It's been a rough couple of years for TV fans, what with production slowing down around the pandemic. Though many British TV shows have returned to
Science is wrong, you can live a perfectly normal life on nothing but cigarettes and champagne.
"Bouquet residence, Lady of the house speaking..."
Number of seasons: Three (2011–2013).Why you should watch it: For a Friends orphan, this show was amazing. The writing was clever and witty and filled with pop-culture references, and the characters were equal parts intense, weird, and lovable.–Ana Carolina, Facebook
There's no need for you to tune into KBHR to find out what books to read. Here is a list of great books that Stevens read on air to the town of Cicely.
Writing a fantasy novel means paying attention to common elements of the fantasy genre, worldbuilding and more. Use these helpful fantasy writing resources.
#alexandria48bc EPILOGUE 7 (All parts available to read under the tag #alexandria48bc!) Support this comic by becoming a patron and get to read a CHAPTER AHEAD!! Link in Bio! Voice of God: Humans ar…
I love images of famous people, actors, political activists, singers etc who also were avid knitters. There are so many wonderful images out there, people from all walks of life knitting for lots of different reason. Many actors learned to knit to kill time on the set. What ever their reason, we salute them and knit right along side them! Shirley Temple I think Shirley is really knitting in this shot and using her needle to count stitches. Either that or she's a really gift actress! You know her parents lied to her about her age? When she turned 12 or 13 they finally told her she was really a year older! Phylis Diller RIP Phylis...I had the pleasure of meeting her in person once, a few years ago at a party out in Mustang Ridge, TX. I told her how much I loved her laugh. I wish I knew than that she had been a knitter. Mamma Cass Betty Rubble Do you think she's knitting something for Barney or Bambam? And I wonder where I can get a set of those needles! Wilma Flinstone I guess this image was never used on the show? Or maybe it was. I'd love to own it. Jane Jetson Meet George Jetson! His wife Jane owned one of the very first knitting machines! Emmeline Pankhurst Emmeline Pankhurst is considered one of the leaders of the suffragette movement in Great Britain. Emmeline Pankhurst was born in 1858 and died in 1928. Here she is knitting while imprisoned for her beliefs. Martha Washington The very first "First Lady of Knitting!" Of course Martha was a knitter. I wonder if she knit the stockings George is wearing? I collect these images on Facebook, where I'm Sandra Singh and on Ravelry in my Sandrasingh.com group. Please feel free to add any images you find on either space!
"Copernicus called, and you are not the center of the universe."
If you lived life on the prairie like the gang from "Little House on the Prairie," which character would you be? Would you be cold like Harriet or would you be full of heart like Mr. Edwards? Find out!
Liverpool-born Coronation actress Jean Alexander - famous for her headscarf and curlers in the role of Hilda Ogden - died yesterday just three days after her 90th birthday.
While it seems like most American mystery and detective shows come from screenwriters, and abnormally large percentage of British mystery shows are based on
It may be surprising, but overall college student leadership development research is an emerging field. Over time there has been a perspective change of leadership from leader-centric…
Fodor's provides expert travel content worth exploring so you can dream up your next trip. The world is a weird and wonderful place—we want to show you around.
As a writer, reader, and a creative writing teacher, I am—for now and forever—a staunch proponent of the place-based narrative. When we think of stories, we tend to focus on those bound to particular characters or events. And yet, some of the most compelling plot lines found in literature are borne from complications with place. […]
9. Never assume a witch is dead
Some of these, only South Africans will remember.
Explore waffyjon's 283326 photos on Flickr!
Maureen K. Heard was a British author who had a brief, fleeting career as a fiction writer during the 1940s, producing sevens novel from 1943 to 1948, comprises of four children's books, two detective novels and a mainstream book – published either under her married name or penname, "Maureen Sarsfield." Those two, once long-forgotten, detective novels have been hailed in more recent times as "gems of the British school." In 2003, the still sorely missed Rue Morgue Press reprinted Sarsfield's Green December Fills the Graveyard (1945) and A Party for Lawty (1948), but gave their editions new, more genre-driven, titles, Murder at Shots Hall and Murder at Beechlands. Tom and Enid Schantz explained their decision that the original, nondescript titles "may have been partly to blame" for, what they assumed, "were unimpressive sales." I kind of liked the original titles. Sure, they're perhaps "a bit too literary," but fitted the smartly written, character-driven detective novels that can be ranked alongside the works of Dorothy Bowers, Moray Dalton, Joan Cowdroy and Elizabeth Gill. The new titles are too simple and generic. Sarsfield's lead-character is a Scotland Yard detective, Inspector Lane Parry, who "twice finds evil deeds in the backwaters of Sussex" and remember enjoying Murder at Shots Hall with a slew of poisonings surrounding a bombed, partially destroyed manor house, but Parry got upstaged by one of the characters, Flikka – a young sculptor who lives and works at the manor house. So I always wanted to read the second novel and, looking for a non-locked room mystery, I decided to finally take Murder at Beechlands from the big pile. Murder at Beechlands finds Inspector Lane Parry stranded in a drift by the side of the road, "feet deep in snow," with his car refusing to move another inch. A raging snowstorm has turned the Sussex landscape into a white, practically impassable, hellscape. Parry decides to follow "an enormously high, forbidding stone wall" on foot in the hope of finding a lodge or gate, but half expects to find a derelict mansion, prison or a mental institution behind the fortified wall obviously intended "either to keep people out or to keep them in." What he found convinced Parry he had stumbled his way to a private lunatic asylum, where the inmates were loudly screeching ("Lawty! Lawty! Lawty!") and fighting in the snow, but the woman, Mrs. Anabel Adams, who he had pecked as the matron turned out to be the owner of Beechlands Hotel. A small, financially troubled country hotel with a less than spotless reputation in the region. And they were hosting a party in honor of a well-known, womanizing World War II Wing Commander, Lawton "Lawty" Lawrence. A party not everyone turned up to on account of the snowstorm and the hotel is practically empty when Parry arrived. The people who did make it to the hotel are Jim Bridges, severely burned during the war, who had lost his wife to Lawty when he lay "all mashed up in hospital" and Christie Layne had lost her virtue to the bomber pilot, but they were there strictly on the invitation of Mrs. Adams. Cintra Norton is "the greatest film star we ever sent to Hollywood" and used to be friends with Lawty before he went abroad. Marigold Trent is a natural platinum blonde, who was sent down by some very old friends of Mrs. Adams, but she hadn't paid her bills since she arrived. Lastly, the party is rounded out by the hotel receptionist, Miss Killigrew, and two London businessmen, Julian Frake and Paul Livington, who might be willing to invest money in Beechlands – one of the reasons why they were invited by Mrs. Adams. She wanted to "suitably impress" them. And now, this unlikely party is trapped together in the partially empty hotel for the night. Something that would not have been a problem had it not been for Lawty's battered body underneath the window of his room. Parry quickly deduces Lawty's death wasn't an accident or suicide, but cold blooded murder! Normally, a raging snowstorm is used as nothing more than a device to confine the characters to a single location, but Sarsfield used it to wage a war of nerves on her characters as the lights begin to slowly die and incidents keep happening. A second body is discovered in the boiler room, but Parry keeps this second death a secret "to keep everyone on such tenterhooks" that, whoever committed the murders, "get in such a state of nerves he'll give himself away." Parry is assisted in mounting the tension by several attacks, professionally disabled phone lines and the unlucky past of the hotel with its unnerving, ghostly taps said to be heard before someone dies, but even Parry is not immune to his gloomy, nerve-stricken surroundings and wonders how long he would "be able to go on keeping his temper." So, when it comes to handling atmosphere and tension, Sarsfield's Murder at Beechlands is what Ngaio Marsh tried to do with the abysmal Death and the Dancing Footman (1942). Where the plot is concerned, the journey to the ending was better than the solution, which was not bad or atrociously clued, but found it underwhelming with only the motive standing out, because usually, this type of motive is only mentioned in (Golden Age) detective stories – not often used as an actual motive for the murderer. One of many (small) signs in this book that times were slowly starting to change for the traditional detective story. Nevertheless, Murder at Beechlands is a busily plotted, eventful detective story that keeps you reading and has a few memorable setpieces. I mentioned that one of my reasons for picking Murder at Beechlands is that it's supposed to be a non-impossible crime novel, but technically, I should label this post as a locked room mystery. And there two of them! Firstly, there's knocking and yelling from behind the locked door of the room where the bodies are kept, but they never get an opportunity to consider it a locked room mystery because the situation immediately resolves itself with a very simplistic explanation. But still, it made for a great scene. Secondly, one of the characters vanishes from the snowbound hotel and is not found when the place is searched, which gives it the appearance of locked room mystery, until you learn the solution. So these minor, quasi-impossibilities doesn't make Murder at Beechlands a long-overlooked locked room novel, but appreciated Sarsfield flirted so heavily with my favorite detective story trope. It also gave me this dreadful feeling that she actually wrote and completed a third, full-blown impossible crime novel, but the unpublished manuscript got lost and any trace of it was lost to time. Because that's how it usually goes. So, all in all, Murder at Beechlands is a mostly well-written, excellently characterized and atmospheric treatment of the snowbound murder mystery, only marred by an underwhelming solution, but, like RMP, you have to wonder where Sarsfield's career would have brought her had "she continued in the vein of these two books."
How would you fare in a land of cruel princes and queens of nothing? Take this quiz to see which of the Duarte sisters you're more like!
Don’t worry, this post is not a recipe for Fried Worms! It’s our next Make and Takes Storytime. How to Eat Fried Worms by Thomas Rockwell was a delightfully tasty chapter book to read with my 5 year old. Actually it was gross, but he loved it. Billy has made a bet with his friends … Continued
These will dominate your WhatsApp group chats.
It seemed nicely appropriate that we wear at Story Time at Ruby's Sure Start Centre yesterday - World Book Day. We spent the afternoon reading and doing various activities around 'Spot the Dog'. I can't take any artistic credit for this because the staff came up with this craft for us, but I thought the little dog we made was so cute, I'd share it with you. Of course, in true Ruby style she didn't want to paint her dog yellow with spots and decided she'd rather paint it 'chocolate' colour like our dog. She proudly presented it to our dog when we got home as her 'new baby puppy'. If you want to have a go with your kids, I've drawn out the template for you below which you should be able to enlarge and print out. You will need to cut out the parts onto either coloured card, or white card which you can paint (we did sponge painting). Pierce or punch holes where shown, and assemble with the pairs of legs either side of the body, attached with split pin paper clips/brads for a 'jointed' dog you can take for a walk! We painted ours assembled, but I think if we make another, we'll paint first - when he moves his legs you can see his white bits!!! Finally, draw the features on the face, and we added a googly eye when we got home. Cute huh?
