He’s faster than fast food! Crispier than Chex Mix! He’s . . . . Super Chicken Nugget Boy! When Fern Goldberg arrived at Bert Lahr Elementary School, he was just an average kid: nearsighted, a touch on the skinny side. Then he fell into the pool of radioactive green goo behind Bogie’s Burger Barn. Now whenever his skin comes into contact with condiments, he transforms into a bona fide, deep-fried superhero who’s not afraid to take on villains great and small, from the class bully to the giant, mutated French fry who threatens to crush the whole school beneath his massive, starchy feet . . . . Villainous vegetables beware! Here comes the most formidable food fighter in history!
When Gordonville's most preeminent food scientist, Dr. Myron Ned-Grant, came to speak at Bert Larh Elementary, he seemed like a really nice guy--that is, until school bully Dirk Hamstone reminded him of his name's unfortunate resemblance to eggplant
On the outskirts of Gordonville, deep in the heart of the burkeburke hills, lives a creature so strong, so fearsome and so meaty….Yes, that’s right meaty….that even the most fearless, tender and breaded of heroes might not be strong enough to foil him. He’s Massive Meatloaf Man. And once Fernando Goldberg gets a load of the meaty monster, he decides it may just be best to steer clear. But Dirk Hamstone has other ideas. He aims to find fame and fortune by luring the Loaf in and putting him on display. Does Dirk care that trying to tame the beefy barbarian is endangering himself, his classmates, and everyone else the maniacal meatman comes across – carnivore, vegetarian, or even vegan? Not a chance! It will take a whole lot of quick-thinking to cut the mustard—or, er, the ketchup—once this ferocious, succulent and sumptuous beast unleashes his fleshy fury onto the innocent citizens of Gordonville. Will Super Chicken Nugget Boy send the creature packing? Or will the Massive Meatloaf Man make mincemeat of the entire town?
MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.
In Cory Doctorow's wildly successful Little Brother, young Marcus Yallow was arbitrarily detained and brutalized by the government in the wake of a terrorist attack on San Francisco—an experience that led him to become a leader of the whole movement of technologically clued-in teenagers, fighting back against the tyrannical security state. A few years later, California's economy collapses, but Marcus's hacktivist past lands him a job as webmaster for a crusading politician who promises reform. Soon his former nemesis Masha emerges from the political underground to gift him with a thumbdrive containing a Wikileaks-style cable-dump of hard evidence of corporate and governmental perfidy. It's incendiary stuff—and if Masha goes missing, Marcus is supposed to release it to the world. Then Marcus sees Masha being kidnapped by the same government agents who detained and tortured Marcus years earlier. Marcus can leak the archive Masha gave him—but he can't admit to being the leaker, because that will cost his employer the election. He's surrounded by friends who remember what he did a few years ago and regard him as a hacker hero. He can't even attend a demonstration without being dragged onstage and handed a mike. He's not at all sure that just dumping the archive onto the Internet, before he's gone through its millions of words, is the right thing to do. Meanwhile, people are beginning to shadow him, people who look like they're used to inflicting pain until they get the answers they want. Fast-moving, passionate, and as current as next week, Homeland is every bit the equal of Little Brother—a paean to activism, to courage, to the drive to make the world a better place. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
The e-mail Danny and Allison read on their new computer in 1996 looks no different from the millions of others received by Web users around the world, with one glaring exception--it was sent by their dads who died during the 1970s. While residing in the afterworld at an amenity-laden paradise called Midway Manor, guitar-strumming Mickey Parks and piano-playing Lloyd Wallace monitor and manipulate the lives of their adult children on earth from the mid-'70s through the 1990s. Tampering with the facility's sophisticated computer, the dads thrust Mickey's daughter Allison and Lloyd's son Danny into a passionate but sometimes stormy relationship-a relationship steeped in Danny's heavy drinking and entangled in the often-zany world of men's adventure magazine publishing. After carefully implementing a plan to send their son and daughter a gift of knowledge that could enrich their lives forever, the dads' brief contact is cut short. They are banished to another destination in the afterworld, but not before they impart indisputable proof of life after death--and unwittingly put Danny's and Allison's earthbound lives on the line.
This book will tell all you need to know about British English spelling. It's a reference work intended for anyone interested in the English language, especially those who teach it, whatever the age or mother tongue of their students. It will be particularly useful to those wishing to produce well-designed materials for teaching initial literacy via phonics, for teaching English as a foreign or second language, and for teacher training. English spelling is notoriously complicated and difficult to learn; it is correctly described as much less regular and predictable than any other alphabetic orthography. However, there is more regularity in the English spelling system than is generally appreciated. This book provides, for the first time, a thorough account of the whole complex system. It does so by describing how phonemes relate to graphemes and vice versa. It enables searches for particular words, so that one can easily find, not the meanings or pronunciations of words, but the other words with which those with unusual phoneme-grapheme/grapheme-phoneme correspondences keep company. Other unique features of this book include teacher-friendly lists of correspondences and various regularities not described by previous authorities, for example the strong tendency for the letter-name vowel phonemes (the names of the letters ) to be spelt with those single letters in non-final syllables.
