Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

At the galactic centre a vast civilisation is preparing to launch the greatest, most technologically
advanced starship ever built. The night before the launch, its creator Leovinus wanders around the ship
for a last little look. With mounting alarm, he discovers that things are not as they should be. Sloppy
workmanship, improperly programmed cybersystems, robots that collide with doors.
As the launch proceeds all initially seems well, but then the ship veers out of control and seems about to
crash when suddenly it undergoes an SMEF (a spontaneous massive existence failure). Whoops.
Meanwhile on Earth...
Jones writes pretty good pseudo-Adams, but really the book is plodding and predictable. Perhaps it is
merely an advert for the game. The British edition of this book was cancelled at the last minute because
the game is not yet ready and the publisher wanted to bring them out simultaneously. I had the book on
order from England, but when the British edition was postponed indefinitely, in a fit of pique I went to
www.amazon.com and bought an expensive American hardback. Then I discovered that some of the
postponed British copies seem to have sneaked through the net and have appeared on the shelves here
in New Zealand. Bummer.
The British copies have two enormous advantages over the American hardback that I ended up with.
Firstly the British edition is cheaper, and secondly it has a photograph of the naked Terry Jones in the
throes of composition.
Inanimate objects hate me. Well they hate everybody, but me more than most. Have you ever watched
adverts for cleaning liquids? The people on the TV gaily squirt and rub and away comes all the grease.
We all know that isn't true (grease and stains cannot be removed from any surface, everyone knows
that), but that's not what gets to me. What gets to me is the way the cloths and sponges that they use
all behave themselves perfectly. When I clean things, I rub the cloth over a surface and the cloth
immediately rolls itself up into a perfect cylinder and then crunches down into a tiny ball. Within seconds,
it becomes unusable; indeed it rolls itself up so tightly that often it threatens to vanish completely. How
such an enormous volume packs down into such a tiny space I have no idea, but I'm sure it violates
several conservation laws.
Furthermore, no matter what surface I clean, no matter where in the house it may be, the moment a
cloth touches it, it sprouts hair. Without a word of a lie, when I unravel the tiny ball of my cloth and
spread it out to try again, it has invariably picked up a fistful of hair (it is always black and curly) and this
hair immediately sticks like superglue to the surface about to be cleaned and no power on earth will
remove it again; certainly not the cloth which exhibits a degree of loathing that has to be seen to be
believed. It won't pick the hair up again, it just wants to put more hair down there (though it will
condescend to spread it around a bit).
There is one book that should be required reading for every person who deals with figures -- Darrell
Huff's classic work How to Lie with Statistics. John Allen Paulos' book Innumeracy bids fair to
approach the same standard. The book examines the consequences of mathematical illiteracy through
an engaging sequence of anecdotes and observations. Applying simple, straightforward arithmetical
thinking to a host of everyday situations gives enormous insight into the way the world works. It can
strip the veil of hypocrisy from biased news stories, allow a reasoned judgement about winning lotto, let
you resist the false claims of advertisers. It raises your consciousness -- turn on, tune in, drop out with
probability statistics.
James P. Blaylock writes odd books and All the Bells on Earth is a doozy. Walt Stebbins comes into
possession of a glass jar containing the badly preserved body of a bluebird. The jar leaks and smells
strongly of gin. Stebbins knows that the bird was destined for one of his business enemies in the town
and initially he hangs on to it as a small revenge. But then he makes a wish...
Add to this mix a lunatic priest, a man with a compulsive urge to silence the bells of St. Anthony's church
and several immolated corpses and you have a potent mix indeed. Somehow Blaylock juggles all the balls
of his absurd plot without dropping one and the intricate twists and turns of the plot (and the high good