By coincidence Karen Templer at Readerville has been having a similar experience of reading on her iPhone and has written an excellent overview of how to go about doing it and what makes it so good. As she points out, Apple CEO Steve Jobs isn’t interested in making a reading device because he thinks there is no market for them. It’s odd then that his company turns out to have made such a great one:

I’ve been of two minds about the notion of electronic books. Like any hard-core booklover, I love the physical object. (See Most Coveted Covers for evidence.) It’s hard to imagine curling up with a hard little plastic or metal doohickey instead of ink and paper. On the other hand, the idea of carrying an entire library around in your pocket—the ability to switch between books or buy a new one at any instant—has obvious appeal. Which is a big part of why devices like the Sony Reader hold no appeal for me. Not being a gadget person, the last thing I want is an extra one. The Kindle has the benefit of direct, wireless downloads and some level of web access, which makes it a bit more appealing than those that require you to be at your computer to buy and transfer a new book. But a device of that size, heft and limited function means having to choose to carry it along (or not) each time one leaves the house. I never leave the house without my phone, however, so when it became clear that the sexy, multi-talented, reasonably priced, second-generation iPhone was going to be open to third-party applications (”apps”), and that among them would be reading software, I mapped a course. …

Well worth a read. Here’s the link again.

design by Eno.

I have a piece on crime and Liverpool in Stories from the City, a collection of new writing about the city: past, present and future. My piece looks a the differences between gangsters and legitimate business and speculates about the causes of criminality in Liverpool.

Written, designed, edited and produced locally and independently, Stories from the City launches next week (on December 3rd) and will have its first 800 copies distributed free across Liverpool as a gift by its publishers, Redwood, for 2008. It includes writing by Shane Gladstone, Kath McKay, John Parker, Michael Sellars, Joe Shooman, George Skelly, THIS WIRED GOD, Kenn Taylor, Maxwell Turpin and Tony Walsh. And me.

“Stories from the City is an antidote to the avalanche of self-congratulatory crap that the city has produced in its Capital of Culture year. The writers within are interested in the only questions that matter: how we got to be here, in this place, at this time, and what it means to be alive in this city on this earth. Read, think, support. Liverpool needs work like this; it always has and always will. That there are people willing, even eager, to take such risks is to be praised.”
Niall Griffiths, award-winning Liverpool-born author

“A great book and a celebration of Liverpool’s greatest natural asset, namely language. This city loves words – we cherish them like connoisseurs and spend them like drunken sailors.”
Paul Du Noyer, Associate Editor of The Word, former editor of Q and Mojo and author of Liverpool: Wondrous Place.

Redwood is a Liverpool-based printing services and creative solutions company. It is the one of only a handful of printers across the UK to hold full environmental accreditation for both FSC and PEFC. Redwood act as publisher for a small range of titles and limit themselves to publications raising social awareness or promoting the arts.

Stories from the City is an independent creative collective founded by journalists Kenn Taylor (Flux, NME, The Big Issue) and Shane Gladstone (Dazed and Confused, Clash, Mercy) to undertake an open-submission creative writing project about Liverpool for 2008.

For any further press enquires about the Stories from the City project please contact: liverpoolmagazine<A T >gmail.com

For further enquires about Redwood please contact claire < A T > redwoodltd.co.uk

Stories from the City

ISBN Number: 978-0-9560557-3 Price: £5.95

In his pre-budget report the Chancellor reduced VAT to 15%, but punished the pubs by cancelling out the cut with a matching rise in duty on beer. At a time when pubs (like shops and almost every other business) are losing customers, this makes no sense. It’s not as if the cut in VAT will lead directly to cuts in retail prices anyway; it might help businesses maintain their margins though.

I have no problem with using price to change behaviour, but most pubs are civilized pleasant places. So why make them pay for the irresponsible behaviour of others and why make them bear a disproportionate burden in these difficult times?

More here, here, and here.

Edit 27/11/2008: The Chancellor has sharpened his blade a little and conceded that one tax rise doesn’t fit all; duty on spirits (whisky, vodka, alcopops) will now ‘only’ rise by 4%. But it looks like this is not about drink, it’s about pubs and beer. Duty on beer will rise by the full amount as announced earlier this week.

Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint.

The list of people receiving order cancellations from Amazon is growing so I’m putting together a collection of alternative places where you can pre-order Cains: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint, which will be with us very soon now. Many thanks to everyone who has pre-ordered the book.

Amazon (UK) is giving you a link to click for updates about publication.

Amazon (USA) is taking orders (weird, huh?)

WH Smith (UK) is taking orders. (Matches the Amazon.co.uk price for UK customers)

Waterstones (UK) is taking orders.

Borders (UK) is taking orders. (Matches the Amazon.co.uk price for UK customers)

Borders (USA) is taking orders.

The Book Depository (UK) says it’s unavailable and recommends trying Amazon.co.uk.

The publisher is taking orders (thank goodness for that) and also gives a link for customers in the USA and Mexico.

via.

The seductions of drink are wound deep within us. Which may explain why, two years ago, when John Gasparine was walking through a forest in southern Paraguay, his thoughts turned gradually to beer. Gasparine is a businessman from Baltimore. He owns a flooring company that uses sustainably harvested wood and he sometimes goes to South America to talk to suppliers. On the trip in question, he had noticed that the local wood-carvers often used a variety called palo santo, or holy wood. It was so heavy that it sank in water, so hard and oily that it was sometimes made into ball bearings or self-lubricating bushings. It smelled as sweet as sandalwood and was said to impart its fragrance to food and drink. The South Americans used it for salad bowls, serving utensils, maté goblets, and, in at least one case, wine barrels.

Gasparine wasn’t much of a wine drinker, but he had become something of a beer geek. (His thick eyebrows, rectangular glasses, and rapid-fire patter seem ideally suited to the parsing of obscure beverages.) A few years earlier, he’d discovered a bar in downtown Baltimore called Good Love that had several unusual beers on tap. The best, he thought, were from a place called Dogfish Head, in southern Delaware. The brewery’s motto was “Off-Centered Ales for Off-Centered People.” It made everything from elegant Belgian-style ales to experimental beers brewed with fresh oysters or arctic cloudberries. Gasparine decided to send a note to the owner, Sam Calagione. Dogfish was already aging some of its beer in oak barrels. Why not try something more aromatic, like palo santo?

Here’s the link.

Not all well known garden offices and shedworking atmospheres are actually real. Naturally, sheds feature heavily in many children’s stories - in my case Jennings’ Little Hut by Anthony Buckeridge is probably ultimately the inspiration for this magazine - from the rustic simplicity of the Secret Seven’s meeting hut and Hagrid’s single room live/work timber building in the Harry Potter stories, to the rather splendid back garden laboratory which belongs to Charlie Ashanti’s mother in Zizou Corder’s Lionboy.

The Shed issue 16.

Suddenly Lok could understand that the man was holding the stick out to him but neither he nor Lok could reach across the river. He would have laughed if it were not for the echo of the screaming in his head. The stick began to grow shorter at both ends. Then it shot out to its full length again.

The dead tree by Lok’s ear acquired a voice.

“Clop!”

His ears twitched and he turned to the tree. By his face there had grown a twig: a twig that smelt of other, and of goose, and of the bitter berries that Lok’s stomach told him he must not eat.

Below is a clipping from the New Scientist article, the implication of which is, as Golding speculates, that the Neanderthals did not learn to throw objects themselves:

Studies of elite handball and baseball players suggest that frequent overhand throwing from an early age permanently rotates the shoulder-end of the humerus toward an athlete’s back, compared to people who haven’t spent much time hurling.

This bone rotation only occurs in the throwing arm, so a difference between the right and left arm in fossils could be a sign of projectile use, Rhodes says.

To find out, she and Churchill measured humerus bones from Neanderthals and ancient and modern humans.

They found some evidence for projectile use in male European humans from around 26,000 to 28,000 years ago – the middle Palaeolithic period – who would have been contemporaries of Neanderthals. Their right humerus bones were generally more rotated toward their back than their left, while Rhodes’s team noticed no such asymmetry in Neanderthal arms.

Here’s the link to the article again.

Gregory Peck bites off more than he can chew

There is a great story over at Wired about the whaling ship Essex, which in 1820 was rammed and sunk by a Sperm Whale somewhere in the Pacific. This is the story that partly inspired Melville to write Moby Dick a book everyone should read at least once. Melville of course was a seaman on several whale ships and stories like this would have circulated among his fellow crewmembers. One of the best things about Moby Dick is the way Melville blends the mechanics and science of whaling and whales with their mythic power. The real story of the Essex is fantastical in itself, but Melville’s novel turns the whale into a force beyond nature. From the article:

The ship’s three remaining whaleboats — one had been destroyed by a whale’s flukes during an earlier hunt — were dispatched for the kill. As the harpooning began, First Mate Owen Chase, commanding one of the whaleboats, looked back and saw a large sperm whale, which he estimated at 85 feet, approaching the Essex.

As he watched helplessly, the whale propelled itself into the ship with great force. Some crewmen on board were knocked off their feet by the collision, and Chase watched in disbelief as the whale drew back and rammed the ship again. This time the Essex was holed below the waterline, and doomed.

The crew organized what provisions they could and two days later abandoned ship aboard the three whaleboats. Twenty men left the Essex. Eight would ultimately survive the harrowing ordeal that played out over the next three months.

Here’s the link to the story, which comes with an excellent slideshow entitled ‘The Creatures That Ate Hollywood’.

Here’s my take on Melville’s novel.

As every four year-old knows, up there in the loft space, in the dark underneath the tiles, hiding in the shadows, are monsters. Monsters you couldn’t imagine in a lifetime of bad dreams. Monsters just waiting to come down into the light and terrorize your daydreams as well.

I have only a vague idea where this one came from–I think it hitched a ride on a removal van some time–and I didn’t know it was up there. It’s an Imperial “The Good Companion” Model T and has seen some action since it was built in Leicester, probably some time in the 1930s. It doesn’t work, I’m afraid; the carriage return is busted. But it has very nice round keys with inlaid lettering.

Edit. 19 November 2008: More glamour shots below.