Squidoo - Earn money online by writing reviews and content

Squidoo - Is a pretty unique community site allowing you to earn a share of the advertising revenue generated by people visiting the page you created. Whether it's a review of a book, restaraunt, night out or a rant, if it attracts visitors you'll get income! You can even use it to signpost your website and increase SEO (search engine optimisation).

For an example you can visit the page I made about Absinthe

If you sign up via my referral link you will also earn an extra $5 when you have earnt $15 revenue through visitors either just viewing your page and more if they click through from links on your lens (squidoo call each entry a lens)

There is no limit to the number or subjects you can create pages on and payouts are monthly via paypal. The minimum payout is actually a ridiculously low $1

I'll report back in a few weeks to let you know how I get on with it and what sort of earnings I have made. I don't expect to make bucket loads of cash, but I'll see if I can make some interesting content and what sort of things I have found worked!

Absinthe (Absinth) - The Green Fairy

Absinth(e) (in the UK is spelt with an e) has one of the most mythical histories of any alcoholic drink. It was actually banned on a number of occasions due to the results of peoples reactions to it. The hallucinogenic properties of it are fabled and well documented as well as it being used by many artists and writers for inspiration.

Here I intend to review a number of books available on it's history and usage.

Absinthe: History in a Bottle by Barnaby Conrad

Maybe not the most definitive book on the history of absinthe but accessible, enjoyable and plenty of graphic images to delight the reader. The images range from wild portraits by Van Gogh, to anti-Absinthe propaganda published by the French Government. This book is well researched and provides a good backdrop on the 'absinthe-culture'. The research is quite extensive and the images plentiful, there are also mini-biographies and literary quotes from and about Verlaine, Rimbaud, Wilde and Baudelaire showing how Absinthe was said to influence the creative and artistic. This book is very readable and insightful and probably the current most popular tome on absinthe.


Absinthe: Sip of Seduction - A Contemporary Guide by Betina Wittels & Robert Hermesch






Edited by T.A. Breaux with a foreword by Marie-Claude Delahaye. This comprehensive guide has been lovingly compiled by two avid collectors of all things Absinthe. Included is a cultural and scientific history, a gallery of famous drinkers both past and present and a detailed analysis of what Absinthe is and its effects. In addition, there are extensive guides to where to find Absinthe around the world - where it's legal and where it's not - as well as techniques for drinking it and making absinthe cocktails. Illustrated throughout.

Absinthe - The Cocaine of the Nineteenth Century: A History of the Hallucinogenic Drug and Its Effect on Artists and Writers in Europe and the United States - by Doris Lanier

This work provides a history of "the green fairy", a study of its use and abuse, an exploration of the tremendous social problems (not unlike the cocaine problems of this century) it caused, and an examination of the extent to which the lives of talented young writers and artists of the period became caught up in the absinthe craze.

Absinthe produced a sense of euphoria and a heightening of the senses, similar to the effect of cocaine and opium, but was addictive and caused a rapid loss of mental and physical faculties. Despite that, Picasso, Manet, Rimbaud, Van Gogh, Degas and Wilde were among those devoted to its consumption and produced writings and art influenced by the drink.

There are still many debates as to whether Absinthe was a Hallucinogen and this book does tend to take it as fact that the 19th century process of making it ensured that it actually was an hallucigen. This book is more aimed at the reader of social history than the more casual reader

The Dedalus Book of Absinthe by Phil Baker

This well-researched history of Absinthe is an absolute joy to read. It chronicles the devotion, effect, and, in some cases, destruction experienced through this drink by not only the masses but influential writers and artists such as Oscar Wilde, Aleister Crowley, Baudelaire, Ernest Dowson, Verlaine & Rimbaud, Toulouse Lautrec, Van Gogh, et al. Also contains handy reviews of currently obtainable brands of the drink. Highly recommended!

Hideous Absinthe: A History of the "Devil in a Bottle" by Jad Adams

Hideous Absinthe boldly combines the art, literature, science, and social history of the nineteenth century to produce the story of a drink that came to symbolize both the high points of art and the depths of degeneration.
Jad Adams looks at the myths of absinthe and examines its influence on the artistic movements of the nineteenth century. He considers the work of Degas, Manet, and Picasso, who painted what are now considered masterpieces depicting absinthe drinkers. He examines the mystery of van Gogh’s absinthe addiction and asks whether absinthe truly did contribute to the poetic vision of Verlaine, Rimbaud, and other writers.
Adams looks back at absinthe’s contribution to the hedonistic culture of the French Second Empire and to Toulouse-Lautrec’s Paris of the 1890s and details the outraged English reaction to absinthe in the context of resistance to French art. Absinthe was seen as a foreign poison undermining the national resolve just as the decadence of Oscar Wilde and his circle was seen to undermine national culture.
The story continues through thrill-seeking American and English absinthe drinkers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Banksy Creates Crap Art At Glastonbury Festival

Our Banksy has done it again, the cheeky creative genius has created a henge at glastonbury from the famous portaloos!

I wonder how many festival punters are going to get so mashed up or desperate that they'll try and use them!

Original story appeared in the Guardian - 14-06-07

Thanks to towleroad for blogging about it first!

Glastonbury Tickets on eBay for £8,000+

Michael Eavis is reported as being disappointed with the quality of the tickets printed for this years Glastonbury Festival (BBC Story). Tickets are now appearing on eBay, though it does look like there is some Auction Wrecking going on as this example shows -

Anyone wanting to risk the getting turned away on the gates as the photo part of the ID must be backed up by other forms of ID, so there's no real way around this added security level.

As for anyone fool enough to think the car park tickets will enable them to get close enough to try and sneak in better think again as there will be a check that car occupants have tickets before they actually leave the main road to drive the mile or 2 to the actual car-parks! Even if a 'fence-jumper' gets close enough to the fence they will be quite disappointed when faced by the impregnable 'Ring-of-Steel'. In the 2 previous years that this fence has been used there has been no reports of anyone successfully getting over it, and very few actual attempts at it either. The fence is 10ft of solid metal with a 3foot angled overhang, even the SAS would consider this impossible to scale without equipment. The other popular idea has always been tunneling under it, well as the same material that is used for the fence is also laid on the ground next to the fence and bolted to the uprights this is also making tunneling impossible to all but the most hardened miners. The enclosed road either side of the fence to allow security to drive quickly to any point of the fence with floodlights and a secondary 8 foot mesh 'Heras' fence, either side of this road means the tower lookouts will get plenty of time to get a patrol to you before you even touched the 'Ring-of-Steel'.

Basically, if you haven't got a ticket, forget about trying to get in and stock up at home to catch the web-cam, webcasts, TV coverage and Radio broadcasts courtesy of the BBC. You may also want to be thankful of clean porcelain and cold, reasonably priced beer without having to queue!

You can catch up with our adventures of the festival here on our glastonbury page which we hope to be updating the slideshow daily during the festival!

The Book Garden @ Glastonbury Festival 2007

The Book Garden will be appearing at this years Glastonbury Festival alongside such acts as The Arctic Monkeys, The Killers, Iggy Pop, The Who, Bjork, Chemical Brothers and many more! Well, we won't actually be on stage as such, and selling books isn't exactly performance art, but we'll be there with a stock of approx 4,000 books. The majority will be general fiction, though we will be have a large selection of Travel Guides, Art Books, and Theatre Texts & Plays as well as sections on Health and Spirituality.

You will be able to find us on C market and this little map will hopefully be a guide to where we'll be. So pop in and see us, books will be available from 30p and very few will be priced more than a fiver. We also intend to offer a post home service for those who'd rather not carry a book around or want to send a gift to a friend/relative from the festival.

If we can get online we will be posting updates here and on this web page

Sold Dispatch Now: How to Make £6000 - £15000 pa. from Amazon, Sharon Fussell - Reviewed

Unbelievable! That was my first reaction when I came across this book! The old saying - "If something looks to good to be true, it's probably because it is too good to be true". (this is the only instance in the English language where a double positive becomes a negative!)

Sharon Fussell makes some quite astounding promises in this book which is for sale at £37, quite a hefty sum for a book that only has 85pages. The claim that you can easily make that sort of money from only a couple of hours work a day and with only the need for a a couple of shelves of books, is far fetched. I know very few sellers who are able to source the kind of niche stock that would enable that performance.

These quotes from her website, canonbury publishing , are quite astounding!

How you can make 86p extra pure profit on each and every book by almost doing nothing! - It's called signing up and paying a monthly Pro-Merchant Fee!

If you have a spare room, you could be making £36,000 a year as an international bookseller! - You'd need a pretty big room! Say about 500-1000sq feet!

you can look forward to becoming an international book seller and earning at least £6,000-£15,000+ per year working about 1 hour a day from home - From the few people I know that got into selling on Amazon from buying this book, none have achieved what is claimed. And they have stated that the amazon seller boards provide much more valuable advice and assistance than this book did.

Sold Dispatch Now: How to Make 6, 000 -15, 000 Pounds or More in the Next Year from Amazon This is a link to the book on amazon where you can see some reviews, and note how many people have found the reviews useful! You may also wish to join in the discusion on the book listing page about this book!

The only people I know who can even approach the claims made on the amount of profit from such low amounts of stock and work are those who have expert knowledge of niche markets. For example, if you were an expert on, let's say, books about wheelbarrows, and could source stock from the wheelbarrow college weekly carboot sale very cheaply and resell quickly for a very good price, you may be able to make that sort of money easily. Though for most specialists there knowledge of book genres and where to source them is the result of years of experience and they do not pass this sort of experience on!

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