Moving Out

Time to update your bookmarks and feed readers, folks - Stained, Glass Windows has moved to a new address: http://gary-greenwood.blogspot.com/

Different address, different colour scheme, same old babbling.

Happy Birthday, Ly!

By the time you folks read this, Ly and I should be ensconced in a nice cottage in the middle of the Brecon Beacons waiting for friends and family to arrive as a surprise for her birthday.

It's been fun organising everything and everyone but it's also been a bugger of a time trying to keep the whole thing a secret from Ly for the last few months. She's too smart for her own good and knew something was happening but - I'm hoping - doesn't know exactly what.

Anyhow, it'll hopefully all go well and we'll be back in a few days.

Happy birthday, Ly! 

Is It Too Geeky . . .

. . . to be excited by this: official skins and themes for Gmail from Google?

Well too bad because I am.

Google are releasing coloured themes for Gmail over the next few days and have supplied a sample of them which you can see on the left.

Seriously, if you're not using Gmail you should be - it simply is much, much better than Microsoft Outlook and way better than Hotmail or Yahoo mail, all of which I have used recently. Labels, filters, a huge 7 gig of space, vacation responder, a bunch of experimental features and - perhaps most important of all - a superb spam filter.

I get maybe one or two spam messages in my in-box every few months, seriously. The vast majority of the time they get automatically sent to the spam folder and deleted by the system after 30 days.

Go on, go and sign up - it's free.

** Update ** - Thursday, 5:04pm - I have themes! I'm off to play! 

Just Popped In

Stupidly, stupidly busy in work at the moment, hence the lack of ranting and raving once more.

Via my mate Dave and the New Humanist blog, though, here's something that made me chuckle: God Trumps!

Back to more regular posting soon.

Bears Banned By Baby-Eating Bishop

I try and be a bit skeptical about newspaper stories that say things have been banned - there's the recent one about Oxford council supposedly having banned Christmas lights that was reported in several places like the Telegraph (which you'd kinda expect) but also in the Guardian (which I kinda expected better from being the namby pamby, left wing liberal fellow that I am.) Needless to say, both papers were wrong as The Oxford Times points out.

So despite this post's title, I'm still a bit suspicious (partly because it comes from the Telegraph) about this story.

Garden gnomes (along with teddy bears which gives me license for my alliterative headline) have been banned from cemeteries in the Diocese of Bath and Wells and have been called "inappropriate" and tacky.

Needless to say, the move has been met with fierce criticism from the grieving public with one person quoted as saying "People should be free to put what they want around the gravestones as it is down to personal preference."

The trouble with that, of course, is that personal preference is just that - personal. What may be seen as a sign of love and devotion by one person may not be by someone else. Let's say a close personal friend who shares my love of the holy trilogy dies and I adorn their grave with life size cardboard cut outs of Han, Luke, Chewy and even Darth - that to me might be a personal thing but I'm sure the relatives of Auntie Ethel who's buried next to my mate wouldn't appreciate a Corellian smuggler and his friends looming over them.

So I find myself agreeing with the Baby Eating-Bishop's staff here when a spokesman is quoted as saying "If people want their loved ones to be buried in one of our churchyards then they have to stick to the rules which are clearly displayed at all churchyards."

If those rules say no gnomes or teddies or Star Wars life-size cut-outs then so be it. From that side of the argument I'm with them all the way.

However, the same spokesman does let himself down a bit:

"A spokesman for the Diocese of Bath and Wells said: "There is no such thing as a real gnome so why should we have such unnatural creatures in churchyards?""

Right . . . so he doesn't believe in gnomes because there's "no such thing" but (presumably) he believes a Jewish man died and rose from the dead two thousand years ago and lives in the sky with his dad and a ghost, even though all three are the same person . . .

I think I hear a gnome laughing. 

Guinness Is Not My Friend

Never touch the stuff, usually, but last night I was given the choice of that or lager - no contest, really.

Myself and Tim headed off to Bristol to see the excellent Flogging Molly at the Carling Academy and as he'd very kindly offered to drive, I set about the beer. We had a couple in the Hatchet across the road as we were well early for the gig, but in the Academy itself, as I said, it was lager or Guinness for me. Needs must and all that, and I set about having a few more drinks.

There were a couple of supports bands - Streetdogs who were great (I shall be getting some of their stuff soon) and Skindred who were good but nothing brilliant - but Flogging Molly were just superb. Ly and I managed to see them twice on the same day a couple of years ago at the Reading Festival - loud, raucous, up-beat Irish folk-punk music at its finest.

Those three pints of Guinness played hell with my innards this morning, though . . . which is probably more than you need to know. 

Funny Firday

Just catching up with stuff and found a couple of things that made me chuckle - first two things related to the recent US election:

First something from Pundit Kitchen:

and, just to show I'm not biased, something from Newsbiscuit:

and finally something from b3ta that just made me laugh so much while feeling guilty for doing so and which will mean nothing to younger or foreign readers:

Have a good weekend, all! 

Give With One Hand, Take With The Other

I'm glad Obama won the election (I've no doubt he'll be glad to hear that) though despite all the hoopla and celebrations, the guy is still another politician. Is he better than Bush, McCain, Cheney, Wolfowitz etc? Oh, no doubt about that right now, but once the party's over and he actually moves into the White House we'll have to see what he does.

I'm hopeful but then I was hopeful when Blair took over after what seemed like a lifetime of Tory rule here in the UK and we all know how that turned out.

Amongst all the joyous crowds and scenes of Americans celebrating, however, I couldn't help notice that California - you know, that West Coast free and easy place - has banned same-sex marriage. A progressive and forward thinking President-elect has been chosen and while he and his party faithful cheer on one side of the country, people on the other side tell homosexual couples that they cannot marry.

"People believe in the institution of marriage," Frank Schubert, co-manager of the Yes on 8 campaign said after declaring victory early Wednesday. "It's one institution that crosses ethnic divides, that crosses partisan divides. ... People have stood up because they care about marriage and they care a great deal."

Fine, let them care about marriage; but how does someone being married to another person of the same gender threaten "the institution of marriage"?

Isn't marriage a public celebration of two people's love for one another? How does two men or two women being married alter that?

Fucking ridiculous, it really is. 

My Level Of Interest

Couldn't give a monkey's about the whole Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand debacle that appeared to have overtaken the British news recently, nor about the complaints about Jeremy Clarkson's joke on last Sunday's edition of Top Gear (which I actually found quite funny).

In fact, here's where they come:

Now, can we have some real news, please?  Like finding out who's going to be the next US President? 

The Launch Of The Dreaming Pool And Faith In The Flesh

Ten years ago today, myself and Tim Lebbon were launching our books: The Dreaming Pool from me and Faith In The Flesh from him. Tim had managed to con our local rag, the South Wales Argus, into interviewing us and we'd had a hasty chat with a reporter some weeks before plus a photo shoot at the local park which ended with the reporter laid on his back taking our picture and telling us to look mean and scary. You can see the result below - whether or not we actually managed to look scary is up to you people to decide.

Our erstwhile publisher Darren Floyd of Razorblade Press had arranged a full one day event for the launch which was to be called Nervous.

Which also summed Tim and I up on the morning of the launch - not because we were shy about talking in front of loads of people or that we'd be hobnobbing with the cream of British horror writing that day as Ramsey Campbell, Simon Clark and Pete Crowther were all guests of honour that day, not to mention Steve Volk, screenwriter of the classic Ghostwatch was there as well; it might have been a book launch for Tim and I but paying customers expected a better class of attraction.

The reason we were nervous was because our books, all four thousand of them, were due to be delivered to Darren's house that morning and, by the time we'd finished breakfast, they still hadn't turned up.

Still, they eventually showed up and the day was a great success, despite Tim's look of concern below - Simon Bestwick on the left smirks (which is slightly better than his deafening laugh!) while Tracey, Tim's better half, looks utterly terrified.

The books looked great (though the typesetting on mine was ballsed up to say the least) and it was nice to finally have my first published book out. And, as I was learning, the way writers celebrate good news . . . is to head to the pub.

The Park Vaults in Cardiff was invaded by a bunch of writers, publishers and sundry others and many, many beers were consumed. My first FantasyCon was still a year away at that point and I had no idea what beer monsters writers were.

Honest.

No, really.

Okay, maybe a little.Left to right is a much younger (and thinner) looking me; Simon Clark; Tim; Darren Floyd being very disrespectful behind them; and Tracey.
The writers' circle - a few years before, Tim had set up a writers' circle which, by this time, had whittled down to Max O'Hagan; Matt Williams; Tim and myself. We used to meet up every other Wednesday, drink beer and talk bollocks. The four of us still get together ten years on, though it's more likely to be every third month or so, though we still drink beer and talk bollocks.
And that's Ly, my girlfriend at the time and now my wife and to whom, along with my grandad, The Dreaming Pool was dedicated.

As I said, the day was great fun and it was a bit odd looking at these photos so many years later and thinking where we are now.

Tim's had a hell of a lot of success, particularly in the States, and is now writing full time whereas I'm happier about my writing now than I have been for some time; I'm more relaxed than I was and am content to churn out a novel every now and then.

Of course, it wasn't all plain sailing for Tim following Faith In The Flesh. Over the coming months we did a few more mini-events including one at a local library. I know I turned up - according to the flier, though, some other relative of Tim's showed up: