Terry Jones (1)Besprekingen

In 1969 the groundbreaking TV program Monty Python's Flying Circus was shown on British network for the first time on the 7th of September and the catch phrase "And now for something completely different" became their trade mark

C- (Meh).

Aliens arbitrarily give an ordinary person omnipotence. This does the things a movie is supposed to do on paper, but it's hard to imagine someone who wouldn't find watching it to have been a waste of their time.

(Mar. 2024)

A companion book of some sort to Monty Python's Flying Circus, published in 1971. There's a lot of familiar stuff in here: the Upper-Class Twit of the Year competition, silly walks (in the form of a series of still photos), Dinsdale and his hedgehog, etc. There are also lots of very silly ads, naughty pictures, a bunch of forewords consisting entirely of people complaining about not being invited to write the foreword... Basically lot of the kind of silliness you expect from Python. The result is random, surreal, and ridiculous. So, pretty much exactly like the experience of watching an episode of the show, only without having the actual Pythons to watch, so not quite as good.

Still. I paid 50 cents for this at my local library sale, and I got at least a dollar's worth of laughs out of it, so I'm happy.½

This novel is a pleasant little romp. The opening chapters set up the dilemma of the sabotaged starship on its original alien world of Blerontin, and I didn't find it very amusing until some Earth humans entered the plot in chapter 8. For all the slapstick scientifictional trappings, the story turns out to be a highly conventional romantic recombination comedy.

Douglas Adams' introduction was in fact as funny as anything in the rest of the book.

A silly little "fluff" book as a brief interlude between more heavy fare. [return][return]Written by Terry "I write in the nude" Jones, based on a Computer Game idea of Douglas Adams, this is a story of spaceships, aliens, humans, sentient bombs, failed economies, insurance fraud, and pacifist armies. And lots and lots of silly, rampant sex.

El tigre de mar y otros cuentos para soñar es lo que sucede cuando un escritor con una buena historia, un ilustrador que además de saber ilustrar, sabe captar la esencia de las historias y un editor que sabe editar en el amplio sentido de la palabra, se juntan con el fin de ofrecer al lector una experiencia completa de lectura.
Reseña completa en: Medium

Ok story, pleasant enough.

The fact it was written in 3 weeks and was based on a MS DOS game really shows

What a delight this book is! Lovely photographs and humourous illustrations of crushed fairies abound.

Angelica Cottington is 16 years old when she finds a diary of her long-deceased older sister, Euphemia. Euphemia has photographed several fairies, and writes about her adventures with them in the woods. Twelve years later, Angelica is appalled by her sister's behaviour. Angelica detests fairies and squashes them dead in the very diary her sister left praising them.

As we read the diary entries and Angelica's notes, we come to understand what really happened to Euphemia. A lovely fairy tale indeed!

This is a wonderful entertaining and informative book about life in the Middle Ages. It is full of interesting facts and corrects a lot of the myths we have developed about this time period.

ISBN 0413625508

No ISBN stated

Kdesi v nejvzdálenějším vesmíru se Blerontiňané s oranžovýma očima chystají vypustit obří hvězdolet Titanic, růžovou loď se stříbřitým leskem, létající hotel, jehož sláva pronikla do všech spirálových ramen galaxie. Začíná bláznivá vesmírná honička, jíž se nadšeně účastní nejen Blerontiňané, Yassacanové, humanoidé, ale i nejrůznější inteligentní přístroje, kyborgové, liftboti, doorboti – a ti všichni se chtějí hvězdoletu zmocnit! Parodii na sci-fi příběhy napsal jeden z tvůrců Monthy Pythonova Létajícího cirkusu, Terry Jones. D. Adams, jmenovaný v názvu knihy, se v prologu přiznává k duchovnímu spoluotcovství knihy. Jones a Adams spolupracovali na počítačové internetové hře a Jones využil animované postavičky a doplnil jejich scény a skeče v ten nejpodivuhodnější pohádkový příběh, o němž Adams napsal: „Pošetilejší, rozpustilejší a báječnější příběh bych sám nikdy nenapsal!“ Chytrá, laskavá crazy pohádka, v níž jsou porušována snad všechna pravidla sci-fi literatury, jen ne pravidla dobrého literárního řemesla.

I thought the book was fascinating and very well done. Terry Jones writes about the Middle Ages in an interesting manner, full or facts and his sense of humor. Recommend to anyone who is interested in this time period.

I didn't mind but I do want to warn others that there are pictures of nude fairies in here (full frontal and plenty of butt cracks). Just wanted to warn parents that want to share a book about pressing fairies as if they were flowers with their young'uns. Pressing flowers is an any-age type of activity but a book about pressing fairies, who aren't always dressed, should probably be labeled at least Young Adult.
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I came across Robin Hobb using the Cottington Fairies instead of butterflies to get a point across: described writing as “chasing butterflies and trying not to crush them” and interviewer asked her to expand on the idea. “I get an idea, I can see it, and it’s absolutely beautiful, and I start writing it and I get it trapped on the page and it’s not what I meant to write,” she said.

“And the rewriting is arranging the little body and trying to make it look nice! I enjoy rewriting much more than I do doing first drafts. It’s really hard, but rewriting, you at least have something to work with, and you can make it better. First drafts are very hard for me.”

https://harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk/2014/08/19/george-rr-martin-and-robin-hobb-were.....

During his time at the Institute for the Criminally Insane, Quentin Cottington devoted his life to the study of stains both great and small, and their associated smells both foul and sweet. His so called research led him to believe that these stains were more than just something to be scrubbed, washed out and removed, these were living, breathing, stinking beings.

Strange Stains And Mysterious Smells uncovers a world never before imagined, a world of stains come to life and smells having personalities. With the fame of his twin sister Angelica, it seems strange that we have not before heard of Quentin Cottington, especially with the content of his research. A uniquely stench filled book that's rich with stains, personality and beings of a disgusting nature.

Once there was a goblin king who endeavoured to keep his subjects safe from the growing advancement of the ungoblin world. So he built a great structure where all goblins could live in safety from the outside world. Eventually this became the only place goblins could be found; this was the Labyrinth.

The Goblin Companion is the accumulation of forty-three dusty, mouldering notebooks dating from 3000 B.C. created by a goblin of some talent but, unfortunately, little concentration. Painstakingly restored by the eminent goblinologist, Brian Froud, these pages are full of goblin diagrams, footnotes and facts.

On her sixteenth birthday Angelica Cottington discovers an album that had once belonged to her sister Euphemia. It had been twelve years since her sister had passed, a sister she bearly remembered but for a few kindnesses. However the entries with this album reveal to Angelica the character of a girl lead astray by the fairies, portraying Euphemia as she has never been revealed before.

Lady Clottington's Pressed Fairy Album continues Angelica's story, and fairy pressing, through the revealing entries of a lost album. In this we learn not only of Euphemia's life and love of capturing fairies in photos, we learn of Angelica's reactions to her sisters exploits. But the most shocking truth of all is still to come, if only Angelica could refrain from squashing fairies for a moment or too. Another beautifully constructed and elegantly pictured book in the cottington series.

Terry J is my fave python and finding out that he was a history nerd made him even more appealing. A nice light read with interesting facts

Like "And Another Thing..." this is based on the work of Douglas Adams and was created by someone else after his death. It has fewer references to the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy than that book did, but I would still only recommend it to fans of the series.

For a humorous book, the thing that really matters is whether it is funny. It is. I laughed out loud once reading this book, and enjoyed at least half of the humor.

The story is mildly entertaining, the aliens quirky, and the silly tech inventive. Some elements of the book reveal that the bulk of the material was written a few decades ago, specifically the gender-related stereotypes of the main human cast. For me, the humorous tone mocking those stereotypes and the transformations that each character experiences over the course of the story are strong enough that I don't mind the use of the stereotypes, but I could understand if a reader put the book down long before it got around to justifying itself.

This should not be as funny as it is.

Även om det var fråga om en produktion för BBC så står det vid läsningen fast att teve-historia är som all annan populärhistoria, fast mer så: bland stundom tämligen radikala om än väl belagda försök till omtolkning finns gamla, sedan länge avfärdade myter återberättade, en tendens att förlita sig på anekdotisk eller väldigt lokal bevisföring och ibland en tämligen ohämmad partiskhet.

Bokens syfte är i huvudsak att visa att mycket av den populära bilden av medeltiden är lika falsk som den populära bilden av snart sagt alla tidsepoker: stolta riddare, väna damer i nöd, välvilliga (eller illsluga) kungar, förtryckta bönder – som bäst kanske dessa klichéer var passade efter ett fåtal, eller under en viss tid, men flera är rena påhitt (de lismande, penningsugna prelaterna avfärdas dock inte, snarast stärks bilden).

Att synen på vad som egentligen menades med ridderliga dygder varierade beroende på vem man frågade, att bönder kunde vara nog så välnärda, att vissa kungars eftermäle blivit oförtjänt när segrarna skrev historien, att medeltidens kvinnor var mer än stackars våp – sådant kan nog många historiker skriva under på. Färre – i alla fall sådan som skriver på andra språk än engelska – skulle kanske hålla med om den bild av engelsk exceptionalism som utmålas, eller att klosterordnarna väsentligen var källan till allt det som framstår som dåligt i den medeltida kyrkan (i synnerhet med protestantiska ögon sett).

Men det är många myter som försöks stickas hål på. Viktigast och mest lyckat är nog attacken på »medeltiden« som en homogen period, där de viktigaste skillnaderna mellan 1100 och 1500 var vad kungen hette – medeltiden var lika lite en stagnant del av historien som någon annan epok.

More of a pick-up-on-occasion sort of a book, and very silly. Fun, in a, "No more than four pages with coffee in the afternoon," Sort of a way - and that's a good thing.

Having read Trolls earlier this year, it is clear that Froud was trying out a new format presentation with the Goblin Companion., as it was a big departure from the Lady Cottington series and the Runes of Elfland. Froud presents us with a compendium (compact of course to reflect his small subject matter) that introduces a variety of the goblins of the labyrinth. Each has their own unique personality and story, even though there is a certain stylistic unity among the creatures. As per usual, the illustrations were top-notch, as Froud clearly found a lot of interest among his goblin variations, bu I would hae enjoyed slightly more robust textual content, as many of the creatures barely got an introduction!

If you looked up fun easy read in the Encyclopaedia Galactica there would be a picture of this book. Never too deep, but the pace just keeps flowing along. The characters are all written nicely, and even have arcs in the story. And the humor, while maybe not laugh out loud has that warm, irreverent HHG2G / Monty Python feel throughout.

I originally read this when it came out, but just pulled it out again after Jones passing. Thanks for the the fun read Terry. RIP.½