Big Orange Chair

Spotted

Big Orange Chair

Leanne from Sydney was in New Zealnd with friends from England when they saw this Big Orange Chair in a French eMagazine.

Thanks Leanne for adding another chair to our collection.

Obviously the world has many a perfect habitat for the Big Orange Chair, though I must say the last couple we've been sent have a definate European leaning.

We have set a target of adding another 20 chairs to the World of Big Orange Chair's Album on our Facebook page.

What with Leanne's in this Edition and Justin's in the last we are now only 18 new Big Orange Chair's away from achieving the target.

So now it's your turn.

How about helping by adding your chair to the global collection?

If you'd like to see the "gallery" then visit the BigOrangeChair facebook page (become a friend while you're at it).

Of course we welcome your version to add to the collection.

Send it to: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it and we'll show it to the world here as well.

Kony

or ...phony!!!!!

Once. and not so very long ago, I vowed vehemently I would not become involved in social media.

Ok so now I have Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Linkedin, a smart phone so I can stay connected, I get RSS feeds from my favourite sites...and so it becomes neverending.

This global campaign I have to say was impossible to miss and raises so many questions and that is a good thing.

The originators of this social media phenomenon, Invisible Children, had a very simple agenda with a specific outcome attached; make Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony a celebrity by bringing his crimes to the world's attention and thereby force government agencies to act in his capture and arrest.

The 30 minute film's objective - to make Kony famous and bring him to justice by the year's end - sure hit some important marks  - like George Clooney for one.

"I'd like indicted war criminals to share the same celebrity as me," George is quoted as saying. "That seems fair."

Not everyone is quite so sure. A Flinders University senior lecturer said: "Isn’t it wonderful that we have the choice to click on this link to make us feel better. But they’re not heroes for clicking on a link. They're just lazy. And giving money won't help."

A little cynical perhaps in the face of such overwhelming global support. Ultimaltely some of these campaigns are going to strike the right chord. What you do with it after that is a personal decision.

It will be interesting to see if this "people power movement" does bring Kony to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Highly Reco'd

Prodigal Summer by Barbara Kingsolver

RATED: 3.5 Big Orange Chairs

Prodigal Summer weaves together three stories of human love of lives inhabiting the forested mountains and struggling small farms of southern Appalachia.

At the heart of these narratives is a den of coyotes that have recently migrated into the region.

Deanna Wolfe, a reclusive wildlife biologist, watches the forest from her outpost in an isolated mountain cabin. She is caught off-guard by Eddie, a young hunter who comes to invade her most private spaces and confound her self-assured, solitary life.

On a farm several miles down the mountain, another web of lives unfolds as Lusa Maluf Landowski, a bookish city girl turned farmer's wife, finds herself unexpectedly marooned in a strange place where she must declare or lose her attachment to the land.

And a few more miles down the road, a pair of elderly, feuding neighbours tend their respective farms and wrangle about God, pesticides, and the complexities of a world neither of them expected.

These characters find connections to one another and to the flora and fauna with which they share a place. Their discoveries are embedded inside countless intimate lessons of biology, the realities of small farming, and the urgent truth that humans are only one part of life on earth.

A suprisingly fascinating read. It exceeded all my expectations.

Not So Reco'd

I'm Not Scared by Niccolo Ammaniti

RATED: 2 Big Orange Chairs

I'm Not Scared is the winner of the prestigious 2001 Viareggio-Repaci Prize for Fiction. It also came highly recommended to me by a friend whose opinions I value. Yet I have been left unmoved and underwhelmed by this novel.

It's 1978, the hottest summer of the twentieth century. In a tiny Italian rural community, the adults shelter indoors while six children venture out on their bikes across the scorched, deserted countryside.

In the midst of a sea of golden wheat, nine-year-old Michele discovers a secret so momentous, so terrible, that he dare not tell anyone about it.

To come to terms with what he finds, he will have to draw strength from his own imagination and sense of humanity. The reader witnesses a dual story: the one that is seen through Michele's eyes, and the tragedy involving the adults of this isolated hamlet.

Novelist Ammaniti captures the vagaries of childhood: the shifting alliances, the casual betrayals and the mix of helplessness and earnest audacity with which children confront adult situations.

Part mystery, part morality play, the novel is written in simple, spare prose.

The result has been likened to such classics as Stand By Me, To Kill a Mockingbird and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer something I clearly missed.

Shameful

Identity Theft

We have all been warned before about the rise of this insidious crime.

Just so's it's not safe anywhere anymore.

One wonders whatever compels someone to think that:

a) they have a right to just usurp anothers identity

and

b) what is their aim in doing so.

God knows half the people I know would be happy to have their slate clearned by someone swiping their identity.

Many would also be happy to pack their life off with it and to hell with it all.

Don't get me wrong the people I hang out with are great, not a bunch of miserable malcontents.

It's just that as aches and pains start filling the spots once occupied by youthful enthusiam and ebulliance, and you begin to attend more funerals than weddings and births the idea of a total identity swap, the idea you can become once more the "go faster model", holds some appeal.

But really... aren't these poseurs just the limit?