Speculation, Fact and Fiction

Here's a book chain promotion with a bit of a difference. Borders in the USA select what they're calling Original Voices - one each in fiction, non-fiction, young adult, children's illustrated, and also music categories.

According to the press release, he nominees in each category are chosen by store and HQ employees with the winners selected by a panel of judges at the corporate HQ, who volunteer to read each book and listen to each CD and take part in group discussions about them.

Here's the full press release.

Then, and here's the thing, the winners also get $5000, which is a very usefully non-trivial sum towards helping a writer or musician buy in whatever they might need to help them keep on producing good stuff, be that studio time, childcare, or, say, food.

Is there anything comparable in the UK? Not that I'm aware of. If anyone knows different, please, speak up.

By contrast, according to most reports, publishers have to pay the chains to get their titles in most* of the big front of store promotions.

*As far as I know, no-one can buy their way on to the Richard and Judy list.

The Guardian today has a piece about a new trove of skeletons found in Australia, of animals long since extinct, including the marsupial lion, or thylacoleo, which was nine feet long and reckoned to be a fearsome predator. Oh, and horned kangaroos. And ones that lived in trees - mind you, there still is one of those on New Guinea. I saw it on a David Attenborough BBC programme, and for an arboreal creature, it didn't really look comfortable in the branches.

A lot of these things all died out suddenly about 100,000 years ago and there's much debate as to whether that was due to climate change or the impact of hominids/early Man arriving.

What The Guardian article doesn't mention is that the Thylacoleo is an animal that a good number of cryptozoologists* are convinced is still alive out there, lurking in the remote corners of the Australian Bush. And let's be honest, there's a lot of remote out there.

I do like to hope that things like this can still be discovered - or rediscovered, like, for instance, the Thylacine/Tasmanian Wolf.

*cryptozoologists do the following:
determining a particular small insignificant brown bird on an Indonesian island is a different species to the small insignificant brown bird on the next island over;
investigating the spread of non-native species
finding creatures that have been thought extinct for years;
finding creatures entirely new to science, including quite big ones, not just bugs;
searching for things like the Yeti and/or Sasquatch;
developing fabulous theories to explain mankind's prediliction for myths about dragons and the like.