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 [...]
Monthly Archives: February 2008
This week in words
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 [...]
As the snow falls
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 [...]
Open that bottle
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 [...]
How’s your happiness set-point?
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 [...]
I’m all for it
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 [...]
Why can’t you reserve?
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, [...]
Who falls for spam?
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 [...]
Wisdom for writers
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, [...]
Spending time at the pub
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 [...]
