Two and a Bit Books about Flatulence

Yes, you read that right. Today we are looking at books about farting. If, unlike C. S. Lewis, you retain the adolescent “fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up” then you may wish to look away here. Go and read Proust or something.

The “bit” is the title essay in the collection Fart Proudly, which is – believe it or not – a collection of the works of Benjamin Franklin. Yes, that Benjamin Franklin.

Writing the Declaration of Independence 1776 cph.3g09904
All right, Franklin! We know it was you!
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Colouring In with a Hook

Colouring books for grownups have become a real hit in the last five or six years. You can’t hardly visit a bookstore, stationery shop, or anywhere else involving paper-based products being retailed to the public at large, without happening across a selection. Usually, if the retailer is clever, with coloured pencils stationed close at hand, because who has yet recovered from the childhood passion for a fine array of coloured sticks?

I have yet to fall to the temptation of the adult colouring book (though I’ve coloured in a Book Depository bookmark or two in my time). Yet a new passion for colouring in has seized me, not involving pencil or crayon, but hook.

Some of you may recall that I developed an obsession a couple of years ago (how time flies!) with the form of embroidery known as tambour. The obsession went on the back-burner with the book idea that it came with, but it’s been simmering away, and recently, as the book idea moved to the front burner, so did the obsession.

Here’s what my first efforts on ‘real’ fabric – as opposed to netting – produced. (Those of you with fine artistic sensibilities may wish to avert your eyes.)

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The Problem with Ambidextrosity

(besides the fact that it isn’t really a word.)

Let us suppose for a moment, that, like Horatio Nelson, you lose the use of your dominant hand.

Sir Horatio Nelson when wounded at Teneriffe
Horatio Nelson losing the use of his dominant hand.
You don’t have to be as dramatic about the actual losing of use – though feel free to make up any kind of back-story you like; blood and  gore totally optional – the point at hand (hur hur, sorry) is how one copes with said loss of function. And this is where I am at a loss. Because while I have a reasonably active imagination (Exhibit A), what I do not have is a dominant hand.

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