If you can dream it, you can do it

When technology becomes indistinguishable from magic.

"The only limitation is your imagination."

A few weeks ago I featured a few t-shirts featuring cool quotes, and one of the t-shirts included this cool quote from Walt Disney...

"If you can dream it, you can do it."

However, not everyone follows the above philosophy, and even scientific geniuses have occasionally got it wrong due to an inability to dream big.

Here are a few examples of scientific doubters (some of them geniuses) who suffered from 'That's impossible!' syndrome, only to ultimately be made to look a bit foolish when science proved them wrong...

Book reviews (part 7)

It's time for another round up of some of the books and short stories which I've recently been reading.

Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl by Herself - 4.8 / 5.0

If you've ever felt fed up with some trivial part of your life then read this book and it'll help to put things back into perspective, and make you realise how lucky we are to live with the freedoms we take for granted. At times it was heart-breaking to read about the inhumane horrors that went on in centuries gone by, but this is also a story of hope, and as well as describing the evil of slavery it also recounts Harriet Jacobs' quest for freedom (written using the pen-name Linda Brent).

I'm not usually a fan of historical books, but it was a very humbling experience to read Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, and this is a book which stays on your mind long after you finish reading it. As it's out of copyright you can download it for free from Amazon for Kindle, so there's nothing to lose by giving it a try.

Update: Amazon have now started charging for it, but you should be able to find it elsewhere for free.

Pranks on facebook and twitter

A few examples of how to prank people on social media.

As I've mentioned before on my blog I'm a big fan of pranks, but the prank has to be good natured otherwise it ceases to be a funny prank and instead becomes a sly trick. So with that in mind, here's another batch or pranks (or sly tricks, depending on your point of view), but this time featuring pranks and tricks with a facebook and twitter theme...

1) My breath smells of farts!

Like this photo if you have camel breath.

This first example is a funny trick you can play on facebook which will make your friends feel a bit embarrassed. First of all post a status which is happy news or a positive comment or basically something which is likely to get as many likes as possible from your friends.

Then once a load of friends have liked your status, edit your status to say something completely different, such as:

"Like this status if your breath smells of farts!"

So then it will appear as if all the friends who liked your original comment have clicked 'like' to indicate that their breath smells of farts.

If you don't want to post something childish like this on your own facebook page then you can also do the same trick by replying to someone else's status with a comment which is designed to get lots of likes, and then later editing your comment to something embarrassing.

Funny prank or sly trick?

How seriously do UEFA treat the issue of racism in football?

Let's kick common sense out of football.

The beautiful game, but it's not without its faults.

It's time for a football themed blog post this week, but instead of my usual round-up of funny football quotes from players and managers, I've decided instead to look at a serious question.

That question is, 'How seriously does UEFA treat the issue of racism in football?' It's tricky to specifically quantify something like that, so the most obvious way to measure how seriously certain issues are taken by UEFA is to compare the punishments that UEFA have handed out for various 'misdemeanours', and then see how the fines compare.

So here are a few examples of fines handed out by UEFA for various crimes...

Customers who bought this item also bought...

If you enjoyed Charles Fudgemuffin then we recommend ... Charles Dickens?

As an author and a reader, a useful tool on Amazon's website is their 'Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought...' feature. It's primarily designed to help readers find similar books which they might also like, but as an author it's interesting to see what sort of books your readers are interested in.

However, some of the suggestions aren't always what you would expect, and some of the unexpected results I've found include some of my early scifi books apparently appealing to the same target audience as Charles Dickens! To be specific, A Tale Of Two Cities, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist were apparently all bought by readers who also bought Charles Fudgemuffin books.

Charles Dickens appeals to a similar target audience as Charles Fudgemuffin, apparently.