Royal wedding: Celebrity reaction on Twitter

CELEBRITIES joined millions of people on Twitter around the world watching and typing during the Royal Wedding yesterday.

Cheeky former England cricketer MICHAEL VAUGHAN predicted Prince Harry could try to chat up Kate Middleton’s sister Pippa.

He said: “Lets all pray for Harry... pray that he gets lucky tonight with Pippa.”

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Singer JUSTIN BIEBER also appeared to like Pippa, he said: “Congrats to William and Kate *and Kate’s sister.”

STEPHEN FRY shocked his followers by ignoring the wedding completely and tweeting about a snooker match he was watching. He said: “Semi finals always provide a special thump of nerves. I’m glued.”

At the start of the ceremony, former Strictly Come Dancing judge ARLENE PHILLIPS said: “I feel like I have been hypnotised by Paul McKenna through the TV to watch wedding like a ­numbskull.” But by the end she added: “Oh s*** I am actually crying.”

Pop legend GEORGE MICHAEL was clearly impressed, writing during the ceremony: “One word... class.”

And the host of programme Crimewatch RAV WILDING tweeted: “Proud to be ex-military and police... both of whom I think marshalled today’s wedding superbly.”

TV’s BEN FOGLE said: “On a double decker from the Abbey to the Palace. Had to show a bank statement to security to get on.”

SHARON OSBOURNE remarked: “Just saw Prince William & Prince Harry arrive at Westminster Abbey. Magnificent Men. Diana would be so proud.”

Presenter LORRAINE KELLY wrote: “Got to love Harry – he looks a bit hungover and his hair is mad.”

In an hour during the ceremony, Facebook also saw 268,777 mentions of the wedding – 74 a second – in the UK.

Demand proved too much for the BBC website, which crashed at one point.

Source: www.mirror.co.uk

Official Miley Cyrus Gypsy Heart Tour Poster Is Released

Miley Cyrus and her team have released the official tour poster for Miley’s Gypsy Heart tour. The official poster shows off a more mature, yet dramatic side of Miley that might clue us in on what her new sound will be like. She is will be doing an international tour with no current plans of a US one.

I have to say that I have a feeling that this tour will have a theatrical theme to it. Of course, this is just my own opinion. I would not be surprised if she does do it that way, but then again she may not. We all have to wait to see how it plays out.

What do you think about her tour poster? Does it look good, okay or bad? It looks decent, but I think it should look more like a music concert than a play off Broadway poster. However, it does do the job that it is supposed to do.

Source: http://www.bsckids.com/

Demi Lovato Has Bipolar Disorder

Nearly a week after she tweeted her support for Catherine Zeta-Jones' decision to get treatment for bipolar disorder, Demi Lovato revealed her own struggle with the illness.

"I never found out until I went into treatment that I was bipolar," Lovato told People magazine. "Looking back it makes sense. There were times when I was so manic, I was writing seven songs in one night and I'd be up until 5:30 in the morning." She added that she has "battled depression from a very young age."

Recently, Lovato has been open about her issues with eating disorders and self-mutilation. "I feel like I am in control now where my whole life I wasn't in control," she said of her life post-treatment. In order to stay healthy, Lovato made the decision to leave Disney Channel's "Sonny With a Chance" and work on music instead.

Her focus is not only this new chapter in her career, but also the ability to connect with others who might be dealing with the issues she struggles with. "What's important for me now," she said, "is to help others."

Lovato will also discuss her issues in an interview airing Friday on "Good Morning America" and "20/20." Regardless of what she's dealing with now, she's made it clear that she's hoping to help her fans. "The real reason why I'm sitting down with you is to open up the eyes of so many young girls, that it doesn't have to be this way," she said in the chat with Robin Roberts.

Source: www.mtv.com

Book review: 'This Vacant Paradise' by Victoria Patterson

Books and movies that take on shallow lives and lifestyles usually fall into one of two irritating camps: funny or moral. In the first, the author gets to poke fun at the silly characters they've created; in the other, the author gets to show how unexamined living leads to unhappiness, or worse, perdition. Either way, a great gulf opens between the creator and the characters.

In a novel, the writer has to go deep with her characters; this is why stories about shallow lives work so much better in film or television — for example, "Arrested Development." When characters are held at arms' length and judged they lose dimension and the reader loses interest.

Victoria Patterson gets around this problem in an interesting way using the literary version of what Shakespeare might have called "hoisting on their own petards," or blown up with their own mines (from "Hamlet," Act 3, Scene 4).

Almost everyone in "This Vacant Paradise," set in modern-day Newport Beach, is venal, self-centered, dishonest, focused on money, desperate for status, racist and image-obsessed. Some of the characters, like Esther, the main character, have a few but not all of these qualities.

It cannot have been easy for Patterson to watch their utter failure to connect, change, engage — any of the things that make us human. But she presents them unapologetically and does not promise any transformation.

Esther is living at home with her wealthy grandmother, who is evil incarnate. But Esther wants her money. To do this, she must convince the hideous crone that she loves her by acquiescing to her demands, which include marrying a silly, self-centered wealthy man. The use of money and status to control one's children and grandchildren is the stuff of Shakespeare and Russian novels — the burning hatred it engenders goes barreling through generations, starting wars and flattening rainforests.

In "This Vacant Paradise" it smolders in Esther, who falls in love with an academic, even as she tries to seduce an unappealing scion.

Academics, on Fashion Island, are Clinton-loving commies, always lost in thought, basically untrustworthy. So Esther is headed for the falls with no barrel, and it is fun, one must admit, to watch her go over.

In this brassy world, people "get to know" each other over martinis in an evening by sizing up clothing and cars. So it's no surprise that Patterson's early descriptions of her characters are fast and aggressive: "Paul Rice, an idiotic man with the advantage of a stunning inheritance," or Esther, "At thirty-three, she was well acquainted with the rules of attraction and commerce." "She was not unhappy, but solitary and introspective."

This kind of writing breaks rule No. 2 of creative writing (all rules, of course, exist to be broken): "Show, don't tell." One fears, however, that the writing coheres to rule No. 1: "Write what you know." For there is little beyond this world within the novel's cosmology. Maybe Esther and the academic will survive without money, on love, but Patterson throws the academic a big inheritance in the end. One wants to like Esther, who has the potential to rise above it all, but she fails us:

"No matter how much plastic surgery," she thinks, looking at female competitors in a bar, "they would never be as physically attractive as she was at this very moment." This is not the stuff revelations are made of. A reader wants the entire little planet on which these little people live — the mall and the strip of Southern California real estate, to perish in a great conflagration, James Bond style.

But no. To Patterson's credit, she goes down with the ship. These people are beyond salvation. Esther has a mini-epiphany: "For the first time, she was paying attention to people on the sidelines of wealth." It's not enough for us to root for her. No, these people will continue feeding the image forge and cranking out empty, desperate hollow men and women until the end of time.

The good news is that novels enter the bloodstream with greater permanence than television shows. And this one has a great big sign over the entryway: Do Not End Up Like This.

Source: www.latimes.com

Learning an early love of books

Volunteer Ed Strong read “Whose Shoes? A Shoe for Every Job” to preschoolers Monday at Grace Lutheran Church, as part of a statewide effort to promote early literacy among preschoolers.

CDT/Nabil K. Mark

Lance King, front, and other children listen to volunteer Ed Strong read. Strong read the book to preschoolers at Grace Lutheran Church April 25, 2011. The reading was part of the Smart Start-Centre County early literacy project. CDT/Nabil K. Mark

The Pennsylvania One Book, Every Young Child project has selected “Whose Shoes? A Shoe for Every Job,” a photograph concept book by Stephen R. Swinburne, as the book for this year’s program.

Across the state, the book is being shared with preschoolers in a variety of ways.

Smart Start-Centre County has organized 30 community leaders, such as Strong, to visit early learning sites throughout the county. They will read the book to the children, engage them in a learning activity and give them each a copy of the book to take home

Source: http://www.centredaily.com/2011/04/26/2669622/learning-an-early-love-of-books.html

Children's books for Easter

ILLUSTRATED BOOKS

It’s a Book by Lane Smith (Macmillan, £10.99, 3+) is a rallying cry for literary Luddites. A donkey with a laptop and a limited attention span is questioning a monkey about the unfamiliar object in his hand.

“It’s a book.” Where’s your mouse? Does it tweet? “Nope. Book.” Finally the donkey is won over and refuses to give the book back, only to tell the monkey he’ll “charge it up” when he’s finished. A work of genius – let’s hope they don’t make an app of it.

Here’s a treat for the minimalist toddler who is only allowed to play with wooden spoons and saucepans. Oliver by Christopher Franceschelli (Bloomsbury, £9.99, 1+) is an egg. Just an egg.

A plain white egg which appears on different sides of the thick white board pages to demonstrate its limited lifestyle – until you get to the last pages where an ingeniously simple white ribbon device pulls a yellow chicken out. Curiously addictive. But give the poor child a chocolate egg too.

If sensory deprivation is not your thing, try l Like Peas by Lorena Siminovich (Templar, £6.99, 0-2), a fabulously sturdy touch-and-feel board book with a vintage aesthetic that introduces simple concepts through vegetables. I’m slightly embarrassed by how long I’ve spent with this, but it is exquisitely tactile. The towelling pumpkin’s very therapeutic.

JUNIOR FICTION

If horror books that look as if the covers have been designed by the anatomist Gunther von Hagens are what gets boys reading then the flayed head on The Shadowing by Adam Slater (Egmont, £5.99, 10+) should do the trick.

Callum is a “chime child” – one born under a full moon between midnight and daybreak – but hides his ability to see ghosts until a “Fetch” from the Netherworld starts murdering children.

It’s surprisingly palatable, perhaps because the horror is rooted in folklore rather than from a writer’s testosterone-fuelled imagination.

Ministry of Pandemonium by Chris Westwood (Francis Lincoln, £6.99, 10+) also features a boy with special powers. Ben doesn’t know he’s special until he’s recruited by Mr October, who wants him to help steer the recently deceased towards the afterlife before they can be diverted by the forces of evil.

Suitably horrifying creations – like the Mawbreed, “industrial-strength vacuum cleaners of doom [which] suck out the souls of the living” – are balanced by a well-crafted sense of place and excellent characterisation.

Frances Hardinge is a superlative fantasy writer and Twilight Robbery(Macmillan, £9.99, 11+) has everything: fabulous characters – Mosca, a “clench-jawed scrap of damp doggedness” with her adult sidekick Eponymous Clench – richly evocative world-building and writing so viscerally good you want to wrap yourself up in it.

TEEN FICTION

In Flip by Martyn Bedford (Walker, £7.99, 11+), Alex wakes up in a stranger’s body. Inside he’s still a sensitive, hard-working, clarinet-playing boy but on the outside he’s Philip, a boy he’s never met, who’s cool, sporty and – as he discovers when he goes to the bathroom – considerably better endowed than him.

Bedford does not play this for laughs. It’s a serious contemplation on what constitutes the soul.

Half Brother by Kenneth Oppel (David Fickling, £10.99, 12+) is the story of a baby chimp, Zan, being raised in a family as a university experiment in the acquisition of sign language.

The introduction of a quasi-brother into Ben’s family forces him to look at his own life with some of his father’s scientific detachment. As he grows closer to Zan and becomes more uncomfortable with the ethics of what they are doing, he conducts his own questionable research into capturing a girlfriend.

Oppel turns what could so easily have been a kind of simian Lassie, into a touching and intelligent coming-of-age novel.

A serial killer drifts like smoke across the pages of The Opposite of Amber by Gillian Philip (Bloomsbury, £6.99, 14+) but the flesh and blood of the story lies in the relationship between two sisters, left to fend for themselves in a Scottish seaside town that feels permanently out of season.

Jinn, “quick and shining bright”, has always done everything, even talking, for Ruby, to the extent that Ruby is “spoilt voiceless”. Ruby’s narrative voice, however, is lucid and painfully exacting as we witness her helplessness in the face of Jinn’s descent into drugs and prostitution.

Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/8453945/Childrens-books-for-Easter.html

Book Review: Dragon's Ark by Thomas Burchfield

Dragon's Ark is a supernatural-horror that takes place in our modern times as the ageless King of all Vampires rages to secure the future of his mountain kingdom.

There is an ever-increasing need to depict vampires in books and film, in television series like True Blood and the successful Twilight film and book series phenomenon. However, there are many books in the vampire-horror fiction genre whose unique takes on the ages old vampire tales could stand to benefit greatly by this blood-filled love of the vampire craze - provided you have the creative know-how to telling a story, and a good editing team.

Dragon's Ark centers on Monitor County, a burgeoning tourist resort/retreat, whose land developers exercise the unfortunate and familiar, scrupulous tactics in obtaining the rights to build: bribe a few of the local politicians, cheat a few landowners out of their property, and threaten a citizen or two. But there is just one problem nagging the whole situation - the hunk of rock known as Dragon's Ark - and Monitor County's long-time and mysterious resident, Klaus Bartok. Klaus isn't too keen on the greedy land developer's interest in decimating the Ark and decides to become more involved in deterring their interest. With all the tasty tourist and eager developers abound - as in any vampire tale, of course, there will be blood.

Firstly, any book that opens with a prologue - it is understood that it's goal is interest the reader into proceeding on to chapter one of the book. Here, that was not the case. Much of the prologue was heavily "descriptive," trying to force the reader to visualize the passages filled with cliché, and less about the character dialogue in the story, which at times misses out on including mentioning a character's relationship to the exaggerated narrative. The prologue steers the reader, instead, into an inconsistent and ever-changing synopsis.

Character development is crucial to a story. Dragon's Ark relied too heavily on its characters' internally driven dialogue, and exercised difficulty in transitioning the internal dialogue into meaningful succession of some of the most "horror induced" scenes. Many of the characters, which at first appeared key to the story, but roles were soon cut short, were easily forgettable.

The only two characters in the story worth keeping to through to the last chapter were David and Carla. David, a physician practicing medicine in the rural community of Monitor County, and his wife, Carla, a former city girl suffering from a debilitating disease, fall in love with the town. Unfortunately, due to the lack of consistent upkeep in the story, they too, all but disappear from the book. I think if the story focused more on the story of this seemingly loving couple, the entire storyline might have been salvageable.

Dragon's Ark is one of those okay books that teeter on being good if the story's interestingly unique concepts were successfully executed. The passages were overly descriptive - teeming with similes - and there was the persisting backtracking in an effort to try and follow the story through-out.

Overall, Dragon's Ark creates a perplexing aura of critically cerebral clichés with few redeeming qualities. It does little to keep the reader interested in seeing the story through to the end.

Source: seattlepi.com