Έλα να τα πάρεις!
Contact



Search
This Month
April 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
Month Archive
Year Archive

The Story of Zoya and Shura
full text from greeklish.org

Photo Galleries/Φωτογραφίες

Bandiera Rossa by Pankrti


Dynata Dynata
by Antique



Rang de Basanti from the film
Rang de Basanti (2006)



Teri Mehfil Mein
from the film Mughal-e-Azam (1960)



Rob Van Dam
wins the WWE Championship
at One Night Stand (2006)



CM Punk wins
the World Heavyweight
Championship (2008)




Notice


The blog and contents of the entire greeklish.org site represent the personal views of the site's authors. The views expressed on these pages are the views of the authors alone and are not the views of our employers or of any organizations with which we are affiliated.

Most original works from this site may be licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 (US).

Copyrighted quotes and images obtained from third party web sites are used under the terms of Fair Use. Some materials used by greeklish.org are in the public domain.

Family photos are intended for viewing on this web site and should not be reproduced or used elsewhere without the permission of the owners and operators of greeklish.org.

Main Page  »  books
View Article  Two pictures
It's been a busy week or so as I've been balancing quite a bit in my "down time."  I have been writing a bit on the Iranian students for some other sites and at the same time, I have been building a web archive of material related to the Great Patriotic War (more on that project soon), plus I've devoted a bit of time to defending a blog article I wrote for our site way back in April 2006.  Now, it does tend bother me when I go too long without posting new material and I know we don't have a vast readership here, but now and again folks drop me a line to check on things if I'm too quiet.  So, while I don't have anything terribly important to add to greeklish.org tonight, I will take a break from my other projects to post a few pictures...

Here's old Domino, fast asleep:



If you've never had the pleasure of meeting Domino, I will point out here that she is a big dog.  She currently weighs about 65 pounds.  You might notice that she has crammed her entire body into a dog bed that is actually intended for a 10 to 15 pound dog.  The small bed belongs to Stupsi who weighs about 12 pounds or so.  Domino's rather large bed is on the floor right next to Stupsi's bed.  You can see it in the picture.  It is completely empty.  Sure, Domino could get up and plant herself on her own bed, which is probably much more comfortable because it is designed for a dog her size.  But this is clearly a matter of principle.  Stupsi is out of the picture, fast asleep on the cold, hard floor.  Domino is still very much in charge of things around here.

Here's my desk after several nights of writing about the Iranian students, the Great Patriotic War and Dr. R.'s lecture:



1.        The Teaching Company's Legacies of Great Economists lecture series on audiocassette
2.        Marxism:  Philosophy and Economics by Thomas Sowell
3.        A History of the USSR, Part Three (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948)
4.        History of the USSR, Part III (Progress Publishers, 1982)
5.        Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Workers' Movement by Karl Marx (New Park, 1982)
6.        Smokin' Banana Peels CD by The Dead Milkmen
7.        Post card featuring the famous quote by Dom Helder Camara:  "When I gave food to the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor were hungry, they called me a communist."
8.        Soviet-era museum placard featuring the slogan "Death to the fascist hordes!"  (underneath are the books What is Dialectical Materialism? by O. Yakhot and Peace and Greece, Speeches by Dr. Ales Bebler)
9.        Bumper sticker:  "I'd rather be smashing imperialism"
10.      Soviet Calendar:  Thirty Years of the Soviet State (Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1948)
11.    Rey Mysterio: The Biggest Little Man DVD set

Now...back to work!
View Article  The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-Around Surprise Book (Evening Edition)
Animated ThumbtackWhen I was in fourth grade, a classmate introduced me to a rather bizarre book that he had found in our school's library. The book was "The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-Around Surprise Book (Evening Edition)" by Louis Phillips and Lynn Braswell" and I had never seen anything quite like it. The book was basically a hodgepodge of silliness, irreverent jokes and strange black & white graphics. I absolutely loved it. Over the course of my next few years at that school, I checked it out a number of times. When I left the school, I suppose I forgot about it for a long time although from time to time, I got the urge to look around for it at libraries and bookstores, but I couldn’t find another copy.
 
Several years ago, back when finding used books on the web was a bit more difficult than it is today, I got the urge to seek out a copy of this book to see if it was still as cool as I remembered it to be.  An initial search through Amazon.com netted a used copy for somewhere around $110.  I pretty much figured that I would never find an affordable copy at that point, so I stopped looking for a while.  Imagine my surprise when I looked on Abebooks.com a few weeks ago and found an ex-library copy for $10!
 
My copy of the book arrived in the mail a few weeks ago and it is indeed just as I remembered.  The book is quirky, eccentric, and really, really funny.  It starts with a dedication by author Louis Phillips to " the one person who has stuck with me through thick and thin and whose faith in my work is not diminished:  ME." On the Library of Congress info page at the beginning of the book, the reader is advised that he/she is holding a "Deluxe Autographed Edition" of the book which is signed by none other than William Shakespeare.
 
The narrator, or "host" of the book, is a character named Peter Gerard, Esq. Mr. Gerard looks suspiciously like one of the knights from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." The illustrations in the book are a lot like the illustrations in the "For Beginners" series (see "Einstein for Beginners," "Marx for Beginners,"  "Darwin for Beginners," etc.), as they include a fair amount of humorously captioned reproductions of paintings, advertisements, et cetera.   "Animated Thumbtack" features number puzzles, historical trivia and information about animals, including a series of pages devoted to ostriches.  About midway through the book, there is a feature called "The Real Life Retreat Game" which is basically a two-page spread that resembles a board game in which each space requires the player to go back 2 spaces.
 
One of my favorite features of the book is "The Peter Stuyvesant Two Heads Are Better Than One Page" which basically just consists of the page title and several identical portraits of Peter Stuyvesant.  It’s funny because it makes absolutely no sense.

The book’s index includes an acknowledgment of the “Society of Indexers” for “providing the proper index format and assisting in the preparation of (the) index.”  As for the index itself, here’s a sample:
 
eight, page, 8
eighteen, page, 18
eighty, page 80
eighty-eight, page 88
 
...and so on.  I dont know about everoyone else, but to me, it's just hilarious.

All in all, this is a really unique book that is extremely entertaining. To this day, I’ve really never seen anything like it and it will be a real pleasure to pass on the laughs by sharing it with my own kids.

Further Reading
The Animated Thumbtack Railroad Dollhouse & All-Around Surprise Book (Evening Edition) Amazon.com listing

Greeklish?



Login
User name:
Password:
Remember me 
Click for Dayton, Ohio Forecast

History Is A Weapon

logo
site statistics