FEATURED AUTHOR - Art Blegen is the author of “The Adventures of Kris”, a series of early middle-grade chapter books for young readers from six to ten years old. Each child is important, and each family matters to Art. He is an advocate for educating children and their parents to ensure they have a healthy balance of positive examples in their lives. Wholesome stories and a healthy imagination can lay the foundation they will use for the rest of their lives. Whether playing with his grandchildren or coaching…
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Recent comments: User reviews
Talking of the Apache guy, don't ever ask him anything! You only have to ask this chap if he wants a cup of coffee and he'll hit you with six paragraphs detailing his proud heritage and what he thinks about life in general. They should have called him Big Chief Exposition. The other characters are equally daft.
The story also goes to great pains to eliminate any excitement that the situation might hold early on.
The very first game in the book suggests you place a cardboard box over your gas jets with some holes cut out in it to make a spooky face. If that wasn't flammable enough for you the book goes on to suggest cramming it full of crepe paper. The author rather reluctantly adds not to let the entire thing burst into flames.
My other favourite is the fun game of inviting your friends to thrust their hands into a bowl of flaming brandy to retrieve pieces of burning fruit. The person who gets the most is rewarded with being the one most likely to get married that year. Presumably to another person with blackened stumps instead of fingers.
Only really worth a read if you plan to set fire to your neighbours on halloween and want something to blame it on. None of the other games are really that interesting.
The book also has hundreds of tips some rather dated but some that are still very useful. If you have access to half a lemon, a bucket of warm water and some vinegar then there's very few domestic disasters this book can't guide you through safely!
Some of the solutions seem so unlikely that I tried a few of them to see if they really work and I haven't found one that doesn't yet. In fact this book actually saved me quite a lot of money on a house repair that I thought beyond my abilities but turns out to have an elegantly simple and low tech solution!
A rich/brave/poor man meets a badger/fox/fish and does something nice for them and in return gets a trinket of some kind, the end.
A bit of a let down, maybe one of the other collections of Japanese folk-lore is better.
It reads like 'the infinite space rejoiced at the infinite wonder of the swirling infinite joy of the infinity and swirled infinitely in the cosmic wonder of infinity.'
I'm not kidding, imagine page after page of that! The preface expresses the authors hopes that he will be published and that people will enjoy his writing. As someone who has had the pleasure of working in publishing all their adult life I can honestly say neither of these is likely.
It's really well written and features some genuinely surprising events which I won't mention so as not to spoil it for you. The author really brings the events to life in a straightforward way but there's some great insights too.
It's probably also forgiveable that it doesn't mention video surveillance given that it was written in 1944.
Anyway, since neither of the other reviewers seem to have actually read this pamphlet before reviewing it I thought I'd give it a go. This is an interesting historical document but it's advice ranges from the mildly plausible (using coins to blow fuses) to the absolutely ridiculous (remove toilet paper from lavatories!).
The reason this is interesting is that most of these acts of sabotage existed only in the paranoid minds of secret service types on both sides of the war. There's very little evidence that small scale sabotage of this kind was widespread mainly because the punishments were so severe if caught and the actual effect would be so negligible to the war effort. Despite this the USA was especially fearful of the hidden saboteur and many a clumsy or inept worker was interviewed as a potential spy.
It's great that documents like this are being preserved though I think it's unlikely to be of interest to anyone but historians and perhaps the most disgruntled of employees.