Raw Meaty Bones

A dog's a man's best friend. It's a phrase we still use commonly in this day and age, yet with the amount of dog's baited, abandoned, stolen and abused in more ways than one it would be no surprise to me if our K-9 companions decided to pack their chew toys and realigned their loyalties. Most of us don't like hearing it and many refuse to believe it but feeding our much loved four legged family members anything from the cheapest & nastiest Two-Dollar-Shop kibble to the top shelf highly expensive Vet Recommended brand name pet foods amounts to little more than an unintentional form of abuse from the hands of the owner. And it is unintentional, after all, most of us are only feeding our dogs what's been recommended and advertised as highly nutritional and essential for the well being of the animal. In fact we're constantly reassured we're doing the right thing in feeding this muck to our poor pooches. The fact however is that we've been pulled in hook, line & sinker by the con job that is Supermarket Pet Food.

Enter Dr Tom Lonsdale and the Raw Meaty Bones diet.

Tom has recently moved back into the Vet end of the Bligh Park Health Centre. Four days ago we walked our two bundles of energy down there to weigh them and check him out. We left over an hour later with our dogs committed to a new diet. We didn't have to add anything to their existing diet as they already had chicken wings and drumsticks regularly, we just had to stop feeding them the kibble and other factory processed "Pet Food" as it is made mostly of grain and other substances the canine system is not equipped for. Basically, the supermarket pet food is nothing more than junk food that slowly but surely poisons our pets.
Ellie & Buddha have been on the RMB diet for a total of four days and already are calmer, happier, and healthier, and they smell a lot better too. As I'm typing this they are both working their teeth and gums on a lamb head each and loving it, and I'm loving the money I'm saving on the much cheaper & healthier doggy diet.

I highly recommend doing your own research into the subject and here's a few good places to start:

http://www.rawmeatybones.com/

http://www.aussiermb.org.au/

Review: Sparklers

Sparklers by Pat Booth

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Well this one was rather dark & disturbing and sick & twisted. A good eye opener for those who think the world is full of wonderful kind-hearted beings and still think murderers, rapists and paedophiles don't exist.

A brilliant work of fiction that draws from some of the harshest realities of life. I found Sparklers to be a well paced, riveting thrill ride that plays on some of the more sordid fantasies and fears lurking in the depths of the mind.



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Trust the Pound

Last year we acquired two little black puppies from our local animal shelter, they were listed there as foxy crosses. They clearly were anything but.
After sending some photos and video clips to some breeders we were informed that they were most likely German Pointer X Labrador Retriever on one side and Greyhound X Border Collie on the other (Possibly with some Kelpie too). After tossing up which breeds to register them as, suddenly 12 months had gone by and they still weren't registered so we had a look through tonnes of photos online and decided we most likely had a Greyhound X Labrador and a Greyhound x Kelpie.
So a few days ago we trotted off to the pound to update them with the details. And after all of this the lady at the pound listed them as, simply, Labrador X & Kelpie X.

So much for attention to detail.

Review: Judgement of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959

Judgement of Tears: Anno Dracula 1959 by Kim Newman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



I was unsure about whether or not to bother with this one as I started reading, but it didn't take long to become enthralled in it. Now I'll have to hunt around for the first two novels in the series.



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Review: Split

Split by Tara Moss

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



I read this novel a couple of years ago so it's not fresh in my mind but I will say this. I'm generally the type of reader who will pick a book from anywhere in a series, enjoy it, but then not bother with the rest of the set. Split changed that. The edge of the seat quality of this second part from Tara Moss's "psycho magnet" saga commissioned me to round up Fetish, Covet and Hit in order to follow the heroine, Makedde Vanderwall, from the Catwalk to the Crime Scene so to speak.
Split reminded me of scenes ranging from the 2000 Australian film Chopper to dark and intriguing BBC series Wire in the Blood, yet in a world where a truly original story is increasingly elusive Moss has succeeded in writing a body of work that is refreshingly far beyond just another rehashed "Who-Done-It."
Don't wait for a rainy day when the TV's on the blink to read this one. Do it now!




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Review: Keeper of the King

Keeper of the King by Nigel Bennett

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Without giving too much away, Keeper of the King is, to date, the only story I have come across that throws Vampires into the Arthurian Legend and it does so brilliantly. But don't expect too much about the knights of the round table as this is set in the 1990's.
As with all good modern tales of the Nosferatu Bennett throws in something extra to change the way the reader thinks about Vampires while maintaining a few blood sucking essentials to ensure the characters are still unmistakably our favourite undead creatures of the night. This combined with a bit of sex, romance, and a quest for a certain golden chalice keeps the reader's eyes adhered to the page long after the eyelids want to close for the night.



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Writing

I'd possibly be an accomplished well known novelist if it wasn't for the fact that every time I start to write something fictional I either deviate too far from the original idea, forget it completely, or simply read back over it, hate it, and lose interest followed by deleting it altogether. There was one rather short and depressing poem I wrote several years ago and submitted to website which published it in a book along with the other "winning" entries from their users. Alas, the website, book title and poem have all escaped the confines of my dark recess of a memory and I didn't at the time feel like paying for a copy of the book. Anyway, let's get back on track.

Sitting with my napping dogs, Ellie and Buddha, I had just finished Chapter Two of Tara Moss's Siren when the idea crept inside my head to about a dark mysterious fellow with thoughts of revenge and retribution to dish out. I flipped open my laptop, opened up OpenOffice Writer 2.0 and proceeded to type. What I typed was most definitely not dark nor was it mysterious.
The mysterious man had transformed within mere seconds and I found myself writing about a young woman enjoying the sun late one Spring day...

...so unless something dark and mysterious happens I don't know what's going on.