So, apparently it turns out that X-factor is fixed! Who would've thought it! I mean imagine it...the shock!
Host Dermott O'Leary has apparently come out and said that Cheryl Cole's decision not to vote on the show at the weekend was a deliberate conspiracy hatched by the judges just before the show came back on air after a short break, to get rid of the candidate they wanted gone rather than the one who stayed even though her performance was weaker. Apparently, and I wasn't really watching so wasn't really paying attention, the one who stayed forgot the words and pretty much resorted to just begging for her position live on stage! According to The Sun, which I perused whilst waiting to get my hair cut today (I don't read that muck anymore than I would ordinarily watch X-Factor!), Dermott accidentally let this information slip out giving more ammunition to the loser's father who has slammed the show in recent days in the press!
Surely no one can be THAT surprised? It must be pretty obvious to anyone with a brain-cell that the show is a complete and utter farce? In the small bit that I saw the other night, a group (I will not even attempt to pretend I knew who they were) slaughtered, or should I say raped the life out of, the classic song Kids In America. It was right proper lowest-denomination telly and I felt myself getting dumber and dumber with every second that passed!
This latest scandal comes hot on the heels after Louis Walsh described one contestant as a "young Lenny Henry!" Personally I can't see what is wrong with that....after all, at least the contestant WAS black! It could have been worse, he might have said "You remind me of the late Roddy McDowell in Planet Of The Apes" or "One of them Gollywogs like what my neice, Lucy, had when she was little..." or even "You remind me of a young Shirley Bassey" even though the contestant was male!
God...why do people spend sooo much time on this fracking shit? It's a pile of crap, it's shit telly and it has no relevance. In a year's time no one will remember anyone on it! And that includes Cheryl and Danni too with any luck!
Wednesday, 10 November 2010
It carries on directly from events in book (3) The Wastelands with Roland and his Ka-Tet facing imminent death at the hands of Blaine The Mono as he hurtles across the country on a kamikaze suicide final run. Only by beating the computerised train at riddling can the Ka-Tet hope to survive and as their vast knowledge of riddles begins to run dry, so too does their time begin to run out!
Of course, it will come to no surprise to learn that Roland and his posse do indeed beat Blaine at his own game, otherwise the series would no doubt all end here! But their eventual destination is as about as far from Mid-World as you can possibly get...though where they have ended up is a world that will seem eerily familiar to fans of King's work!
Settling down for the night in this strange new land, Roland and his Ka-Tet sit down to have a palaver. And it is then that Roland reveals a story of his past that tells of how he first set out on his quest for The Dark Tower and what befell him when he first became a Gunslinger; the last of his kind!
This flashback story takes up the majority of the book and is a welcome return to the essence that made The Gunslinger such a joy to read. "Is (Roland's) story a Western?" Boy Jake asks. "All Roland's stories are Westerns," replies Eddie and though this is not strictly true, it is true that the moments when this series is at its best owe much to sergio Leone's Spaghetti Westerns!
Everything about this book makes it my favourite of the series from the images of Roland and his buddies sitting around a camp-fire telling stories to Roland's anecdote of his first love and the tragedy that ensued when he and his former friends found themselves way out of their depth in a back-waters town crucial to the fight against harrier, John Farson! The story that is gradually revealed here finally gives a human face to Roland The Gunslinger and reveals exactly why he is now the way he is. It also goes some ways to explaining his obsession with The Dark Tower and offers a suggestion why he might want to reach it so bad!
At its heart, Wizard And Glass is yet another love story. And yet, all around it are a series of events that have dreadful consequences for Roland and his home of Mid-World! Words cannot describe how much I love this entry in the series and it is even one of the finest books that King has EVER written, not just a part of The Dark Tower series that encompasses all of his work and is connected in some way to all he has written!
Love is a many splendored thing......
When S.I.L.V.E.R's creators introduce a recall, pulling all of the robots in his model type back to the factory following complaints, Jane and S.I.L.V.E.R hit the road in a bid to escape but their love is doomed from the start and what we are left with is a tragic Romeo And Juliet story for a twenty-first century cyberpunk generation!
This is a real classic piece of sci-fi that is forgotten or ignored ninety-nine times out of ten by people who have failed to hear of it or have perhaps been put off by Tanith Lee's other work which never quite matched the dizzy heights that this book achieves. Certainly it is amongst my favourite novels of all time and still brings a tear to the eye every time I read it. Think Bladerunner but without the guns and blasting and maybe you will get close; this is a book that asks very important questions about what it is to be human and begs the age old riddle: just what exactly constitutes a soul and could it be recreated in an artifical enviroment?
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