Sex, God, politics and other trivia, like science and business, get skewered in this selection of Gary Suttons published rants. But somehow this curmudgeon dotes on relatives. One column helped a judge decide to overturn a jury verdict. Another caused a CIA operative to show up on his doorstep. Death threats and nasty letters to editors followed several pieces. Whether in the NY Times or Math World, The Wall Street Journal or the La Jolla Light, Suttons thoughts always seem to provoke. Funny, Outrageous. Never even close to conventional.

Provides definitions and examples of words and phrases used in different geographical regions of the United States.

Did you know that Jedburgh Justice is ‘executing someone first, then giving them a trial’? Or that Kentish Fire is ‘applauding sarcastically to silence your opponents’? From the author of Haggard Hawks and Paltry Poltroons, this is a fascinating collection of curious phrases and expressions from the English language, together with the stories of their etymology and anecdotes about their use in history. Where Haggard Hawks focused on lists of ten words of a particular kind, this collection instead focuses on lists phrases and expressions, also arranged by their quirky and specific origins. The contents will include: 10 PHRASES DERIVED FROM PLACES IN BRITAIN (Jedburgh justice, Kentish fire, Scarborough warning...) 10 PHRASES DERIVED FROM PLACES IN LONDON (A draught on the pump at Aldgate, Kent Street ejectment...) 10 PHRASES DERIVED FROM PLACES IN AMERICA (Hollywood yes, Michigan bankroll, Chicago Overcoat...) 10 LATIN PHRASES USED IN ENGLISH (Quid pro quo, nunc est bibendum...) 10 FRENCH PHRASES USED IN ENGLISH (La vie en rose, C’est la guerre, Revenons à nos moutons...) 10 SHAKESPEAREAN EXPRESSIONS (Gild the lily, Salad days, All that glitters is not gold...) 10 LITERARY EXPRESSIONS (A thing of beauty is a joy forever, Abandon hope all ye who enter here...) 10 PHRASES FROM COMICS & CARTOONS (Keep up with the Joneses, Mutt and Jeff...) 10 PHRASES FROM SONGS (Miss Otis regrets, The birds and the bees, Potato po-tah-to...) 10 WAYS OF SAYING ‘WOW’ (Great Scott, My stars, Mamma mia...)

Off Plumb is a fictional novel about Plum Island. It is a retro glance at a group of characters caught up in the chaos of a mystery, romance, and sheer adventure.

He can’t resist a puzzle… When Texas Ranger Brice McAllister spies a sexy woman in short shorts gardening in her backyard, he can’t help but flirt. She shuts him down hard, and Brice is astonished when he realizes this alluring woman is also the aloof and dowdy librarian—complete with thick-framed glasses and a shapeless dress—who helped him research land deeds earlier that day. He’s instantly intrigued and sets out to discover more—namely, why she’s clearly hiding herself. She can’t attract attention... After one side of her crime family is involved in her fiancé’s death, Maria Giordano puts half a continent between herself and her L.A. home and family. She moves to Whiskey River and reinvents herself as “Mary,” a serious and plain librarian. Her only indulgence is her garden and cooking with her neighbor’s young daughter. And then she meets Brice. Maria has every reason to avoid and resent a man with a badge, but when she needs protection, the last man she thinks she can trust is the first one she turns to.

The Fold Series: it’s like the love child of The Martian and Red Dwarf – with a pinch of Star Trek thrown in for extra flavour! The Initial Fold (Book 1) What would you do if you materialised inside an alien starship? It’s 2049, and NASA-sponsored physicist Edward Virr is on the cusp of man’s greatest breakthrough – the ability to fold space and travel faster than light. He personally tests NASA’s futuristic prototype fold ship with a hand-picked crew. But as disaster strikes the first mission, Ed begins to suspect that he isn’t the only one developing the new technology. Discovering there’s a lot more at stake than first contact, Ed soon realises that Earth’s very survival depends on his ability to solve a crime of galactic proportions. Join Edward Virr and his rag-tag crew as they undertake their first space adventure into the depths of the Milky Way. The Andromedan Fold (Book 2) The crew of your starship are being systematically slaughtered. What do you do? The galaxies ruling council have lost two ships, thousands of light years distant on the outer fringe of the Milky Way. A civilian exploration vessel and the military ship sent to find it have disappeared without a trace. Edward Virr and the crew of the sentient starship Gabriel are tasked with a mission to discover what happened. They find, not only the two misplaced ships but a secret to intergalactic travel, the biggest invasion fleet ever assembled and a ruling alien race so cruel, it could end all of humankind. Join, Ed and company, for their second crusade into the depths of uncharted space. Only this time the team are alone, two and a half million light years from home, they’re being hunted, and nothing it seems goes to plan. The Messier Fold (Book 3) To protect your family’s secrets, how many people would you murder? Planet Earth’s first maximum security jail break involving a cloaked spacecraft necessitates Edward Virr and the crew of the sentient starship Gabriel to give chase. Emboldened by the addition of Andrew’s father, a retired FBI investigator, they pursue their quarry over 250 million light years through a recently discovered galactic gateway – and find themselves immediately fighting for survival. Two races, at war for millennia over lust for power and greed, don’t take kindly to strangers appearing in their midst and push our heroes’ abilities so far, it culminates in an unspeakable tragedy. Meanwhile, their quarry have problems of their own…

This game-changing, reader-friendly book provides a more precise definition of idioms, along with new classifications of them. It eliminates fixed phrases such as phrasal verbs, collocations, slang, and proverbs from the class of idioms, while including two major new categories: similidioms and irony-based idiom sentences (IBISes). As a matter of fact, similidioms (basically, idioms in the form of a simile) have been there probably since the beginning of our history as being capable of speaking, but they have not been revealed, until now. Starting from the observation that the production of idioms in any language is influenced by the technological advance of society, the book takes two of the most productive lexico-semantic categories of idioms in both English and Romanian—crazy and stupid idioms—and provides, for the first time, their classification according to their topic and pattern, in an intriguing contrastive approach. Well-documented and not lacking a subtle sense of humour, the book not only opens new perspectives for researchers in the field, but will also captivate the general reader interested in finding out more about the expressions they use every day.