Reading Books

When  I was at school the teacher would say "Can you all open your desks and get out your reading books." we'd slam open and slam shut the desks and all begin to read. One by one we'd be called up to the front of the class and sit at the teachers desk and we'd be heard reading. I can remember in the lower class the book we started on. It was Book Nought, Kitty and Rover and the pictures were all in a kind of purple. A few years later I was on Book Five and this was about the Sleeping Beauty, the last story was that one. Book Six was next, this had the William Tell story in it. Up in the high mountains was the opening. But I could not pronounce HIGH, I said HIG, not HIGH. So I was put back one book. All for one word. The next year I was in Mr Gallagher's class and I was afraid of him. Mr Gallagher looked a bit like the Irish actor Milo O'Shea, if any of you saw Barbarella with Jane Fonda then you will remember Milo O'Shea in that playing the organ. So it was because I was so afraid of Milo O'Shea, sorry I mean Mr Gallagher that my Life changed. I read books to stay out of his way. It worked, I kind of grew a brain at fast speed. Which in turned meant that 3 years later I got in to Grammar school.

At the moment I am encouraging my smallest one to read, I hear her read all the time as does my wife. It can be funny because If there is a new word then my wife will explain what the new word is, in Chinese and then explain what it is in English. Kids guess what is happening so you have to make sure you get them to read what the words on the page are. Though we all know that our brain fills in the spaces, so you have to stop and slow down and make sure that children read what is on the page and not guess. There is a thing you can get on the Internet, its a paragraph and there are lots of mistakes in it. But if you give it to somebody they will read it perfectly, why? Because your brain fills in the spaces. As for reading its just getting the child involved and encouraging them, sometimes with bribes and sometimes with punishments such as no tv and Disney. My bigger daughter is all grown up, she is on Library Books as we used to call them. In a couple of years time I'll get her to read my books, and I hope it won't be a punishment for her. At the moment she is working her way through Roahl Doal and we also watch films which are based on his books. He really was a great writer.

You can curl up with a book just as you can curl up with a radio on a long Winters Night, the gift of reading is such a great thing. I can remember my mother teaching me to read from a cartoon in a newspaper, it was the Phantom, as well as Chipper the cartoon dog. I remember my old  History teacher recommending the Don Camillo books, they are about a Catholic priest  and  a Communist Lord Mayor in a mythical village on the river Po. Very much cartoon figures but a great read. Sadly you cannot get them in English translation and Santa did not bring them to me this Christmas.

As for today's books, you have huge best sellers which were ghost written, my golden goals by some footballer. I did it my way, by some tv celebrity who has just won a reality tv show. Or the A to Z of sex by some pop star groupie. These kind of books will sell 2 million copies and end up on the coffee table of your local hairdressers or beauty parlour. As for me I read the Daily Telegraph on the Internet, or I listen to radio 4, not forgetting the good documentaries you can find on the BBC or some of the commercial stations.  I also practice my writing here. If I want junk to read then I'll go and have a haircut.

The Dead and The Living

The Dead and The Living (c)

                           by
          
                     Michael  Casey

     I first saw a deceased when I was nine years old ,my father said  not
 
     to worry as the dead are the same as the living ,  only the  laughter
 
     has left them ,  the sparkle has gone from their eyes , the worry has
 
     been lifted from their shoulders ,  and their voice has vanished  to
 
     eternity .

     In  paradise the sparkle will return for it is the  twinkle  of  the
 
     stars , the laughter will return too for it is the morning breeze and
 
     the turning tides are their sides shaking with laughter .
    
     I treat the deceased with the same courtesy as I give to the living ,
 
     though I find the deceased are always more polite .  My father  also
 
     had a few words to say about the living .

     He said that the living are only the caretakers of the  soul  ,  yet
 
     they think their existence is everything , that they know everything
 
      because they experience many things with their senses .

      What the living don't acknowledge is that their time is  short  and
 
      when I lay their bodies to rest then their souls  continue  without
 
      them ,  without their strong ,  without their weak ,  without  their
 
      beautiful or even ugly temporary form , to where I cannot say , only
 
      that it is a better place .
 
      Percy the undertaker placed the lid on the coffin ,the soul was free

                         

                                       THE  BEGINNING

 

Traffic and Bubble Bath

I watched the film Traffic today, I recorded it the other night and left it on our machine, so today I watched it. Everything was understated, it was directed by Steve Sondoberg, I hope I got that right the credits were rolling fast. I was impressed by the good Mexican cop who risked his life so much, he was a very good actor. Michael Douglas also gave a very good performance. His daughter slipped into drugs from being a very rich kid who was bored, in the end she was a hooker to pay for her habit. Very seedy. The style of the film also made in more interesting. How many awards it won I don't know. I could Google and find out but I'm sure the film buffs reading this will tell me. In the end Michael Douglas realised that his grand job was worth nothing compared to the love of his daughter and his wife for that matter. Family is everything.

Bubble bath is so nice, perhaps some may call me a girl for saying this but it is true. A good old soak in the bath is great, especially with the radio for company. Being like a Hippo for half an hour or until the water is no longer hot IS great. You do come out all wrinkly a lot like a prune but it is great. I know in USA its showers but I think a soak is always nicer. My wife likes sauna, then a shower or a bath when she comes back from the sauna at the bottom of our street. My old uncle Dan in Boston loved the public sauna too back in 1980 I was taken there when I was on holiday. But back to bubble bath, it is a kind of church. Why do I say church, before you have cartoons in your mind let me explain. You are at your most relaxed when you are lying there in a warm environment with nice aromas around you. Its a kind of womb, and if you put your ears under the water then things sound how the outside world sounds to an unborn baby. In the bath or should I say tub, in the bath you can relax and all the day's problems can dissolve. You are probably closer to your god too, no outside events crowding your time and mind, I'd bet too that people pray more while they are all alone in the bathroom. You are all alone and there are no barriers, you are literally naked before  God. No expensive suits and designer jewelry, you cannot be pompous and powerful when you are naked and looking like a prune and covered in bubbles. Inventors probably get their best ideas when they are in a bath. Don't let us forget Archimedes in his bath either. 

But why am I linking Traffic and Bubble Bath? Drugs kill and corrupt. Bubble bath turns us back into kids and cleans us. Our minds, our imagination are our greatest gift. We may be thrown into jail but we still have our minds. We may be doing a job we hate, but our minds are free. Drugs are just  a passing high. But if you have your mind, your imagination then you have something to play with which is more powerful than any drug. An imagination is even more powerful than Nuclear Weapons. And man's imagination can bring an end to nuclear weapons.

 Perhaps its in our baths covered in bubbles and hot water that we know just how great Peace is and how Peace and NOT drugs should be shared around. So starting one person at a time we can influence Life on Earth.

p.s. while I was cleaning the car park of CPNEC that's when the idea for Tears For A Butcher

came to me.  Imagination is our greatest gift.

Extended Christmas

We have a lot of snow in England at the moment, some even say its the worst Winter in 30 years.The Infant school opened only to shut down on the first day at Midday. The Junior school over the road stayed open, they did let you take the kids home if you had a sibling at the Infant school. Both schools are at the top of the hill, literally on the brow of the hill, with the soup bowl woods just behind the Junior school. I decided it was safer to walk than drive the car, so JJ stayed while I walked the kids up the hill. I kept on saying "remember this", as we listened to the sound of the snow crushing under our feet. I got them to observe the snow as we walked to school, the pretty natural  "pictures" they could see and how they could draw them  in the future. I encouraged them to observe the shapes, I want them to have memories for the future. When they have children and grandchildren they can tell them about the big winter of 2009/2010, just how pretty it all looked. They may even remember me.  After school  we went through the woods ,the snow looked great behind the school as I showed the girls. There must have been 150 people all enjoying the snow and maybe 15 people with sledges, any of you film fans out there will remember "Rosebud" and citizen Kane, so I needn't say any more. For me though it was an opportunity to plant seeds in my kids imagination, joy and love and snow. Today and the weekend we missed another load of snow but there may be more tomorrow. In fact it was noticably milder and the snow in the back garden wasn't rock solid, it had melted enough to make a snowman. So I started a snowman for my girls and when they get back from school together we can finish it off. These simple pleasures are what makes family, so I hope wherever you are reading this you do the same  for your own family. 

Junk Mail and how to destroy it and all of their computers

I don't know about you but junk mail is a total bore. I think I'm world famous now, why? I  get 20 a day, sometimes more. Sometimes for fun I reply and give them rubbish information. You always get the story that they are dying of cancer and they want to leave you all their money. Or the subject line is "from the desk of barrister James Pooh" and other such gems. I saw on tv news how in one place in Africa there were a line of computers and a teacher at the front who had written the fake story on the blackboard and they were all typing it out. Junk emails also come from China too and all corners of the globe. HOTMAIL ALERT please send us all your info or lose your hotmail. Phshing scams galore, and I click them out of existance. If I had Captain Kirk's technology then I'd vapourise them. If only Bill Gates would let me hit return and them send a magnetic pulse in an email so I could wipe their computers, and far far worse. I'm sure everybody who reads this is agreeing with me. Oh don't forget the 1,000,000,000 I've just won according to the junk email, just send my details and then they'll ask for a 100 to cover  expenses and then they'll post a check for 1,000,000,000. And yes I just to attention when its from the desk of barrister James Pooh. And don't let us forget they are believers, DECIEVERS and crooks and liars that is what they really are.  With each email address that is zapped they get an even more improbable new address. I still think Bill Gates should let me send a zapping email that wipes their hard drive. But he's too busy trying his new Google phone. Hey Bill can you just put that down for as second and help me with this email. However somewhere in the wide world somebody who has English as a 2nd language may end up reading this and think Bill Gates is sitting on the chair next to me sobering up after stealing all my beer from the fridge, and then I'll end up will 200 junk emails a day. But as we all know today is Thursday 7th Jan and every Thursday that is also the 7th Bill goes bowling with the President, not the USA President, but with the President  of the         Michael Casey appreciation society and they read all my stories from my site www.michaelgcasey.multiply.com

AND IF YOU BELIEVE ANY OF THIS THEN YOU BELIEVE IN FAIRIES, or you are still reading from a Blackboard........

Diary or Blog or am I just ranting today help me Richard E Grant

I was just watching the tv when I stumbled over a  programme hosted by Richard E Grant the actor. It was all about diaries. So it set me thinking. Is a blog a diary? I think it is in today's world. As kids we all found our big sister's diary and read through it before trying to put it back in exactly the same place. If we were really cruel then we'd write in it. As I think of it I remember the name of the boy who first had a crush on my sister. Thats a 40 year old memory thats just came sailing back. Do we remember the people and places in diaries?  For family things I do seem to have total recall. The rest of the family don't seem to remember, in some ways I had a very good childhood. The Love my parents had for us all shines through. Though I wouldn't really like to share or expose all of our family life. These reality programmes do go too far in my opinion. Its usually broken/drunken/crazed people who want the limelight the 15minutes of fame. Me, I say lock them in a dark cellar and leave them there, very much what the Simpsons would do. I did actually see the Simpsons movie today so perhaps they have given me that notion. Real people doing real things instead of grasping people who want fame for fame's sake. Perhaps Religion has died so much, certainly over here

 in UK,  that Fame and being on TV is the closest spiritual reality some people can  find. I say this as a believer, so it really does sadden me. There's a though for the philosophers out there who may be reading this. Tonight on the tv news a young man helped save a family from a fire, he went back into the flames twice in order to save his neighbour's children. Now he is somebody I'd like to applaud, NOT hyperventalating dyed hair people who've spent too much time under a sun lamp. Thankfully we have the final series of Big Brother on tv, I imagine none of them will have hear of George Orwell and 1984, me I read the book in grammar school.  But I do realise that blogs are rants as well, I just proved it to myself. Though I must say that when you can connect to people then it is worthwhile, for its the things we share that make us all family, whether you read this in UK, USA or somewhere in Asia

Horror Story and other stuff

I asked my daughter for an idea then I'd write a story, just as we all used to do when we were kids in school. She said "Pain" as I hurt my back again recently and it took 2 weeks to heal. But I decide to write about Horror instead. As I speak the kids are in bed, either that our they are staying in their room and drawing. Drawing is big in our house. My wife is very good and can ever do calligography in Chinese symbols. My own brother can also draw well, so I'm pleased its being passed down the generations. Me, I'm just rubbish.

What about horror? Well you meet somebody and then they turn out different to what you expected, so that in a way is a horror story. As for real horror films, or suspense films they tend to be polarised. You have the buckets of blood ones, which I cannot really watch. Or the suspense ones, with the creek on the stairs. I think the creek on the stairs ones are better, buckets of blood ones tend to be just that, all buckets of blood and no plot. I saw the Lost Boys recently on TCM it was funny and had a good plot and did not rely on too much blood. My wife hides behind her hands when the suspense ones are on. It was film that brought us together, watching films, and yes we are a kind of Adams Family, when my young daughters friends arrive I say "welcome to the adams family" , sharing a good film does break down barriers.

 Japanese films are good too, the cartoons that are so well drawn, we saw one this afternoon it had even won an oscar, best of all it was on BBC so there were no adverts to ruin the film. Its still funny when we see an old film and its the first time my wife has seen it in English, or without Chinese subtitles. But then I watch Chung Ying Fat in some things and I'm raving about it. My wife just gives me a potted history of all the stars and who is married to who. So films  are our joy, so don't switch off the lights I'm going to bed now and I'll make lots of noise as I go up the scared, just to frighten away any ghosts that may be there.