Hey, if you like books.....

No worries! Deckard's attitude to the Toad was kind of a transformation for Deckard for me. He found meaning in Mercer's reverence for the natural world and at the same time he had found empathy for the synthetic world because he kept it regardless of the outcome. He sort of found peace with the two aspects of sentience in that part. Out of all the fantastic things that happen in the book he finds his epiphany in something that we would take for granted. 

Was Black Roses written by the boyfriend of the girl who was murdered, Sophie Lancaster?

John Cleland...?

(titter!)

There seems to be a rather zealous editor. I wonder what will happen to aunt Fanny......

“The best way to treat obstacles is to use them as stepping-stones. Laugh at them, tread on them, and let them lead you to something better.”
― Enid Blyton, Mr Galliano's Circus

poor ***.. always represented as a series of asterisks .

'Oh no,' howled Anna. ' George, stop Timmy from doing all that dreadful sniffing. I think he's found another dead body!'

'Right' said Julian, firmly taking charge. 'George, go and take Anna to the cloakroom. She's gone such a funny green colour. ***, we'll guard the body until the police come.' 

'But who will run and dial 999?' demanded *** excitedly, his eyes shining. 'What a spiffing adventure! I've never seen dead bodies before. We'll have to get to the bottom of it!'

'Woof!' barked Timmy. And sure enough, the children could see a dead lady's white hand poking out from under a dense pile of school books. Dear oh dear oh dear. 

Ok had a bit of a doh moment there. He thought it was real but his wife then found the control panel. I thought it pointed at a profound pessimism, in terms of discerning any difference between the real and the ersatz

Thank you for confirming my suspicions about the goat but the toad had a control panel. It was a real synthetic though. Are synthetics real? That brings us back to the start.

Hopefully Attenborough's dead or attitudes have changed before he gives that voiceover! It did bring a smile to my face though!

Murder and ginger beer all the way,,, poor Timmy

And I must say I wonder if it is all humans who are like that? Or just so-called humans from industrially developed cultures?

Remember in the states, Australia and New Zealand, the so-called called savages in fact had a far more evolved understanding of our place within Nature, that we are part of it, than the newly-arrived Europeans did. It was not they that overfished the seas, created polluting factories, over farmed the land, drive the buffalo into near extinction?

The mentality that allows humans to create machines, factories, to keys, computers alongside robots may be what is also behind that inability to Ree that we are also so good at cutting off the branch we are sitting in. There is s kind of of a myopia there.

I am not saying that I would rather live in a nomadic tribe in a teepee necessarily as slavish adherence to custom can mean horrors like FGM too. 

Something is very wrong with s species though if it could justify having a nuclear war and push all other life into extinction beyondbtgat anywaylet alone with all the inequality that exists. 

Actually the other androids are spiteful and cruel too. The fugitive Pris is more than happy to bait the chickenhearted Isidore once she realises he is a retard, thanks to the radiation. 

I thought the pod people demonstrate better what it might mean to be less than human. In Invasion of the Body snatchers.

There were murderers galore as well as lashings of murders in that Christie. 

Ahhh Enid Blyton. Mallory Towers etc..

To be fair to Christie... a scaling down of the staff room made good sense!

i met my first husband whilst sat in a pub reading the Plague supping a pint of Guinness.. such feminine mystique.., lol

We did some of the Canterbury Tales at school. We were told beyond the prescribed ones The Miller's tale was somewhat ribald, so as hormonal school kids.......

Killing an Arab. Robert Smith was also 1959 vintage and so he must have done L'Etranger for his French A level too. Oh. Mum died yesterday. At least I think it was but can't really remember. Then he committed said killing because he'd had too much sun. The idea you could be executed for not responding in socially appropriate ways spooked me but I liked Meursault's brutal honesty in not capitulating to the prescribed forms of sentiment.  We did The Plague too but I'd already read that at 13, along with Christie's Cat Among the Pigeons, where schoolmistresses were being murdered at an alarming pace at an exclusive girl's boarding school. RIP Blyton. I read The Plague because I was morbidly curious about Plague, which by the way is still going strong in some parts of the world, including the States. I still rate Camus for his anti capital punishment stance. 

Lolita I read for myself recently. Wuthering Heights I read many moons ago, as well as Jane Eyre. And did I read 1984. And Kafka's Trial and metamorphosis. Later on someone told me about a tale in which the protagonist is turned not into a giant beetle but rather a giant *** and it is his analyst who breaks the news. Good for a giggle. 

• Many an SF spree and glutting of all things vampire have I embarked upon. We did The Time Machine at school.and I have the film on You Tube, as well as more recent O level favourite, The Woman on Black. The 1989 TV film was.an absolute treat, the Harry potter version a bit overdone though the author didn't like the 1989 version at all. 

I started David Copperfield at 11 but could not continue as all the abuse David kept experiencong made reading it too upsetting, but I finished it later. 

I see Dante, Catch 22 and Middlemarch, which have come up before, have shown up here. Ulysses we did at Uni, ditto The Iliad and The aOdyssey, epics were mandatory, Scarlet and Black and Anna Karenina. 

I doubt they had doughnuts in his time. They certainly had the plague. Other than that it was about Catholics being naughty and behaving badly, mainly by bringing lots of new little monks and nuns into this wicked world. 

Yes, the toad was real and an android killed the goat

Does that mean the NTs that secretly (or otherwise) wish to destroy me, see me as of value...

mmmmm.....

... like a hunting safari to kill the last Aspie...

cue David Attenborough’s dolcit tones from a nearby shrubbery...

”... here we have the trembling figure of an Aspie, alert, poised, dumbfounded and overwhelmed by its surroundings.., it must run and be free or freeze in shutdown, the hunter hypnotising its pray with small talk, illogical sentences and crazy bodily gesticulations...”

....

the last Aspie.....think of that..

”All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.”

on the other hand... empathy to other individuals and working for the good of the community.

...you mean... hope? Quiet, mute acceptance  that the current model is wrong? Or, not working, at least?