Mike Crowl's Blog, page 39

Revolving Secret Santa gifts

The other night my wife's workplace had their Christmas meal together, and during the course of the evening (which was held at the home of one of the senior staff) we played a form of Secret Santa which apparently was originated on the TV series, The Office. It's rather complicated to explain but basically the first person whose name is drawn out of a hat goes to the pile of little gifts, picks one, and then draws the next name. 

If the person who's drawn second thinks he or she would lik...

Dunedin wins gigatown

To immense jubilation on the part of the supporters, Dunedin won the Chorus gigatown competition last night. I wasn't among the crowd in the Dunedin headquarters (formerly the National Bank in George St) but watched the live streaming from Wellington in which the announcement was made, and then saw the gradual build up of tweets and Facebook comments and photos and videos as people got sufficiently over their initial excitement and shedding of tears and began to digitally announce to the worl...

A neuroscientist debunked...

Sometime ago I read Proust was aneuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer. The review below is what I wrote for the local paper at the time. I've just come across this book again in an article in the latest NZ Listener, which is discussing a much more recent book on neuroscience by Christian Jarrett, called Great Myths of the Brain, which I hope to read at some point soon. 
Apparently, Lehrer has had a major fall from grace. "...in 2012...Lehrer was accused of recycling his own work and plagiar...

Doing the nanowrimo

At the beginning of the month I suddenly decided to take up the National Novel Writing Month challenge, normally abbreviated to nanowrimo, an abbreviation I have to look up every time because I can't remember it.

For those who don't know about this challenge, the idea is that you write what is basically the draft of a 50,000 word novel from the 1st to 30th of November (inclusive). That's the goal. I'm sure a lot of people start off intending to get there, and wind up some 1000s of words short....

An official Goodreads author!

I've just been promoted to an official 'author' over at Goodreads. I hadn't realised until yesterday, when I was reading Goodreads for authors by Michelle Campbell-Scott that this was an option. Useful little book, but the 'helps' on Goodreads themselves, once you actually take the trouble to investigate them, are also very useful. In fact, possibly more detailed than those in Campbell-Scott's book. That's not to decry her book, which, as I say put me onto things on Goodreads I didn...

Debbie Howell - author

One of the people who tweeted for the longest time in the gigatown competition was Debbie Howell. She started tweeting for the competition back in 2013, which meant she was doing it for virtually a year. 
I came into the competition quite a bit later, in March 2014, and during the course of tweeting back and forth discovered that Debbie was also a writer. I've just bought a copy of her first book, Healer's Touch, a gritty fantasy novel that I began to read a few months ago, and now need t...

The Blood Secret uploaded

I've been very neglectful in not telling people who read this blog that my latest e-book, The Mumbersons and the Blood Secret, is now available from Kindle, and Smashwords. I'd love to say it was also available in print, but that's not the case at the moment, although it's a possibility. One of the many options I've explored that haven't quite got off the ground yet.

Anyway, last Saturday the book was uploaded online, and is sitting waiting for people to buy it....

The Blood Secret is the...

#gigatowndun

I've been involved in the #gigatown competition since March 2014. Some people have been involved since November last year, I think. That's a horrendously long time to compete at something.

Most of my involvement has been on the tweeting side, sending dozens, sometimes hundreds of tweets on many days with the hashtag #gigatowndun. In the process I've gradually lost track of the people I've been following on Twitter who aren't involved in the competition. Which is a pity.

Some of them g...

High priests of intellectualism

In two different books I've been reading recently, I've found the same unpleasant idea turning up. 

From Paul Johnson's Intellectuals, page 199

[Bertrand Russell] wrote: 'I like mathematics because it is not human.' In his essay, 'The Study of Mathematics', he rejoiced: 'Mathematics possesses not only truth, but supreme beauty - a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without appeal to any part of our weaker nature, sublimely pure and capable of a stern perfection such as o...

The joy of new words

Much of the joy of writing comes from shopping from the hundreds of thousands of words that English makes available, and it’s good to remember that each of them was a neologism in its day. The new entries in AHD 5* are a showcase for the linguistic exuberance and recent cultural history of the Anglosphere: Abrahamic, air rage, amuse-bouche, backward-compatible, brain freeze, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, camel toe, community policing, crowdsourcing, Disneyfication, dispensationalism, dr...