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Monthly Archives: December 2011

Office craft: question mark colleague repellant

The other day, one of my colleagues received a catalog from Staples.  This was weird to me because 1) Staples has paper catalogs??, 2) he is not in charge of purchasing office supplies or anything else, and 3) Staples has paper catalogs??

Anyway, one of the pages in the catalog was a pullout page of a giant question mark. I have no idea why you would need to include a pullout page of a giant question mark in your catalog of office supplies, but whatever.  My colleague thought maybe I would like a giant question mark.  He was right.

But, what does one do with a giant question mark?  Why, you cut it out and hang it over the door of your office, of course.  Kind of like mistletoe, but instead of people wanting to kiss you when you’re standing underneath the question mark, as it is not mistletoe, they run away from you because they believe a) your confusion is contagious and /or b) you’re going to pester them with 364859274 questions.

To make your very own colleague repellant:

First Among Sequels

The fifth(?) Thursday Next book!

I’ve mentioned before that Jasper Fforde has a penchant for changing how books are written in our literature stream.  He’s done it with Jane Eyre and Great Expectations for example.  But this time, he’s done it with his own books.  His own!  He managed to change how his own books were written in this book that’s not really the fifth because he managed to unwrite the original fifth book.  That’s talent, right there.

Anyway, First Among Sequels takes place some fourteen years after the last book and we see that Thursday has happily settled down with her husband and her threeish children.  SpecOps is now underground.  Thursday’s duties at Jurisfiction are fulfilled discreetly.  There’s HUGE stupidity surplus in England because they elected a government that had some common sense.  Well, the downside to that is that stupidity, as a commodity, ends up piling up and soon you have this dangerous stockpile of it.  It doesn’t help that stupidity breeds like rabbits too.  So, you have that, along with this atmosphere of blahness that pervades the land, Thursday clones running around in Bookworld, and a Bookworld administration that doesn’t have common sense.  All of this means that the world is coming to an end.  Huzzah!

Also, we herald the return of Aornis and Benevolent Corporation.