My Random Rants

This piece of writing goes out to Lone wolf and cub which is hands down the finest piece of work that has ever been rendered on paper. Nothing else comes close to it. It is a piece of work beyond compare. The kinetic visuals, the fantastic dialogue, the amazing characters of Ogami Itto, his son Daigoro, Retsudo the villain who comes into his own at the end. So much so that you end up feeling sorry for him by the time he dies. No piece of work is as complete as Lone Wolf and Cub. The story starts simple as all good stories do. Ogami Itto is the executioner for the Yagyu Clan. He is framed for treachery by Retsudo the chief of the Yagyu Clan and his wife is killed. He escapes with his son Daigoro and his trusty Dotanuki. He then becomes an assassin for hire with the destruction of the Yagyu clan as his objective. It sounds clichéd but it is anything but.  The attention to detail is unbelievable. The era of feudal Japan is recreated to perfection. Kazuo Koike and Gozeki Kojima ...

Read a lot of Douglas Adams today. Two novels and a salmon of doubt to be precise. (I had read the previous three the day before). One word of advice, if you haven't read them, stop reading this and read them at the earliest. You don't what you are missing. Sparkling imagination and a wit for the ages that man had. Perhaps the one writer who shouldn't have met with an early death. Salmon of Doubt is a particularly engaging read. I didn't envision it to be so and had just ordered it for the sake of completeness because I wanted to read everything that I could of Douglas Adams. Salmon of Doubt sees Adams at his most personal talking about things that he admired most starting with his admiration of Beatles when he was 12. His reverence towards Bach, Richard Dawkins is plain for all to see and he puts it across in such a wonderful way. I could find myself googling away whatever piece of music he referenced, and telling myself (over and over again) to read The Blind Watchm...

The stuff that writers come up with is insane. These guys can take a character and do what they please with it. They make characters so real, so well realized that real life seems pale by comparison. The best writers all have this quality. They have this quality of prose, the way they write, they compel you to read, to invest yourself in the characters, the story. The pages become more than a picture can show, more than the best movie can capture, indeed each page takes on a life of its own. Robert Kirkman does this as well as anyone, develops characters but keeps them ambiguous as well so they can do anything at any point of time. Margaret Atwood could write about someone eating shit and it'd still come out like poetry. Douglas Adams and Wodehouse have such a profound sense of humour, you could read a page of theirs and think about how they wrote it and nobody could figure out how they did it. I mean it took ages for people to realize that Wodehouse was a great writer. What do you...