"The Wettest County in the World:" by Matt Bondurant

This is a slice of American history brought on by the depression, lack of education and alcoholism. Violence is a given. It follows the American tradition of making outlaws into folk heroes. It is a good story but I had a problem with the sequence of chapters. The numbers were in sequence but not the content. It kept jumping back and forth between the years making it hard to follow. If you like this era of history, you will enjoy the book.

"The Moonshine War" by Elmore Leonard

This book reminds me of pirates looking for buried treasure. Except in this case the pirates are moonshiners and the buried treasure is moonshine. It is an easy to read book which leans to our perception of backwoods people and moonshiners in particular. I enjoyed the story although I felt that it ended too soon. It could have used another chapter. I look upon a story as an historical event and I want to know the outcome, how the characters made out. I need the story to have an ending, happy or otherwise. 

What's a Fag?

The temp yesterday was 12C/52F. Almost spring eh? Today back to normal. -2C/28F.

The new book I am writing is about bootleggers, moonshine and murder. I've picked my hometown in Cape Breton as the scene. Not because it's full of bootleggers and moonshiners, it'd just because I know the area. I've put it in the 1950's and also use some of the slang of the time. Don't know if they still use it.

One of the slang words is fag. What is a fag? It's a cigarette. Someone would ask, "Hey, you got a fag," or "Hey, can you lend me a fag?" That was a popular one. Which leads me to say, when someone borrows something, they usually return it. How would you return a cigarette you've smoked?

In my last post I wrote about an alternate bus company. Bottom line - it was a farce. It sure did heat up the news and blogs for that day. Big excitement, like the Romans throwing another group of christans to the lions. It was even exciting the next day with all the "I told you so." Everyone seemed to know it was bull except the reporters.

Read an interesting item this morning. Iceland is considering dropping their Krona and using the Canadian Dollar. We are taking over the world and this is the first move. Americans send in armies, we'll just be nice. Which reminds me, we had this opportunity before, when the Turks & Caicos Islands asked us to take them over. We declined. We were just too nice to take over someone.

It would have been a good idea, our own place in the sun. Canadian money, Canadian laws and we would be ripped of by Canadians, not some foreigner.