50bookchallence, 15000pages

Book #28 -- William Pène du Bois, The Twenty-One Balloons, 180 pages.

Recently I watched a special on Krakatoa on the Discovery Channel and it jogged a faint memory of having read a book in my childhood that dealt (in a rather sanitised way) with the Krakatoa eruption. I remembered it being fiction, but it was the book that got me interested in volcanos as a child. A quick Google search turned up The Twenty-One Balloons, which I recognised as being the book I remembered.

It's a cute little book, but not as good as I remembered it being. Of course, knowing now what I do about Krakatoa, I'm a little disappointed that the author took such a tragedy and trivialised it. In the book, one of the characters specifically mentions that people had abandoned the nearby coastlines in fear of the volcano implying that when it erupted there were few or no casualties. In fact, there were plenty of people living on the nearby coastlines and thousands died.

Ah well. It is a children's book. And a quite imaginative one at that.

Progress toward goals:

171 / 365 (46.8%)

Books:

28 / 50 (56.0%)

Pages:

6,482 / 15,000 (43.2%)

2006 Book List

cross-posted to 50bookchallenge, 15000pages, and gwynraven

Interesting quiz

Haven't done one in awhile, and this is interesting:

( My Philosophical Profile )

I'll have to ponder this one some more later.

(no subject)

So last night I'm watching tv when all the sudden the screen blanks out then turns red and the warning alert sounds. A voice tells me that this is the emergency broadcasting system and that this is *not* a test. East Baton Rouge Parish (where I live) and East Feliciana Parish (next to EBR) are under a severe thunderstorm warning. We should expect winds in excess of 60mph, dangerous cloud-to-ground lightning, and penny-sized hail. Residents are urged to seek shelter immediately.

The duration of this warning? 5:47pm to 6:13pm. Um . . . .

So yeah, basically one storm was supposed to sweep through two Parishes leaving destruction in its wake -- all in less than half an hour.

As for me? I got a little thunder. It was actually kind of nice. I like storms. But no hail, no winds that shook the apartment, no power loss, not even much lightning. All in all a disappointing result for scaring the crap out of me with that announcement. Southeast Louisiana in Hurricane Season is not where you want to be when hearing emergency broadcasting warnings.

*sigh* I can't wait for Hurricane Season to be over. The suspense is killing me.