The mighty fist of oppression

Me in front of Liu Bolin's Iron Fist sculpture.

http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Regional/2014/03/06/Art-with-a-punch-Chinas-Liu-Bolin/.

A Tayport Poem

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Pillars

This morning arriving at work I saw a Chinese guy doing the old Jean-Claude Van Damme deal on one of the pillars in the passageway which leads into the site. Hitting the pillar with his bare hands. No thin wooden spar this either, we're talking solid concrete. I wonder how long it would take to wear it down and break the pillar? And then how many pillars would you have to break before the roof fell in? Samson would have the place down in a jiffy. This passageway seems to attract a lot of eccentrics - guys juggling balls (narrow passageway with a low roof, ideal place to juggle, but the guy was getting round this by bouncing them off the ground) or girls' dance groups (I think they make use of a big mirror at one end of the passageway). Then there's the rest of use, just trudging in to work.

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Tahir Shah's wikipedia page in French

I helped translate this (from English into French):
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahir_Shah

Timbuctoo: After Tahir Shah's amazing alternative travel books, his first novel is also an excellent read

I received a free copy of this ebook from the "Cave ab homine unius libri (Beware the man who owns just one book)" web-site: http://www.caveab.com (and I also bought the hard-back edition).
I have read most of Tahir Shah's alternative travel books and enjoyed them very much, so I was very much looking forward to this book - his first novel. It definitely lived up to my expectations.
Here Shah succeeds in transporting the reader back to this interesting period in history (the British Regency era, 1811—1820, where the Prince of Wales - or the Prince Regent as he was known - ruled in place of his father King George III who was deemed mentally unfit to carry out his role).
It tells the tale (based on a true story) of Robert Adams, an American who was taken slave by Moors after a shipwreck off the coast of Africa, how he reached the mythical city of Timbuctoo, and then managed to escape his captors and come to London where he recounts his story to the corrupt Royal African Committee who have just sent out an expedition in the hope of seizing the legendary gold of Timbuctoo.
Shah uses short 2/3 page chapters (very cunningly for the current generation's short attention span) to gradually build up the suspense, describe a range of colourful characters and paint an interesting picture of this period of British history: its customs, obsessions, persecutions and inequalities.
Highly recommended.