Mike Crowl's Blog, page 35

Holders of various sorts

There's something wonderful about the way in which words are invented for different crafts, jobs, and technical areas. The music world has a number of them, some of which I've talked about in other posts, but here's my latest discovery: a gooseneck holder.

Rather than try and describe this, I've added a photo of one form of this rather cute device:



It reminds me of something from an animated movie, though I can't put my finger on it at the moment.

A related musical item, in a very loose sen...

Scott and Bailey

We've been watching the first series of Scott and Bailey, starring Suranne Jones and Lesley as the two detectives Bailey and Scott respectively, with Amelia Bullmore as their boss. Bullmore gets most of the best lines, but Suranne Jones is excellent as the detective whose clever in the detective area but hopeless in her love life. Sharp is great too, with a nice line in sarcasm, and a good deal more wisdom than her sidekick.

The blokes in it get the thin edge of the wedge: they play most of th...

Some notes on current reading

My Goodreads 'currently reading' page has eleven items on it - there were ten until I realised one was missing. I'm not actually reading them all simultaneously. In fact I've (temporarily) given up on some of them.

Those on the back burner: 
Saint Francis of Assisi, by G K Chesterton. I started to read this after finishing Chesterton's book on Thomas Aquinas, which was great. For some reason, Francis just isn't cutting the mustard in the same way, and I only got about halfway thr...

Two plays in two days

Last night I went with a friend to see The War Play, by Philip Braithwaite. It's a somewhat fictionalised story of what happened to Braithwaite's great-uncle Jack, who died in the First World War. I won't reveal exactly what happens in the play because there's a certain shock element to some parts of the story, but it's superbly put-together, and if you have a chance to see it, go. It's on at the Fortune Theatre in Dunedin until the 18th April.

There are only four actors in the cast: Jonathan...

Shakespeare Festival

Last night we went to the - wait for it - Otago Regional Festival of the Shakespeare Globe Centre New Zealand University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival. Yeah, I know, quite a mouthful.

Basically it's the regional part of the finals that will take place in Wellington at the National Festival later this year. 48 of the young actors chosen to represent NZ then go on to work together for a week in the National Shakespeare Schools Production. I wrote about this last year, when the NSSP...

The third in the Grimhilderness series...

This unpleasant-looking fellow also
plays an important part in the story. I've been blogging a bit recently about the new children's book I'm in the process of writing. Only a couple of weeks ago I said it was no longer going to be called The Disenchanted Wizard. At the moment it is called The Disenchanted Wizard. Unless something better turns up. 

On the other hand I wrote a bit later that the book was no longer a prequel to Grimhilda! This at least is still correct, and l...

Living with computers

Just thinking how commonplace computers and such have become in my lifetime; actually it's not even that long. My first experience of computers, as far as I can recall, was when I worked at the Dunedin City Council, back in the eighties. We couldn't actually change anything on the computers (which in those days were still fed by cards with holes punched in them), but we could type something onto one of the terminals, and print it out. That was Big Time! (The actual computer filled an entire r...

The Author to Her Book

How many authors feel about their work, I'd say...The Author to Her BookAnne BradstreetThou ill-form'd offspring of my feeble brain,Who after birth didst by my side remain,Till snatched from thence by friends, less wise than true,Who thee abroad, expos'd to publick view,Made thee in raggs, halting to th' press to trudge,Where errors were not lessened (all may judg).At thy return my blushing was not small,My rambling brat (in print) should mother call,I cast thee by as one unfit for light,Thy...

No longer a prequel...

Over the last week I've been hammering away at the structure of my next children's novel, which used to have the title, The Disenchanted Wizard, but may not be called that by the time it's finished.

The book started out from two separate ideas: firstly, to show how Mr and Mrs Map in Grimhilda!  got stuck together on either end of the map of Grimhilderness. Secondly, there was to be a major character called the Moorish Dog. There's still a Dog, but he's no longer Moorish, and the map of the...

Ravel on You Tube

I've been watching, or listening to, a number of You Tube videos of classical music performances over the last couple of weeks. Sometimes I've just listened while I'm doing something else on the computer; other times I've sat and watched the video, distracted from doing anything else altogether. 

I hadn't realised just how much music was available for one thing, though I'd known that just about any piece of music you wanted to hear, or see performed, can be found on You Tube these days. W...