketches end with him killing everyone? Alltop would like to end a sketch with gunfire too.

Just as it should be

Alltop is damn funny. Twain silhouette via Hirsute History t-shirts.

Economics 101

My economics professor told the following joke in class, so you know some of them have a sense of humor and understand theirs is a dismal science: A physicist, a chemist and an economist are stranded on an island, with … Continue reading →

Hitler Sings! And the First Irish Moon-shot

More from Spike Milligan. And if that wasn't enough, Spike can make fun of his homeland too. (Though I think he's actually making fun of the stereotypes.) Alltop doesn't like the sound of these boncentration bamps.

Ampersand wearing a fez

I think Marc Johns has nailed it. This is exactly the kind of whimsical hat an ampersand would wear. Here are some other suggestions punctuation/headgear combos: colon wearing a bowler hat semi-colon wearing a flat cap question mark wearing a … Continue reading →

The Goon Show: Tales of Men's Shirts

Before Monty Python, there was The Goon Show. I love the way that when Spike Milligan does anything, he breaks the rest of the Goons up. This is their penultimate radio performance, which also happened to be televised, and is, … Continue reading →

Out-of-context quotes from my work in progress

I'm well stuck into what I hope is my last draft of my next novel, and I thought I'd share the occasional quotation from the book: The sirens were an old technology, originally invented so that everyone knew it was … Continue reading →

How green are Arthur C. Clarke's predictions?

I'm always amazed when I see clips of Clarke predicting how technology will change our lives. The clip above is from 1973. In retrospect, he gets so much right, yet some parts are way off; here's another, from 1964. I … Continue reading →