The confusing world of mattress toppers

Be careful how you write. And be careful what you go looking up on the Net.

I was searching for the combo of writing and the phrase mattress topper tonight, and came across a site where someone is describing Memory Foam Pillows and Mattress Pad Memory Foam. I can sort of understand what a memory foam pillow might be, but the second phrase seems a bit out of kilter. This pretty much goes for the rest of the article as well, where we're told the memory foam contains unique properties that no more pillows can match. I presume we mean no mere pillows?

Further down the page we have this interesting statement: Memory foam has mass-produced its way into the forefront ever since it was found that the foam molds to the shape of your body applying your body's have heat. You can understand what it means, but you wonder how the words got into that arrangement.

But that last sentence wasn't anywhere near as scary as this one: With a memory foam cervical pillow, your head and neck remain aligned with your spine as you sleep. I struggled at first to think what word should be there instead of 'cervical,' but it turns out in fact that though I thought cervical only applied to a certain kind of cancer women get - relating to the neck of the womb, apparently - the word is also used for the neck and upper spine area and is perfectly correct.

So I learned something, at least, from this article!

Anyway, all that aside, the article this comes from is listed as being written by one Frank Vanderlugt, with the date Mon Dec 26th, 2005 beside his name. But on another site the credit is given to Chris Rodriguez. According to another site, Chris Rodriguez is an EzineArticles.com Expert Author. Obviously a complete command of the English language isn't required of Expert Authors.

The plot thickens. At the bottom of the first article, we have this comment: Chris Rodriguez is andy skinner and webmaster for duvet-n-more.com. Chris is Andy? Or is she Mr Vanderlught? I don't know who anyone is!

How did I get into this? I was only looking at mattress toppers!

Here Lies Eric Ambler

Finished reading Eric Ambler’s autobiography last night - it’s called Here Lies Eric Ambler. I suspect there may be a bit of a play on the word, lies, in the sense of: is he telling us the whole truth, or has he made his own life into something of a novel?
Be that as it may, it ends rather abruptly just after the second World War, though the introductory chapter is set much later, when he has an accident caused by being overcome by fumes in his car. Perhaps he intended (or even did) write a second volume.
I bought it at a secondhand bookshop somewhere along the road from Cromer to Blakeney; they were having a half-price sale. I thought it might be interesting in terms of what it said about Ambler’s way of writing, but he talks a lot more about his (quite adventurous) life, and the books almost seem to come together by themselves. He mentions some incidents that found their way into the books, and how he tended to change things as he went along and then rewrote and rewrote after he’d finished, but beyond that there isn’t much.
One thing that he makes an emphasis on is his refusal to believe in any sort of God, or to have any sort of faith. That would be fine if he didn’t then set out to make it seem that anyone who does have faith is some sort of fool. Right towards the end, when he’s in the midst of some World War II battle and thinks he’s a goner, he finds himself repeating some words learnt from the past: Into thy hands I commit my spirit. He’s immediately ashamed of himself, and goes on about the foolishness of chaplains in wartime who claim that no man is an atheist in a foxhole. He doesn’t consider that he may be the one who’s wrong, but like so many secularists he can’t see that his point of view isn’t necessarily the correct one.
Coincidentally, in a recent Books and Culture ezine, it mentions Eric Ambler as being a writer of note and one to re-read. I’d like to track down some of them and see what they’re like, and to see if the worldview in them is different to the one he portrays in his autobiography. The editor, John Wilson, writes: Eric Ambler's novel The Intercom Conspiracy (1969), [is] currently out of print, alas, but used copies are readily findable, and there's always the library. Bonus for journalists: an editor is one of the key figures; the newsletter he edits is based in Geneva. It's a brilliant, chilly tale, best read alongside an Ambler novel from thirty years earlier, A Coffin for Dimitrios (UK title: A Mask for Dimitrios), his best-known book. Both feature the character Charles Latimer, a novelist. It's fascinating to see how Ambler's view of espionage and power-politics evolved in the intervening years.