Latest Articles from The Vandal AKA Derek Haines

The Big English Present

The Present in English grammar is very, very big! The grammatical term of the present in English is a bit of trap. Yes, it is tense, but when combined with the four basic aspects of simple, progressive (or continuous), perfect and perfect progressive the concept of the present being the now type present goes out the window. The confusion starts with the present simple. It is big. Really big. So big in fact that it swallows up the past and future and sticks them together. For example. I am a man. Could I have been a woman last year? Or will I change into a woman in five years? No,

Louis – The Life of a Real Spy

Louis was a spy As a child and a young teenager he would tell me stories and mysterious tales of far off lands and people. Singing strange songs in mysterious languages. At the time, I had not heard of the word enigma, but now I know my friend Louis was exactly that. Louis never lied to me. Only telling me what he wanted me to know, but somehow always managing to slide around a part of a story that would have possibly necessitated at least a white lie. At around eleven years old, I clearly remember asking him with a child’s innocence if he had ever killed anyone. He replied

Amazon Exploits Authors – Again

Does Amazon exploit authors? For self-published authors, Amazon has the annoying habit of giving a little with one hand, and then very soon after, taking away an awful lot more with the other. In the very early days of Kindle Direct Publishing, Amazon gave self-published authors a wonderful new platform to expose and sell their work. Yet soon, after this initial period of ‘absolute bliss‘, when authors made some money, and Amazon filled up their coffers with mountains of ebook content to drive Kindle device sales, Amazon decided to demand exclusivity in return for access to their new ebook marketing tools. These KDP Select marketing tools, however, turned out to

Sneaky News!

Google News are sneaky As many do I suppose, I check Google News once a day or so. It’s not my favourite news source, as I have a long list of news and newspaper sites I check most days, but it covers a lot of territory. However, in the last few days, I have noticed something that is really starting to irk me about Google News. Well, not just irk really. More like annoy me greatly. It is something that proves that Google is purely an advertising company and nothing else and that they are becoming increasingly aggressive. Let me start at the beginning of this nasty little story of how