I hope everyone enjoys Santa’s birthday tomorrow.
I had an idea for an updated Nativity play. The three Wise Men bring in the gifts and the Virgin Mary leaps to her feet and sings ‘Material Girl’.
Author: Eamonn Murphy - Writer
Eamonn Murphy has published over seventy stories in small press magazines and collected them into small, cheap volumes for posterity. They are available at all good eBook retailers and libraries. In his spare time, he writes reviews for sfcrowsnest. Retired now after years of hard labour (building sites and call centres), he lives near Bristol, England, with a nice lady, a nasty Jack Russell, an untrainable loony Labrador and some ducks. He has a BA (Hons) from the Open University but very little common sense. Find out more at eamonnmurphywriter.com.
Stop the pigeon or kill the rich?
The big story locally at the moment is about a tree that has been festooned with spikes to stop pigeons roosting in it. The pigeons defecate on the cars below and the car owners are not pleased. The cars are expensive because this is the wealthiest part of town. You can see more about this here.
Someone’s started a petition to get rid of the spikes and save the pigeons. Not that pigeons are popular: rats with wings, we call them. The public doesn’t like pigeons much at all, as a rule, but it likes the rich residents even less. A sign of the times, perhaps.
I wonder would the petition be at all successful if this was an ordinary street of second-hand Fords and Peugeots? Most people who have had to clean pigeon poo off their cars find it distasteful and would normally sympathize with others who had to do it daily, but not if those others are rich. In a ‘them and us’ scenario any trouble for ‘them’ is just fine by ‘us’. This is largely thanks to the unscrupulous greed of the Mega-rich like Trump and all the other tax-dodging, worker exploiting, mean-spirited billionaires.
However, not all rich people are bad. In the part of town with the tree, I would guess they are upper-middle-class professionals such as doctors, dentists, accountants, lawyers. When they come out in their suits to go to work it is no doubt an infernal nuisance to have a filthy car. The petitioners say they can wipe them every day but do you really want to do that in a suit? I wouldn’t.
Indubitably, some of the protesters are genuine fans of wildlife, even pigeons, and want to put their needs over the needs of BMW’s and Mercedes but I suspect more than a few petitioners are just anti-rich, even Richist which is a form of discrimination. But not all well-off people are bad and some of them pay a lot of taxes to keep the country going.
Who’s right? I don’t know. But if you make a society unliveable for useful, working people – even if they are rich – you’re not making it better.
P.S. I believe one Dick Dastardly has started a counter-petition to stop the pigeons. Only one signature so far, his dog Muttley.
In Praise of Calibre
Calibre is a free program that lets you download, read and convert ebooks and even send them to another device. The converting might be the best bit of all.
A publisher sent me a book to review in mobi file. I sent it to my kindle address. All I got on my kindle was a silly icon in the top left corner that I could do nothing with. I checked online and this sort of thing seems to happen a lot with books not bought from Amazon even if they are in mobi. Amazon likes you to buy your books there and is not big on sharing. (Most other ebook sellers make them available in multiple formats)
The solution is to put the book on Calibre and convert it, rather madly, from mobi to mobi. Calibre (on whom a thousand blessings) then has an easy two click way to send it to your email kindle address and when it arrives it’s a readable book not a silly icon in the top left corner of the screen. Hurrah!
It may be that some files have DRM or other protection that messes up kindle transmission so it isn’t necessarily Amazon’s fault. In any case, Calibre was made for sharing and it’s absolutely free, though they like donations and deserve one from me today. I just sent them $10 via Paypal.
This ‘give the service free and rely on donations’ model might work for me. $10 is about 30 x 35 cents and I will have to sell 30 books to get it. I wish I could. I can only give them away. Which reminds me that my books are now available on Group Giveaway at Instafreebie with lots of other good books. Click on blue for the Gothic Horror Giveaway featuring Arnos Hell and on this other bit of blue for the Horror and Thriller Giveaway featuring Five Little Horrors. Consarn Christmas and Other Stories features on the rather nice Best of British Science Fiction Giveaway which starts tomorrow.
Calibre also have an Audio Library, bless them.
P.S. I can’t afford a WordPress plan with a Patreon button but if anyone is grateful after reading one of my free books and wants to give me money the Paypal address is bigfootmurf@hotmail.com
Smashwords have a system where you can pay what you think the book is worth. I’m not sure how that works out for authors.
