Home for the weekend to compete at the Merseyside Open, which should be fun, and the two rounds of pools ought to mean I have time to remember how to fence. I hope my good foil is fine, it's been playing up, or rather, when I fence one particular person it plays up, so it could just be his lame, which has been known to do this before.
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I get why Derek Chisora slapped Vitali Klitschko. It's to annoy him, in the hope of knocking him off his game. I just don't get
why! It's not going to work, Vitali is too old and wily for that. All you're going to do if you annoy him is that he's going to pound you to pulp once he's sure he's won the fight.
I think tactically naive is the nicest thing I can find to say about it.
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Book Meme - Day 30 - Your favourite book of all timeï»żI believe there may be three people who don't know this, but for them and any passing aliens, my favourite book is 'The Three Musketeers' by Alexandre Dumas (pere) (in case you hadn't guess, accent marks aren't working on this computer).
Explaining why might take some time, but it's three things mainly:
1) The plot - there is one, and it moves forward in a sensible manner.
2) The writing style - like all of Dumas's works, the author knows his stuff, and knows that his characters aren't always right and there's just a general sense of place and time and that information is conveyed interestingly and well.
3) The characters - oh my word, the characters. As I've said before, I love the way there are no minor characters, there are only characters that we don't focus on.
I love that the main bad guy isn't, it's made quite clear early on that the Cardinal would make a much ebtter ruler than the King, and he just happens to be the adversary because our protagonist has sworn his loyalty to the king. The Cardinal keeps up his end of this, prefering the idea of having D'Artagnan on his side to the idea of D'Artagnan dead. Even Rochefort (who I still confuse with the cheese) becomes an honoured adversary.
Even the English characters aren't evil.
And then there's our heroes, who aren't, they're proud, vain, bumptious and broke, but they're also fun and loyal and magnificent and honourable within their own creed. I couldn't think of fictional people I'd rather spend time with. I think it's because they're presented flaws and all, and the flaws are intrinsic to their strengths and they're all so three dimensional. They're not fictional, I tell you, they're just real in a different universe (why yes, *that* bit in 'A Christmas Carol' always struck a chord). There's this fantastic scene about 2/3rds of the way in, where Porthos is waiting for the rich wife he's bedding, and he's making sure he's presentable and most importantly that his sash is turned the right way round because he only had enough money to have one side embroidered and it'd kill him for anyone to know, and you don't think he's silly, your heart just clenches for him. And this is a character who, in lesser hands, would have been one of those two guys who always hang out with our heroes.
It's such a wonderfully rich book, and I recommend it utterly and completely, although, as with all things translated, some translations are better than others. (The one my Mum has and like is a mid-90s Pengiun, but I also have a mid-90s Puffin that's terrible.)
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