Citizensheep. "Michael Grimes lives in Birmingham (UK). This is his blog about anything that he fancies."

I’d forgotten all about this picture. This is what cartoonist Alex Hughes thought I looked like back in 2009.

I noticed this optical illusion when I was siting in Druckers in Birmingham’s Bullring. I was looking at it absent-mindedly for a while before I spotted it. Directly outside the window, which looks out over the pedestrian area and down towards St Martin’s Church, are wrought metal railings. Their bars are squared rather than rounded, [...]

I’m curious: has a piece of music ever made you laugh? Out loud? Certainly music can suggest humour – and is often used to that effect in plays and films – but can it be funny for the sake of it? Music certainly elicits emotions: it can excite us and soothe us, make us feel optimistic [...]

Slowly, I’m realising that my online reputation flowchart has been quite valuable to some people. I made it in my spare time and released it to the world for free, but I didn’t think to ask for feedback. So, it would be really good to know how it has helped people (not least because I’m talking [...]

It’s a bit ambitious, but I thought it would be fun to try and get stories from forty people who turn forty this year. I had wondered about threading them together, like Arabian Nights; I might still do that, at the end, but let’s keep it simple for now. So, the theme is simply ‘1972’. [...]

As I posted a silly poem the other day I thought I may as well post more, for posterity. This one is from 1994 and started life as a song(!). About three years ago I added two more verses but forgot to write them down; I spoke them into my phone and then the phone [...]

I just composed this in the time it takes to write a tweet. Don’t ask me why or where it came from. I am a puffin Munchin’ on a muffin But I can’t get enuffin ‘Cos I’ve got a small mouth.

Every so often I find myself in an unexpected and memorable situation. Today, 1 February 2012, I am reminded of the time I met Umar Ghuman. I was traveling home to Birmingham on a Virgin train – not something I do often – and I sat at a table with a couple of Pakistani men. [...]

I was pretty sure the song’s title was also that of a sitcom starring Geoffrey Palmer and Judi Dench, so I could easily have Googled it. But that felt like admitting early defeat, so I closed my eyes and tried to remember. A tried and tested trick (by me, at least) is to run through [...]

Sick of relying on Issu, or other bloated third parties, simply for embedding documents? Well, it turns out you can embed .pdf and .ppt files via Google Docs using a simple iframe. You don’t even need a Google account. <iframe src=”http://docs.google.com/gview?url=http://document.pdf&embedded=true”></iframe> Simply replace the bold text with your document’s url and style the iframe with [...]