feeding change

“Skilled writers of fiction would struggle to conjure up a plot such as that which arises here.” – Judge David Maddison

A 15 year old boy in the UK has been found guilty of plotting his own murder via internet chat rooms. This, reported by the the Guardian Unlimited, is something straight out of one of the many CSI detective shows on TV. If it wasn’t a true event, I’d be jealous of the person who thought it up.

As the Guardian reports, the murder plot went down like this:

“The boy – who is now 15 and can be referred to only as John for legal reasons – persuaded his friend, known as Mark, now 17, to stab him to death in order to pass a fictitious initiation test for the British secret services in a meticulously planned attack one Sunday evening last summer.”

John did this pursuading by impersonating five other fictitious characters via IM, including a 42 year old British secret service agent called Janet. Mark, the boy duped into the stabbing, thought he was talking to four or five different people during the chat sessions but it was only just John, plotting his own murder.

Go and read the rest of the article. It’s fascinating stuff, but extremely usettling because it’s true.

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I love the CBC, I really do. While I was researching this, I found this on their kids site.

Research over. Afternoon wasted.

Flash games aren’t new, but when you’re researching anything can be a distraction, right.

I’m addicted.

And I’m pathetic. My high score was 4000. Can you beat it, dude?

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“I’ve found it’s a lot more fun to go into stores and malls and take photos than it is to go buy something. In fact, all the pretty colors and displays, carefully crafted to make you want to buy things you don’t need, work almost as well in photos as they do in real life, but there’s less danger that you will run up your credit card debt.” – Lisa Brockmeier

In each photo, bright colours burst from over-stuffed aisles shouting “happiness”, but the subjects in the photos look anything but happy. Portly, pasty-legged shoppers cross a depressing parking lot heading to Circuit City’s large glass doors, like church-goers ready to absolve their sins. Tired and hungry dads pull on equally tired and hungry children as they wait in a McDonald’s line-up, ready to assert their freedom of choice, by picking which toy they’ll get with their Happy Meal. They are all great shots, each capturing the sad blandness of the consumer existence today.

The photos remind me of the famous “99 Cents” shot that appeared in Harper’s and other magazines last year, but there is something more honest about Brockmeir’s images. Some are blurry, many aren’t framed well, but that is all for good reason. The photos were part of a covert operation, to avoid the mall’s security guards. Unauthorised photography is not allowed in many stores and malls, so these images were grabbed quickly and quietly and, for me, it adds to their power.

Corporate espionage is often the reason for banning photography in stores, but I think there is something much more sinister at work here. We all shop, it’s necessary and sometimes enjoyable. But shopping has become more than a necessity. It’s now a national past-time and a reason for being. Shopping, we are told, will save us from depression, unhappiness, loneliness and terrorism. But taking unrehearsed snapshots of people doing this fantastic act is forbidden because it reveals how empty the act of shopping is.

Removing these images from their context, like Brockmeier has done, and viewing them in the comfort of your own home, without the flourescent lights and muzak numbing your brain, lets you pull back from the shopping experience and see this national obsession in a new light. Through these images, big box stores become Skinner boxes lined with bright colours, reassuring faces all telling us that we’re free, we’re happy and we can have our pick from the endless racks packed with stuff we don’t really need.

Next time I go shopping, I’m taking a note out of Brockmeier’s book. I’m leaving the credit card at home and bringing my camera instead.

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Things have been hectic in the realworld around here. With two new Max Finder Mysteries just submitted back to back and a new picture book manuscript due this Friday, I haven’t had time to blog.

But I have had time to update my website with images and info about my new picture books, arriving in stores any day now.

Pet Tales, is published by Soundprints and follows a “day in the life” of a pet with an unusual job. It’s my first time writing picture books for pre-schoolers, and it was a lot of fun (even if I did have to cut out all the swear words.)



But the best thing about the whole series is that each book comes with a Read-along CD and a plush toy!!







I can smell the Booker prize from here . . .

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