Mike Crowl's Blog, page 17

Honours List

Honours List - Column 8: June 23 1993 

I am still simmering! It’s over a week now since the Honours List was published, and yet again my name did not appear on it!!
I realise Her Majesty had an ‘orrible year, because she kept telling us so, but is that any reason to continually overlook one of her loyal subjects? What do I have to do to gain Her acknowledgement?
I have worked for the State (being in insurance for five years) and allowed my brain to be on tap at the City Council. I delivere...

Fourth Column

FOURTH COLUMN
This column comes from the days of the 1995 Americas' Cup, when New Zealand, my home country, grabbed the thing off the people who'd had it for far too long. One of our local lunatics gave it a thump, but its was put back into shipshape order before the next outing.
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Occasionally people ask me where I get my ideas from. There's no great secret: it's a matter of picking up opportunities, just like salesmen do when trying to sell something.
And it really isn't hard to get ide...

Words

Words Published in Column 8 on the 30th June 1993
Once upon a time weather-forecasters’ predictions had some likelihood of coming true. Not much anymore. I suggest, disillusioned weathermen try their hand at something easier: predicting the degree of increase in the word torrent that will gush out of the Beehive prior to the coming election.
We live with an abundance of words. Walk along the streets of any city or town and you’ll be overwhelmed by words, myriad eye-catching, purse-opening...

After All

Back in the days when I wrote a weekly column, I produced this one, called 'After All'. It came out in 1993, so the references are to a former Government. However, the issues it discusses (with tongue mostly in cheek) have barely changed a jot.
After All 
7.7.93
Mr Bolger’s condescending response to the report on child poverty should have been expected.His dulcet tones in the subsequent radio interviews were intended to melt the heart of the hardest cynic. His assurances that he knew what t...

Crowl or Crawl

Courtesy Pixabay
Trawling through Evernote, I came across a piece I wrote in 2007. It was published on an internet site that faded away through not being able to pay its writers on time...Since it's a piece poking fun at blogs and their writers, I thought it could do with another airing:
Crowl or Crawl
In one of those idle moments when the brain is parked in a lay-by, I typed my surname into the search engine on Blogger.com. I shouldn’t have been surprised that a number of people had typed...

A comprehensive catalogue

When I first started writing, I was advised by my course tutor to focus on writing articles rather than fiction, since articles actually paid good money. I took this advice, and the articles did pay; not heaps, necessarily, but a reasonable amount.

One of the books I read during this time was Writing Articles that Sell by G J Matson. The book was one of five smallish books that came as part of the writing course. It was a book I read and re-read, and it proved its worth.

I've just come across a...

The need for exercise...or not

This may be a revised version of one of my Column 8 pieces, though it seems mostly to be as originally written. 
Practice makes perfect. If you don't use it, you'll lose it. So they say. Some time ago a member of our family purchased a set of exercise DVDs with the aim of building up her/his muscles. I'm not allowed to be more specific about which family member it was, but the DVDs gave a real boost in the physical department. She/he disciplined him/herself, getting up at the crack of daw...

Hug a musician...

Courtesy PixabayI've been re-typing my old journals so that I have a digital copy on the Cloud. In one entry dating from January 1993, I mention that we'd cleared out some clutter from our bedroom. We decided to get rid of a poster we'd had for some time because it was fading badly and become hard to read. 

I'd copied the words into the journal entry, but couldn't read the author's name, at the time. The words are probably reasonably well-known, though I'm not sure that the author, Kennet...

No substitute for hard work

This is one of a series of posts on memorization of text; in particular in relation to trying out a new technique. 
Getting the first part of Ephesians chapter 3 under my belt took longer than I expected. When I came to join it to the rest of the chapter - which I’d learned some years ago - it was initially a bit messy getting back into it. However, after a couple of run-throughs, and checking the original text to see how my memory of it compared, it came back to mind without much difficu...

Make it harder, not easier

Twelve lines of text ought to be easy to learn – you’d think. But the first twelve lines of Ephesians chapter 3 – equating to the first seven verses – have proved very hard for my memory to retain.
Considering this, however, I remembered that when I was memorizing music more frequently, in the last couple of years, twelve bars of a fugue by J S Bach took me infinitely longer to get to grips with than twelve bars of a jazz-style piece by Christopher Norton. The Bach was much more complex,...