Crissy, an autistic plus-sized beauty, is reluctantly dragged out of her house by her cousin for some local holiday shopping, when she has a chance encounter with Idris, a fine specimen selling pleasure packages. Crissy purchases a package with a particular fantasy in mind with the season’s favorite character and hopes Idris can live up to it. Will he be worth her hard-earned money?

Santa Monica Pier now stands as the last remnant of the bay's once many pleasure piers. For over 100 years it has captured the imagination of its many visitors. This collection of vintage images, artwork, history and treasured lore offers readers the opportunity to travel through time.

Historic SM book

Fabulous festive picture book from the creators of the bestselling Santa's New Beard - a perfect stocking-filler gift!Christmas Eve was here at last,The countdown clock was ticking fast . . .But yikes! When Santa turned the key(The reindeer need some help you see)The engine didn't start, it spluttered,'That isn't right', the elves all muttered . . .When Santa's sleigh stops working on Christmas Eve the elves all rally round to help. Maybe they could use a slingshot? Or the owls could help? How about polar bears?Will they be able to sort the sleigh out before it is too late? Things are not looking good until one small elf has a bright idea!Festive and fun, this is destined to become a seasonal favourite.

At the crisis of his Republic, Plato asks us to imagine what could possibly motivate a philosopher to return to the Cave voluntarily for the benefit of others and at the expense of her own personal happiness. This book shows how Plato has prepared us, his students, to recognize that the sun-like Idea of the Good is an infinitely greater object of serious philosophical concern than what is merely good for me, and thus why neither Plato nor his Socrates are eudaemonists, as Aristotle unquestionably was. With the transcendent Idea of Beauty having been made manifest through Socrates and Diotima, the dialogues between Symposium and Republic—Lysis, Euthydemus, Laches, Charmides, Gorgias, Theages, Meno, and Cleitophon— prepare the reader to make the final leap into Platonism, a soul-stirring idealism that presupposes the student’s inborn awareness that there is nothing just, noble, or beautiful about maximizing one’s own good. While perfectly capable of making the majority of his readers believe that he endorses the harmless claim that it is advantageous to be just and thus that we will always fare well by doing well, Plato trains his best students to recognize the deliberate fallacies and shortcuts that underwrite these claims, and thus to look beyond their own happiness by the time they reach the Allegory of the Cave, the culmination of a carefully prepared Ascent to the Good.

An icon of Southern California and one of America's most imaginative and vibrant cities--the fitting destination at the end of Route 66--Santa Monica lies on the brink of the West and is known throughout the nation for its beaches and its Hollywood A-list locals With a foundation built by the Gabrielino Indians and molded by Spanish and Mexican land grants, railroad battles, and a constant influx of settlers, Santa Monica became an oceanside haven for actors and airplane companies, road races and ranchers.

SUMMARY Will The Real Father Christmas Please Stand Up The author enjoyed several years as a professional Father Christmas in a major capital city department store. During those years, he meticulously recorded details of the best of hundreds of visits he had to the infamous Santa den. He was prompted by his employment agency to publish these records, but it has taken him 15 years to do so. Now, for the first time, he is presenting the public with a unique record of many of those intimate events in his own inimitable style and laced with some philosophy about attitudes towards Father Christmas. The book delivers nothing but true events and leads the reader through every stage of a Christmas season, but presenting them in an interesting personality format, rather than a straight diarised version. The humour, sadness, delight and despair are all here in this one true record of Santa interviews and the reader will undoubtedly recognise themselves somewhere in the pages, whether it really is them or not.