The book I read to research this post was About Pets: The Chipmunk which is a very good book which I bought from my local petshop. Technically any striped squirrel is called a chipmunk. In britain it usually refers to the asian or siberian chipmunk especially when someone says they have a chipmunk as a pet. If you buy a chipmunk from a petshop it will almost certainly be a siberian chipmunk. There is other similiar breeds and there’s even some close relatives in america but they don’t make as good pets. Also in britain if you have an animal in captivity it’s normally a requirement that it came from domesticated parents and not the wild. Chipmunks aren’t as domesticated as hamsters and gerbils and they are exotic pets meaning they come from a completely different region namely russia, siberia, korea, northern china and mongolia. They are found further afield they have even been sighted living wild in france. They need a really big cage preferrably one you can stand up in. They like things like logs and branches for them to climb. If you have more than one each individual must have plenty of space or they will fight. There food must be scattered around for the same reason. Their fights can be serious and are by far the most common reason a chipmunk gets injured. If a chipmunk escapes you need a net and heavy duty gloves because they have a nasty bite. Sometimes a chipmunk can be attracted back into his cage by leaving the door open and leaving a treat in there. If a pair escapes your only chance of getting them back in the cage is to catch them. You should have a concrete base under the cage as they can burrow through most things. A lot of pet shops sell petfood specifically for chipmunks. Don’t be tempted to feed them rabbit food as it will upset there stomach. You may notice chipmunks will eat partly digested droppings you should allow this as it is an important part of their diet. Some food has to pass through twice before it is digested. If you keep chipmunks outside they may hibernate and this helps prolong their life. Of course if kept indoors it’s unlikely they will get this urge. They should be allowed to hoarde food and you should leave it in the cage when you clean it.

The book I read to research this post was the Good Pet Guide to Degus which is a very good book which I bought from my local petshop. Degus live wild between the chilean coast and the lowlands of the andes. The farmers consider them a pest. If you want them as a pet you must buy at least 2 preferably same sex and they like climbing so they like a very big cage preferably room height. There are best kept indoors at room temperature they hate excessive heat or cold. If you are unable to locate degu food, guinea pig food is very similiar. They are close relatives to the guinea pig. You should spend plenty of time interacting with them and they can become quite tame. If you offer a tidbit on your hand they will often go on your hand to take it. You should never reach in from above to pick it up as they are nervous of birds of prey swooping down to pick them up and may bite. They like to use branches but not cedar which is poisonous and will also use paper to make a nest. Don’t use newsprint as the ink is poisonous. They can’t digest caffeine or sugar and these can do harm. They love the rope toys sold in petshops but make sure they are made from natural products. They also love a hamster ball but must be supervised in case they try to escape. If you give them an exercise wheel which should be of the enclosed variety they will run upto 2.5 miles a day in it. They only live upto 12 months in the wild but in captivity can live upto 10 years. You should never grab it by the tail as it will break off and can become infected also it will never grow back. Both the male and female degus make excellent parents. If you have 2-3 degus you should clean the cage once a week and obviously if you have more you do it more often. For their size degus are quite clean and are cleaner than many smaller animals.

The book I read to research this post was China by New Star Publishers which is a very good book which I bought from a carboot sale. This book is primarily for tourists to China & was published in 1996. My auntie who lives in London England has a son who is married to the daughter of a chinese film director. Anyway as a treat he payed for his son in law and his parents to visit him in Shanghai which is where he lives. Anyway they couldn’t get over how modern Shanghai is. China is certainly catching up with the west. Apparently every known mineral that can be mined has been discovered to have deposits in China. Also it has lots of natural ports. There are 2 huge rivers in China the Yiangtze & the Yellow. The amount of drainage provided by all the rivers in China is about the same as that for the whole continent of Europe. A long time ago their was the Opium Wars between China & Britain which the British won & seized Hong Kong and some of the surrounding territory. The wars were caused by the british plying the chinese with heroin so the british were at fault. Another dubious war was carried out by the portugese when they seized Macao. Also America seized Taiwan in the Korean War possibly as a reprisal for helping the North Koreans. All these territories have been returned to the chinese. Many areas like Taiwan although they are part of China are self governing.

The book I read to research this post was Buying a Used Motorhome by Bill Myers which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. There are 4 categories of motorhome. The biggest is category A which is the type used by celebrities. These are very expensive and are often a lorry with pull out rooms. second hand these can be quite reasonably priced often cheaper than for example category B. The smallest is category B which is often a reasonably big van although there won’t be storage space above the cab. Category C & category B+ are the midsized categories. B+ will often just be category B with storage space above the cab. Category C will be like a very large van. Although a second hand category A might look like the solution don’t forget they are often a nightmare to drive and fuel consumption is often poor. Also you often need a HGV licence to drive one. The author tells a story that he bought a huge camper at a brilliant price and found it impossible to keep both axles lined up in the same lane. When he was on the freeway the other drivers blew their horns at him as a result. Not very surprisingly he got rid of it soon afterwards. The moral is always take your potential camper for a test drive. If the camper has less than 10,000 miles on the clock someone has probably had problems with it and is getting rid of it. Equally if it has more than 35,000 miles on the clock it’s well used and you might have to make expensive repairs. Ideally it should be between these 2 mileages. Another thing you should particularly check is that the camping equipment like the cooker and washing machine are working. You should check the condition of stuff like the beds. If you get it from a dealer he should give you a guarantee to give you time to check over the stuff. If you look on a site like craigslist there should be a phone number as part of the ad if not it’s probably spam.

The novel I am reviewing in this post is Doors Open by Ian Rankin which is an excellent thriller which I bought from a carboot sale. Rankin is probably best known for the Rebus series of books but this book is a standalone thriller. It concerns 3 art lovers who plot to steal some paintings from a storage facility owned by a museum in Edinburgh. They are going to replace the paintings with forgeries and one of the men knows he will be called upon to verify the paintings are genuine after the robbery and will lie. Only problem is the forger likes to put things like condoms in his forgeries. Also a gangster who is helping them in exchange for a picture which he is going to an icelandic gangster called Hate to pay a debt has been double crossed like most of the others and now has a picture with a condom in it. One of the artsy friends has fled to Spain along with all the genuine pictures. Also a detective who has an informant in the gangster Chib’s gang is hot on their trail. All that though is nothing compared to what Hate is going to do them and he is built like a challenger tank. Not to mention Chib wants to get hold of the forger because he wants him to do more fakes although a bit more genuine looking. I definitely recommend this book.

The book I read to research this post was Fitness for Dummies by Susan Schlossberg et al which is an excellent book which I bought from kindle. One thing this book stresses is that you should find something you enjoy as a means of keeping fit. Another thing is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be excessive. One thing I remember is when I left school and had to wait a few months to go on a training scheme that was work related I used to walk to a town 10 miles away go round the fitness in the park and then walk home. The thing is I loved it especially the walking because I did get fit and I used to find it really relaxing. If you are interested in keeping fit one thing I like the look of but haven’t tried out is the stationary bike they do with the nintendo wii which comes with software that lets you see a cartoonised scenery as you cycle on your television. One thing they do suggest is finding how much of fat percentage you have and adapting your program accordingly. The simplest way is with calipers that you then convert using a table, it’s the cheapest and also the least accurate. Some people measure muscle by mistake or don’t pinch enough when they are measuring. There are more complex methods like one where you go into a special pool and have to exhale and submerge yourself or some where they use things like xrays, either way they are expensive. One bit of good advice is get a pedometer which measures your footsteps a sedentary person will take 4,000 steps in a day you should aim to start at about 6,000 and add an additional 2,000 each week until you reach about 12,500. Another thing you might enjoy is pilates or yoga, if you want to try something a bit different try hatha yoga or ashtanga yoga which I recommend. If you are already quite fit and like dancing what about zumba or something similiar which is keeping fit to latin music with a few latin and hip hop moves thrown in.

The book I read to research this post was 80′s The Golden Decade of the Horror Movie by Matteo Tortora which is an excellent book which I downloaded for free from kindle. Matteo has a degree in film studies & is a big fan of horror movies. He is also a catholic and apparently there is an organisation connected to that church in Italy that rates films so he has selected some of the more prominent horror movies & put what they had to say. He has also written a short synopsis to each of them films. He has also written quite a bit about the history of horror films in the eighties in particular how it was a major opportunity to have decent special effects in films for the first time. He also profiles quite a lot of directors so I thought I’d do David cronenberg. Finally he has also has listed absolutely loads of horror films on a year by year basis and put internet links to each one.

David Cronenberg was born in Canada in 1943 & at first did a lot of work in Canadian and American television. In 1974 he made a film called Shivers which was about a contractable disease plaguing a town. It had much critical acclaim. The following year he made Rabid which was about a woman who had a condition which made her eat flesh and affected other close people so they developed the same urge. That was followed by several films including Sisters & The Brood. Sisters featured a young Margot Kidder in a dual role. She would go onto find fame doing the Superman films. The Brood was about a lady being used to breed babies which kind of grew out of her. That starred Oliver Reed & Samantha Eggar. Soon after came what many consider his masterpiece Videodrome which was about a tv station that broadcast sex and violence that gradually controlled someone. Even with him being able to produce an organic gun. It was a kind of parody on people who attribute things like murders to things people watch on television. Let’s face it they must be evil to start with when they commit things like murders. Anyway Videodrome starred James Woods & Debbie Harry. The Fly which starred Jeff Goldblum & Geena Davis and was a remake of a classic film about a man who tries to teleport him and inadvertently gets his DNA mixed with a fly. Cronenberg tried to be factual in what the result of combining their DNA would be. He made Dead Ringers which starred Jeremy Irons & Genevievre Bujold which was about identical twins who were doctors and one of whom was obsessed with a nymphomaniac speed freak which destabilized their relationship. One twin killed  the other then killed himself. Cronenberg has had some acting roles most notably in the tv series Alias. Also he has made some good films more recently like Naked Lunch & A Dangerous Method.

The book I am reviewing in this post is the science fiction novel The Dig by Michael Siemsen which is an excellent book which I think I downloaded for free from kindle. This book deals with quite a serious topic which I read about in another book in that there is evidence of human activity well before 2 million years ago which is when early man is meant to have appeared. For example a stone wall which is 150 million years old was found in a USA coal mine. This kind of evidence which doesn’t fit in the equation not very surprisingly is suppressed. In this book a piece of porcelain 100 million years old is found in the Rift Valley in Kenya. The government won’t let it leave the country and they have to fly an expert to the archaeological site to have a look at it. This expert is a bit of an eccentric millionaire who loves things like ipads and has an armband device that lets him experience flashes from other peoples lives. He thinks he has a premonition that another character is going to die but it doesn’t quite pan out the way he thought. Anyway it turns out there is a time portal through which dinosaurs are travelling to the present day. This isn’t helped by a rockfall which traps them in a series of caves but they do eventually get back to the camp. There’s a bit of romance in the story and there’s a happy ending.

The book I am reviewing in this post is Fury of Fire by Coreene Callahan which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This is the 1st book in the dragonfury series of fantasy books. Most of it is set in present day Seattle and concerns 2 warring factions from another realm. One the razorbacks is fleeing from the other. The razorbacks have been massacred and need to increase their population. Luckily they have similiar mind control abilities to Jedi Knights and can seduce any woman they please if she is a human. One problem with this is that if a human has a baby razorback she will be ripped open and die giving birth. Anyway the lord of these people has sex with a lady called Myst and gets her pregnant but his assistant falls in love with her. Of course he doesn’t want to lose her but what can he do. Also because she belongs to his lord he shouldn’t be having a relationship with her. At one stage she is kept prisoner but he finds her and she escapes. It then turns out that she is a razorback so she is able to survive the birth. This also means that she wasn’t seduced by mind control but simply found them irresistible. Interestingly Coreene is a bit of a tomboy who whilst at college was the only girl playing on an all male sports team. She obviously likes macho men.

The book I am reviewing in this post is Last Breath by Rachel Caine which is a very good book which I bought from kindle. This is the last but one in the morganville vampires series. This book isn’t as good as Black Dawn but pretty much sets up the story which is continued in that book. Incidently I have done blogs on Black Dawn & the 1st in the series Glass Houses at

http://oldscratbag.com

In Last Breath some supposed vampires wait at the gates of Morganville and they’re not on the database of known vampires. Clearly they’ve not been there before but how do they know they have to wait? The answer is they are draug which feed on vampires and are there worst enemies. They can look humanlike or become a liquid state. They also like to live in water and like sirens can sing a song that lures humans and vampires to their fate. We also see Claire the books heroine having her neck broken because she knows too much but she is taken to the glass house which has special powers and is brought back to life. I did read before that women like vampires because they consider them romantic and I think this book will go down well with them. There’s a wedding between Eve & Michael and there is a bit of commotion over the cake having Eva on it. Shane, Eve & Claire are human whereas Mike is a vampire who only comes out at night. People are forced to donate blood to the vampires of which there are quite a lot in Morganville. Also Eve is a goth which is probably not a good idea in a town where many people aren’t too keen on vampires. Finally a new fashion in Morganville is having a tatoo of a stake drawn on you just to consolidate the anti vampire feeling.