At drinks with colleagues a few days back, the topic came up of my lack of ‘work style’. Of course I wear a suit, so I’m smartly presented, but that always becomes shirt and pants as I’m not comfortable in a jacket. Add that to the fact that I don’t wear a tie (nobody does here) and I often wear white shirts (I’ve got 8 of them), and my ‘work style’ is very bland. No cardigan, waistcoat, jacket or vest, jumper or cummerbund or what have you. So, I borrowed a colleague’s bow tie and gave it a go. What …
Fareed Zakaria reaches out to me
I take a keen interest in U.S. politics, regularly listening to podcasts of Meet The Press, Bill Maher’s Real Time and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS. I used to watch CNN’s State of the Union too but that on top of the others was a bit much even for me. Why do I take this interest? Cynically I will say that U.S. politics is my spectator sport. It certainly is presented quite a lot like entertainment. Non-cynically I would say it is because I believe the battles in U.S. politics are both interesting and extremely important. The decisions America makes will reverberate …
Medieval humble bragging
Last weekend while I was in Leicester Cathedral, standing by the sleek new tomb for car park King Richard 3, I cast my eye delicately over the tombstones built into the walls and stumbled upon this little beauty. Humble bragging was a thing even in 1743. What is humble bragging? Bragging about how humble you are. Look at this for the form raised to an art: Of a most extensive learning, in his own profession eminent Not aspiring after more Preferments, of much greater Deserving, Possessed of many Shining Qualities, which his Modesty would have concealed. Not bad. Of course, …
Why Downton Abbey has lost its charm – TV review
For 5 years I have loved Downton Abbey- getting excited weeks before it came on, getting all tremulous when the gorgeous and haunting theme music came on, reading up about it and being on tenterhooks to find out what was going to happen next. But now that feeling seems to be gone, and I’m sad, puzzled, and wanting to know why. Yesterday I turned on the TV and saw on the Guide Downton Abbey? What? I thought it had to be a repeat. No, it was episode 4. EPISODE 4?! How did I miss that it was on? Even in …
MJG’s Author Rank 2014/2015
Amazon offers a number of statistics to authors who publish through them- one of them being Author Rank. I don’t know exactly what goes into calculating it, but it’s most likely a combination of the sales rank (number of sales combined with recency of sales) of all an author’s books, plus perhaps something for number of reviews and maybe even score of those reviews. I started publishing on Amazon 2 years ago with my 2 collections of short stories, Ignifer’s Rise followed, then my ruins book, then the Ruins War, then zombie books. It’s nice to note there is an …
Not a bin…
The sign says it’s not a bin. So, some kind of medieval urinal? Answers on a postcard. Actually if you peer closely at the faded sign, you will it is in fact a mop wringer. Of course. We saw this at the Guildhall in Leicester- which we headed up to for a day trip today. Actually, it’s a little sad- we booked the trip to go see our latest niece, my sister’s second daughter, named Clover. She was born a week ago and we wanted to go welcome her to the world. But I had a cold. It seemed …
Friday night Tate Modern
Last week on Friday we eschewed our normal ‘rush-home-to-watch-TV-and-work/study’ plan and instead went out to the late night opening of the Tate Modern. Now that is living the London-life. I have no doubt that soon we’ll be out partying with Twiggy and Princess Margaret. We started by St. Paul’s, went to a burger joint called Porky’s where SY had ribs with a Dr. Pepper sauce and I had the Porky burger with a ‘Porkslap’ beer. Johnny Cash played throughout. Then we did the Tate, which was good but is never as good as the Tate traveling exhibition we saw on …
Cerulean (Robert) flees/fights a zombie
I just wrote a chase/fight scene for Zombie Ocean 3, between Cerulean AKA Robert and a zombie. Question- Has there ever been a character in a wheelchair in popular zombie lore? It makes for an interesting flip of perspective. Trying to imagine myself into the head and body of a paraplegic person is a challenge. Absent a wheelchair, it’s basically all crawling- dragging these motionless legs behind you like a penance. Hard to escape. It was the same kind of challenge to write from Anna’s perspective, a 5-year old girl, in Book 2 The Lost. She just couldn’t do much. …
Vast wit and immense rapport
I’m an English teacher, I teach students who come from all around the world and want to study at University in the UK. I teach them English, Academic Skills, and a bit of Business English. Term just started, so I was ‘breaking in’ 6 groups of students. This is always the most wearying time, as any issues with discipline need to be dealt with immediately (you wouldn’t think it was an issue with 18-years old+ students, but a bad attitude in the first class is only going to lead to more problems later on), you need to get to know …
Little bits of everyday life
– These days it’s dark when I wake up at 6:30, though the house is warm from the new Hive central heating controller which turns the boiler on automatically. It goes to 23 degrees Celsius, and if I wanted I could crank that up from my phone via the app connected to the wifi router. – I could turn the heat up in my house from anywhere in the world, as long as I had internet access. Think about that for a minute. – Actually I’ve unplugged it. Not much call for it, really. It seems neat, but the timer …