It looks like it’s not too late to cast your vote for the world’s oddest book title, which will be awarded the Diagram Prize by The Bookseller, a British trade magazine. The winner will be announced March 28, with the spotter of the winning book receiving a magnum of champagne. The authors and publishers “benefit from the publicity, prestige and sales boost that always accompanies the Diagram Prize.”

On the site, Horace Bent (there’s an appropriate name, don’t you think?), custodian of the Diagram Prize, says, “I confess: I have been anxious that as publishing becomes ever more corporate, the trade’s quirky charms are being squeezed out…But happily, my fears have been proved unfounded: oddity lives on.”

Which would you vote for?

“I Was Tortured by the Pygmy Love Queen,” by Jasper McCutcheon
“How to Write a How to Write Book,” by Brian Piddock
“Are Women Human? And Other International Dialogues,” by Catharine A. MacKinnon
“Cheese Problems Solved,” edited by P.L.H. McSweeney
“If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs,” by “Big Boom”
“People Who Mattered in Southend and Beyond: From King Canute to Doctor Feelgood,” by Dee Gordon.

Thanks to friend and fellow writer Gloria Hildebrandt for pointing me to this quirky competition!

The Toronto Star’s “the week’s best invented words” on the weekend included two I particularly enjoyed:

Springbroke: the financial condition that follows Spring break (from UrbanDictionary.com)

Landspam: spam delivered the old fashioned way: on paper and via your local postal worker (from Buzzwhack.com).

Various misspellings spotted this week online and on paper:

“Loyalty manger” from an ad presumably looking for a manager

“Pre-fixe”, spelling by ear for “prix fixe” or a fixed-price dinner

“Silly-Puddy” for that much-loved malleable Silly Putty of your childhood.

One of my networking groups, the Halton-Peel Communications Association, meets tonight, and as the main organizer, I have my fingers crossed that the snow now falling won’t mess up the roads but will continue to just look pretty. It does; it brings to mind my favourite Robert Frost poem, Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening (“He will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow”) and Canadian folk singer Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night (“the morning light steals across my windowpane where webs of snow are driftin’”).

Speaking of lyrics, on Saturday my husband and I went to see another Canadian legend, the Cowboy Junkies. They’re billed as country/alternative rock but they really don’t fit any one category. The show repeated all the songs from perhaps their best known album, the Trinity Sessions, which was recorded live on one microphone at a church in downtown Toronto 20 years ago. As lead singer Margo Timmins admitted, they don’t generally do happy songs; mournful is a pretty common description! They do have at least one upbeat song (sadly, they didn’t play it): the Anniversary Song. A line I particularly love is this:

Have you ever seen a sight as beautiful / as a face in a crowd of people / that lights up just for you?

What song lyrics speak to you?

The Toronto Star wine critic, Gord Stimmell, alerted me to the fact that tomorrow is Open That Bottle Night. Started by Wall Street Journal columnists John Brecher and Dorothy Gaiter, the event is basically a call to wine enthusiasts to stop waiting for a special occasion; make the last Saturday in February the occasion and pull out that special bottle you were saving. Too often, people hang on to a bottle too long, and either you or the bottle ends up being over the hill.

To participate, grab that bottle you were saving (or go out and buy a special bottle). Open it. Enjoy it.

I’m not sure if we have a special bottle in our wine cellar (aka closet) because we usually do a good job of sharing them with family and friends for occasions, and sometimes even no occasion. But in the spirit of the day, we’ll find something to open!

I caught a brief part of a radio interview today with “transformational expert” Marci Shimoff, about her book Happy for No Reason: 7 Steps to Being Happy from the Inside Out. Marci is also co-author of Chicken Soup for the Soul and a featured expert in The Secret DVD and book. The part that caught my ear was that you can catch happiness from the five people you spend time with most often, just as you’d catch a cold. From my own long-ago days in a nine-to-five job, I’d have to say that you also catch bad moods very easily!

Ms. Shimoff also mentioned that we all have a happiness set-point, the tendency to remain at a certain level of happiness similar to a thermostat setting on a furnace. While this set-point is 50% genetic and 50% learned, it appears you can raise the set-point the same way you’d crank up the thermostat on a cold February day. Of course, the book tells you how. Has anyone read it? Was it helpful?

In “I’m done with social media,” Dave Fleet encourages us to write in terms the average person on the street can understand, such as “web site address” instead of “URL”:

“I’ll open up my conversations to people who don’t live in our little bubble and who don’t know our terminology, but who want to know about this stuff.”

I agree that those of us blogging, reading blogs, using Twitter and all the many other “shiny toys” tend to forget that there is a huge slice of the population who don’t, or even more shocking, aren’t even aware these toys are out there. And I’m certainly all for communicating in the simplest, most understandable terms around. Hear, hear!

(I found Dave via Chris Brogan, who I’ve learned from past experience posts so frequently that I’d better check every day or I am 33 posts behind!)

Is it a spirit of “we have so much business, we don’t need to accommodate you” that makes restaurants refuse to take reservations on a busy weekend? Really, if you know, please tell me because I just don’t understand it.

Son #2’s favourite restaurant is a casual steak place called The Keg. Unfortunately for us, the one in our town closed a few years ago, supposedly because they were building a newer, bigger one even closer to us. (Sadly, it hasn’t happened yet.) The nearest one is now about a half-hour drive away. We know that Fridays and Saturdays are so busy it’s not uncommon to encounter 90-minute waits for a table, if you can even find a place to park your car. People are crammed into the entrance, the hallway, the bar and any other available spot; there are a few chairs and benches, but not nearly enough. The last time we were there with my parents, my 83-year-old father, who has had two hip replacements and can’t stand for long, ended up waiting for a good hour in the only available spot: my car. So for this visit, celebrating Son #2’s birthday earlier in the week, I called to see if there was any way we could make a reservation.

The quick answer to my explanation and request: Oh, no, not possible. But if you come at 5 p.m. it shouldn’t take long.

We arrived at 5:30 so I guess we missed our little window; the place was packed and the promised wait was now 60-90 minutes. To make a long story short, we managed to find a place for Dad for what turned out to “only” be an hour’s wait. Then we were seated in the lounge area, with nearby groups of people waiting for their tables loudly talking over the music and forcing us to repeat ourselves several times if we wanted to talk. (Reminded me of Donna Papacosta’s recent post about her noisy restaurant experiences. Why don’t restaurants do something about the acoustics??)

So, Son #2 got his steak and he was happy. I can’t say that the experience left me wanting more.

Akismet (“You have better things to do with your life than deal with the underbelly of the internet”) has caught more than 8,800 spam messages for me since I activated it on my blog in May, and what a great tool it is. Every once in a while, I look through the messages Akismet has identified as spam and put in the holding pen, just to see what spammers think works these days. There are lots of messages that just contain multiple links; they don’t even waste time trying to pretend they are real messages. Others try, but Askimet hasn’t been fooled by such shameless flattery as “You have an outstanding good and well structured site” or “A very interesting site with top design and contents!” or lame attempts like “Hmmm…very interesting! Thanks!” or “Hi all. Cool site. Thank.”

Meanwhile, my e-mail quarantines lots of messages from names you could possibly know (although how many people do you know with “X.” for a middle initial?), although the subject lines get right to the point about certain body parts or available drugs. Really, do people fall for this stuff??

From a recent newsletter from the always inspiring Daphne Gray-Grant:

“From time to time, I make the mistake of letting myself feel discouraged by the inadequacy of my writing. At other times, I make the equally pointless error of wallowing in self-satisfaction over the supposed wonderfulness of my words. When either of these things happens, I bring myself back to earth by rereading the wonderful Annie Dillard quote: ‘The feeling that the work is magnificent, and the feeling that it is abominable, are both mosquitoes to be repelled, ignored, or killed, but not indulged.’”

Good advice!

After last week’s concentrated efforts to spin straw into gold (writing like a woman possessed), I surfaced to finally check my feeds. Boy, was I behind! Chris Brogan, bless his prolific blogging self, had 33 posts I had not yet seen. I particularly liked his post comparing social networks to your local pub, where he relates walking past a series of pubs at SuperBowl time:

“I knew that each one of those places had ‘regulars’ and ‘visitors,’ and a sense of what’s okay and what draws disapproving stares. Sounds a bit like social networks, if you squint.”

His good advice: buy others in the pub a drink (in other words, share).