I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Frederick Forsyth’s The Day of the Jackal, a book I’ve read and re-read countless times, but this is the first time I’ve listened to it. As I’ve often observed, you catch different things when you listen to a book, rather than reading it.
In this case, it’s a detail, the facts of which I was unaware of when first I read the book, and which I guess I glossed over on more recent readings.
It’s in the section where Forsyth gives the backstory of Goosens, “The Armorer”, who provides The Jackal with his stripped-down assassin’s rifle. He operates a “superb” forge on his premises, which the police are naturally suspicious of. But when they searched it, they found nothing, except indications that he used the forge to make medallions and copies of the city statues for the tourist trade. In fact, he gives the officers one of his replicas, “as a token of his esteem for their work”.
All well and good, but I hadn’t realized the significance of the statue’s name. It was
[spoiler] The Manneken Pis, the one of the little boy urinating:
[/spoiler]
So what I took as an innocent descriptive phrase was actually a sarcastic remark. “A token of his esteem”, indeed!
I’m not sure if this ia a reference or just a coincidence, but I just noticed that the movie Cat in the Hat takes place in the town of Anville. The TV series Preacher takes place in the town of Anneville(Sp?).
I just got the brilliance of the title ‘Forever War’. It’s forever relative to the people on Earth and the reader sort of. It creates this dissonance as the reader identifies with the soldiers for whom only a few months or years pass, but the reader sees the words year: 3,011. And thinks that’s forever.
I’m watching Zootopia for the bazillionth time, when something finally struck me. Nick and Judy have been brought before Mr. Big, and he’s telling her why Mr. Big does not like him.
" I um… I may have sold him, a very expensive wool rug. That was made from the fur, of a skunk… 's butt."
Now, I don’t recall seeing any skunks amongst the citizenry, but there’s certainly no reason that skunks wouldn’t be sentient as well. So Nick brought Mr. Big…the rough equivalent of a humanskin rug.
This is a really late reply, and I’m not going to a lyrics site to check - but isn’t it “the preacher lights the coal, he knows I’m going to stay”? As in lights the furnace to keep the church warm over night for the narrator?
He said he got him a wool rug, not a sheepskin rug. Wool rugs don’t usually have skins attached, so presumably, the skunk rug also didn’t have skin attached, and was just made of woven skunk fur.
So Nick brought Mr. Big… the rough equivalent of a rug woven out of human hair. Still pretty creepy, but at least it’s not “Hannibal Lector” creepy.
Paul’s dream? I thought the spelling was an obvious musical pun as well as an homage to Buddy Holly’s Crickets; and it was John who told the press that “a man in a flaming pie” appeared to them at the window and declared "Beatles with an “A”.
That makes some sense and the lyrics sites agree with you. I listened to it again, and it’s probably because my version is ingrained in my memory, but I still hear ‘lights the coal’ - of course, nobody is enunciating, so it’s possible I’m wrong (I can almost hear the ‘k’ and the ‘d’ on the main line, but neither is there at all on the echo, to my hearing).
In Pink Floyd’s Welcome to the Machine, I’d always interpreted the line “scouting for boys” as unsavory, but it didn’t quite fit the tone of the lines around it.
Until just recently (about 30 years after first hearing the song) I realized they were referring to the Boy Scout’s manual, “Scouting for Boys”. The meaning was just that the song’s subject had been raised in a conventional, affluent, wholesome family environment.
