I've been a bad blogger. So, time for a little catch-up.

...

Um...

Okay. New book for Lynn and me. We finished Mr. Thundermug pretty quickly. It was a very thin book. Sort of peculiar. Somewhat humourous. Not really a story, more a series of vignettes about the history of this talking baboon. I think it was intended as a comment on some aspect of humanity. Exactly which aspect, I'm not sure.

We have now moved on to Hamish X and the Cheese Pirates by Sean Cullen, the first in a planned ongoing series about an orphan boy called Hamish X (a second book is already in the library system). Now this is one insane book. The author, Sean Cullen, is a Canadian comedian formerly of the comic musical group Corky and the Juice Pigs, who now works on his own. And he is stark... raving... mad. And I mean that in the best way possible. In this YouTube clip of C and the JP, he's the one on the right:



This first installment in the series introduces us to Hamish, an orphan whose name is feared by orphanage owners around the world. The nasty ones anyway. Hamish is placed in the Windcity Orphanage and Cheese Factory, run by the evil Mr. Viggo Schmaltz, creator of Caribou Blue Cheese (made, naturally, from caribou milk). Hamish plots his escape with the help of some new friends. Meanwhile, somewhere out there in the world... the Cheese Pirates grow closer and closer...

The story itself is crazy enough but then there are the footnotes. Here's one example. Cullen describes the cheese making process and mentions that the curds have the liquid squeezed out the them. A footnote to that explains:

Curds, not Kurds. Curds are immature morsels of cheese that must be ripened and
aged over time. Kurds are a people who inhabit a region that encompasses
southern Turkey and northern Iraq. No one knows if Kurds ripen with age, but it
is likely that if they were pressed, liquid would come out of them.

Needless to say, after reading this aloud to Lynn, I had to stop while we tried to get control of our giggles. In fact, that happens after the vast majority of the footnotes.

I'm guessing our next joint-read will be the next Hamish book, Hamish X and the Hollow Mountain.

In other news, or rather non-news, I keep managing to put off calling back Mark Hellman to try and get back into the voice work. The last couple of times I've called, I've managed to just get his machine and left messages saying I'll try him again. And so far, I'm still trying to call him again. Stupid intertia.