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OK, so it's only been a week and I've already broken my pledge to have this up by 9pm, Well, Life of Brian was on Channel 4 tonight, that's my excuse.Hmm...it's amazing how effective three words can be in getting people to visit a web page. And in this case it wasn't 'sex', 'porn' and 'nude' but Stupid White Men. It seems just mentioning that book and having the words review and recommendation on the page, got me a high ranking on Google. The wonderful referring power of Bartcop.com at work once again, it seems. Still, it's not as good as the time when you could just type in the words 'dumb motherf*****' into Google and get referred to the George W Bush for President home page, but little things like that keep me amused.
On that note, if anyone has actually read Michael Moore's Stupid White Men and wants to do a review of it then please email me and let me know - if there's so much interest in it, we might as well capitalise on it. I'd do it myself, but the book doesn't seem to be available in the UK yet, qnd I can't afford to buy imported books right now.
Before I forget, there are a couple of new recommendations as well. Just click on the link above here to read them.
I was planning to do a proper recommendation of The Hunting Of The President this week (it's already a featured selection in the Library) and link it in with the Juliefest 2002 planning, but a proper recommendation of that is going to take a bit more research, so I've had to delay it for a week. Instead, well I thought it was time to give you a book to relax to you, one to make you smile. So, here we go with:
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by Tony Hawks |
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Anyone who's been to Ireland will tell you that the pace of life there is generally slower than most other places. For British actor and comedian Tony Hawks, his first trip there rewarded him with a vision that would stay with him for quite some time - a man hitch-hiking with a refrigerator. One of those bizarre images you can never quite get out of your head, it stuck with him for years as a tale to be told at parties until he woke up the morning after one particularly drunken evening to find that he'd made a bet to emulate his heroic Fridge Man and hitch-hike round Ireland in the company of a fridge. This book details his journey.As you might expect, it's not quite your regular kind of travel book - it's hard to imagine a Bruce Chatwin or Bill Bryson deciding to set out on their travels accompanied by a domestic appliance - but if there's anywhere in the world you want to hitch-hike around with a fridge, Ireland comes top of the list. In fact, it probably makes up the entire list.
The book is not just a chronicle of Hawks' travels around Ireland, making a grand counter-clockwise circle, starting and finishing in Dublin, but a catalogue of the many people he meets on the way, showing that Ireland is the place to visit if you're travelling with a fridge. Managing to get his journey publicised on Irish Radio's Gerry Ryan Show, he soon finds himself being welcomed as he enters small towns, while discovering that there are many drivers who'll go out of their way to offer a lift to man with a fridge.
Hawks is also very good at playing the innocent Englishman abroad, capable of using his apparent naivety to get himself into situations throughout the novel, letting others lead him on where good sense might prevent others, be it going surfing with fridge, or trying to persuade the Irish Ministry of Defence to let him borrow a helicopter for a trip out to Tory Island. There are many adventures like this in the book, culminating in a three-man parade through the centre of Dublin on a Tuesday morning, but they don't feel forced, as if he thought he had to get up to some crazy stunts to make the book interesting (though apparently, the book wasn't conceived of until he finished the trip, but I'll take that with a pinch of salt) but just events that went on while he was travelling, offers that were made to him that would be foolish to pass up. After all, wouldn't you get your fridge baptised by a Mother Superior if you could?
Where the book really shines, though, is that it's not patronising about the Irish in the way that many people can be. It doesn't depict them as the stereotypical Oirish dancing to the pipes and drinking Guinness all day (though there is a lot of drinking in the book), while doffing their flat caps to the eccentric Englishman. It's not about Ireland as some magical place, but as a place full of normal people who just happen to have an overdeveloped sense of the absurd, and the ability to recognise that hitch-hiking in the company of a fridge might not be that practical, but it's got to be good fun.
That's another week over! As I mentioned above next week will be a Semi-Special Issue, featuring Conason & Lyons The Hunting Of The President to fit in with the buildup to Juliefest 2002. See you then!
