Not Given Lightly

Cocktails & Records has tagged me with a meme. Essentially, it involves taking a book you are currently reading, going to page 123, going five sentences down and then quoting the next three sentences. At this moment in time I'm in the middle of about four books. Two of them are about Bill Hicks and I've just about read them both, but I continue to dip in and out of their pages. I'm trying to finish off Mark Twain's 'Mysterious Stranger' Manuscripts, but the un-published version of the story started to bore me a bit, so it lies un-finished. Finally, I decided upon Hunter S Thompson's 'Kingdom Of Fear' which I vow one day to finish reading. Oddly enough, page 123 is about where I'm up to. Except there is no page 123. It consists of something called 'Aspen Wall Poster No4'. It's a big marksman target with a picture of a brain at it's centre and along the bottom the legend "The American Dream". So, I headed over to page 124 and found this gem. It's not Thompson himself, rather it's an article by Loren Jenkins called 'Dr Hunter S Thompson And The Last Battle Of Aspen' which has been included in the book to illustrate the battles Thompson and the locals of Woody Creek, Aspen, Colorado had with a multi-millionaire interloper called Floyd Watkins The ponds he had stocked with trophy sized trout over the past three years were shimmering with the bellies of dead fish. More than six hundred trout, some weighing up to twenty pounds, were dead. The waters had been poisoned in the night and Watkins immediately blamed the slaughter on his neighbours, charging them with employing "Terrorist Tactics" against him because they didn't like his taste and style. Ah yes, a tale of two deeply belligerent men in Colorado. One with guns and peacocks, another with money and absolutely no taste. Turns out the pond wasn't poisoned by the neighbours, but by Watkins' own son. Oops! Ok, two more extracts from the Flying Nun CD. 'Not Given Lightly' by Chris Knox, as requested by Cocktails........ ...and 'Outer Space' by '3D's' Finally realised that the 3D's song reminds me a bit of Superchunk. Never a bad thing. More selections from the less travelled parts of my collection tomorrow. I now hereby tag Tampon Teabag, Oye Billy , Last Years Girl and Szelsofa A friendly Chinese Burn for anyone who fails to comply.......... =]