Writers

I Received the Versatile Blogger Award!

versatileblogger11I was surprised to receive the Versatile Blogger Award (VBA) from esteemed author and blogger Ella Medler. Thank you, Ella! It’s an honor. Ella is a super duper colleague in the writing field. Please check out her awesome work!

Versatile Blogger Award (VBA)

What is it?

As far as I can tell — details are rather sketchy and only the creator knows for sure — this lofty-sounding award is basically a mutual admiration society where bloggers recognize their peers for writing quality blogs that touched them in some way. The VBAs honor the blogger rather than specific posts. It’s a chance for bloggers to pat themselves on the back like the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does with the Oscars. Until someone starts giving out Blogscars, the VBAs will have to suffice.

What are the criteria?

If you are nominated, you’ve been awarded the Versatile Blogger Award. I nominated 15 outstanding bloggers below. Congratulations!

Thank the person who gave you this award. That’s common courtesy.

Thank you, Ella. Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Include a link to their blog. That’s also common courtesy — if you can figure out how to do it.

Visit Ella’s blog at http://ellamedler.wordpress.com/. You’ll be glad you did.

Next, select 15 blogs/bloggers that you’ve recently discovered or follow regularly. (I would add, pick blogs or bloggers that are excellent!)

The envelope, please…

Nominate those 15 bloggers for the Versatile Blogger Award — you might include a link to this site.

And the nominees/winners are (in alphabetical order):

  1. August McLaughlin – Savor the Storm (http://augustmclaughlin.wordpress.com/)
  2. CR Hiatt – McSwain & Beck (http://mcswainandbeck.com/)
  3. Craves Adventure – Our Travels Out West (http://cravesadventure.wordpress.com/)
  4. CrissCrossingIndia – Adventure Travel and Photography Across India (http://crisscrossingindia.wordpress.com/)
  5. David C. Cassidy – Because Life is a Really Good Story (http://davidccassidy.com/)
  6. Donna B. McNicol – 2 Taking a 5th (http://www.2takinga5th.com/)
  7. KG Arndell – Musings of a Dark Fantasy Writer (http://kgarndell.com/)
  8. Jeff Whelan – SpaceOrville (http://jeffwhelan.wordpress.com/)
  9. Lada Ray (http://ladaray.wordpress.com/)
  10. Lesley Carter – Bucket List Publications (http://lesleycarter.wordpress.com/)
  11. Pranjal Borthakur (http://pranjalborthakur.wordpress.com/)
  12. R.M. Wilburn – Ponderous Things… (http://ponderous-max.blogspot.com/)
  13. Sheila Pierson – I Write, Therefore I Am (http://sheilapierson.wordpress.com/)
  14. The Jumping Polar Bear (http://jumpingpolarbear.com/)
  15. Vanna Smythe – Fantasy Author (http://vannasmythe.com/)

Congratulations, winners!

Finally, tell the person who nominated you 7 things about yourself.

Hmm, seven things about me. Okay, here goes:

1. In the past decade I’ve lived in nine different locations in five countries on four continents.

2. I proposed to my wife on one knee in a gravel parking lot. She said “yes” anyway after I whined about how much the rocks hurt my kneecap.

3. I joined the Cub Scouts for the first time with my son and am his den leader. I did not participate in scouts as a kid, and this is the first time in my son’s young life that he’s lived where there’s a troop. It’s been fun scouting vicariously through him. Today we built and shot off bottle (water) rockets. It brings out the kid in me!

4. My favorite sport is baseball, but I took a liking to cricket when I lived in Africa because it looks like baseball with different rules.

5. I have a falsetto singing voice like Roy Orbison and Chris Isaak and love to belt out the karaoke version of “Oh! Pretty Woman.”

6. I enjoy getting to know people from around the world. One of my favorite things to do is to meet up in one location with friends I met elsewhere. Today, in fact, I’m getting together in Bangkok, Thailand with friends I met several years ago in Seoul, Korea.

7. One of the toughest challenges living overseas is missing those foods that you love but can’t buy abroad. I miss dishes from my favorite restaurants, not to mention perishable foods that I can’t ship. Thank goodness I can buy and ship beef jerky, cereal, and granola bars. But every once in a while I suffer from store-bought Christmas eggnog withdrawals.

Congratulations to the new VBA winners, and thanks again to Ella Medler for nominating me!

 

buythumbM.G. Edwards is a writer of books and stories in the mystery, thriller and science fiction-fantasy genres. He also writes travel adventures. He is author of Kilimanjaro: One Man’s Quest to Go Over the Hill, a non-fiction account of his attempt to summit Mount Kilimanjaro, Africa’s highest mountain. His collection of short stories called Real Dreams: Thirty Years of Short Stories available as an e-book and in print on Amazon.com. He lives in Bangkok, Thailand with his wife Jing and son Alex.

For more books or stories by M.G. Edwards, visit his web site at www.mgedwards.com or his blog, World Adventurers. Contact him at me@mgedwards.com, on Facebook, on Google+, or @m_g_edwards on Twitter.

© 2012 Brilliance Press. All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted without the written consent of the author.

Time to Reboot

It’s been almost one year since I last updated my blog.  One year!  Where did the time go?  Even the spam bots gave up on me. 
 
Well, I’m back.  I’ve missed posting updates. It’s time to dust this site off and reboot.  There are new stories to tell and insights to share.  If you’re not a spam bot and have this page on RSS, feel free to stop by again soon.
 
— World Adventurers

Featured Blog: The Stand-Up Economist

Now that I’ve finished my Spanish class, I’ve moved on to another class that crams as much political and economic theory as is physically possible into three weeks.  (Really, how much can you learn in three weeks?  A LOT, apparently–they’ve crammed an amazing amount of stuff into a short course.)  In today’s economics segment, the presenter talked about the fact that economics, the dismal science, is fraught with statistics with built-in margins of error.  Virtually every sacrosanct measure we trust to accurately measure an economy, from the average price of a gallon of gasoline to gross domestic product, is ultimately an estimate with a varying margin of error.  As I heard this, I thought, but so much depends on these economic measures!  Interest rates, Social Security expenditures, the Federal Budget, you name it–they all depend on the veracity of economic statistics that are merely estimates.  So I got to thinking, how can one bridge the gap between economic assumption and reality? 
 
Sometimes it takes humor to get the job done.  The Stand-Up Economist, a jovial chap named Yorum Bauman, an economics professor at the University of Washington and part-time stand-up comedian.  His YouTube presentation, "Mankiw’s Principles of Economics, Translated," is a classic.  In it, Dr. Bauman boils the ten principles of economics into the following, easy to understand translations of generally accepted precepts:
  1. People face tradeoffs (choices are bad);
  2. The cost of something is what you give up to get it (choices are really bad);
  3. Rational people think at the margin (people are stupid);
  4. People respond to incentives (people aren’t that stupid);
  5. Trade can make everyone better off (trade can make everyone worse off);
  6. Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity (governments are stupid);
  7. Governments can sometimes improve market outcomes (governments aren’t that stupid);
  8. A country’s standard of living depends on its ability to produce goods and services (blah blah blah);
  9. Prices rise when the government prints too much money (blah blah blah); and
  10. Society faces a short-run trade-off between inflation and unemployment (blah blah blah).

After watching The Stand-Up Economist, it all makes so much more sense to me!