100 Years Later, Beatrix Potter’s Tale Of A Fanciful Feline To Be Published – Penguin UK editor Jo Hanks happened to find an unfinished copy of a new Beatrix Potter series, Kitty-in-Boots, that Potter had hoped to finish, were it not for World War I and other “interruptions.” Because Potter had only completed one illustration, Roald Dahl illustrator Quentin Blake will complete the illustrations, and the volume will be published in September 2016. Best part? Kitty is a female feline!
At the time Potter was writing Kitty-in-Boots in 1914, she told her publisher that the story was centered on “a well-behaved prime black Kitty cat, who leads rather a double life.” . . .
This led her to the publisher’s archive, where she says she found “three manuscripts, two handwritten in children’s school notebooks and one typeset and laid out in a dummy book; one rough colour sketch of Kitty-in-Boots and a pencil rough of our favourite arch-villain, Mr Tod.” – NPR
Spot Fake Kindle Reviews With FakeSpot – Nate Hoffelder reports on a Cnet story regarding a new website called FakeSpot, designed to help consumers figure out how many Amazon reviews for virtually any product might not be legitimate. He notes that the service currently works for the .au, .ca, .com, and .uk versions of Amazon. This could be interesting.
Sometimes you can’t trust the mass of four and five star ratings, and that is where Fakespot comes in. This website (there’s also a Chrome extension) hoovers up the reviews for a given product, crunches some algorithms, and gives you an estimate of the number of questionable reviews.
Fakespot is less than specific on what makes for a questionable review, but according to Cnet the reviews were flagged because the reviewers write only overwhelmingly positive reviews, reviewed products without purchasing them, or were determined to have written other reviews about the same company. – The Digital Reader
Tired of Reading About “White Boys and Their Dogs,” This Badass Kid Did Something Amazing – Part of me is fist-pumping the coolness of this 11-year-old-girl, Marley Dias, who created the #1000BlackGirlBooks project, and part of me is dismayed that an 11-year-old-girl HAD to create it. If you want to contribute to her book drive, you can send books and/or cash to 59 Main St., West Orange, N.J., 07052, Office 323. As Marley told her mother, with whom she was discussing the lack of diversity in her school’s books,
“I told her I was sick of reading about white boys and dogs,” Dias said, pointing specifically to “Where the Red Fern Grows” and the “Shiloh” series. “‘What are you going to do about it?’ [my mom] asked. And I told her I was going to start a book drive, and a specific book drive, where black girls are the main characters in the book and not background characters or minor characters.”
The mother-and-daughter team have been holding book drives and taking in donations since, and they’re already up to 400 books, which should put their February 1 goal well in reach. #1000BlackGirlBooks is also part of the larger project that she got the Disney grant to pursue: the GrassROOTS Community Foundation, a community health organization that her mother cofounded seven years ago with Roots MC Black Thought. All of the books donated for #1000BlackGirlBooks will eventually be catalogued and given to a low-resources library in St. Mary’s, Jamaica, where Janice grew up. – attn:
How Scotland is tartan up comic book movies – Well, at least someone has the time to collect this kind of mental trivia. Some of it seems like stretching to me, but I’m probably not the intended audience.
Whether today’s blockbuster superhero movies are adapted from the comic book universes of Marvel or DC Comics they all seem to have one thing in common – a link to Scotland.
Here are some of those connections from the Avengers and Batman to Wonder Woman and the X Men. – BBC News
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