So when I sang the legal blues recently, I should have been more helpful and given some suggestions for avoiding approval problems with lawyers. Here they are:

1. Consider what’s going on. In a time when lawyers are super-super-sensitive, like a lawsuit or merger, ask if you should even be writing the article.
2. Talk to them first. Ask if there are any sensitivities, so you can write in a way that avoids touchy areas that would only be deleted anyway.
3. Start the approval process early. They’ll need extra time to comb through your copy and turn warm, readable, human-sounding words into stiff lawyer-speak.
4. Push back. Don’t let them use lawyer-speak. Agree to remove an offending word, but negotiate for something a real person would actually say. Ask why something should be changed. Offer alternatives.
5. Don’t ask for “approval.” Ask them to “review” the copy for inaccuracies or sensitivities.
6. Show why you need to address an issue. The lawyers might not want to talk about it, but they may have no choice if there’s already something in the local newspaper, in a letter to the editor, on a blog.

If you have any other tips, I’d love to see them. There are no dealings with lawyers in the cards this week, but I know it’s only a matter of time.

It has rained here most of the day, so what better time to share some of the web sites that never fail to bring a smile:

I can Has Cheezbuger, or LOL cats. Talk about creative writing! The silly captions to crazy pictures of cats (and occasionally other small pets) often make me laugh out loud. Like the two cats stretched up to get their heads into a garbage can (“did u finz the economee down der?”) or the cat inspecting the innards of a multi-hued pinata (“well u haz no polypz just sum skittlez”). There used to be a similar LOLsaur site featuring dinosaurs, but that seems to have disappeared.

Dooce. Well, clearly, Heather B. Armstrong doesn’t need any more link love, she of the hundreds of comments. But I just love her “Daily Chuck,” featuring photos of her two dogs, Chuck the mutt and Coco the miniature Australian Shepherd.

The Q.C. report. Quinn Cummings recently turned this blog into a book, Notes From the Underwire: Adventures From My Awkward and Lovely Life. And she’s doing a book tour by blog, with links on her blog to the sites where other bloggers ask questions. This comment of hers describes her style: “When I write my stories, in my mind I’m walking though Target with my friend Veronica telling her about my newest ghastly exploit.”  And this: “I’m pretty sure that if you start thinking of your loved ones as ‘material,’ you’re writing too often.”

Where do you go for a laugh online?

While countries around the world worry about swine flu (sorry, H1N1), I’m here to tell you there is another insidious virus sweeping at least the blogging world. Yes, some online Dr. Evil is secretly going around stealing our mojo.

You know you’ve noticed it. Some bloggers you follow simply don’t post as often. Others have replaced blog content with their running Twitter commentary, or they select links found on, again, Twitter for a “best of” round-up. (Not a bad idea, and one I may shamelessly steal borrow.) A Google search on “lost my blogging mojo” pulled up 714,000 results.

Yes, I’ve lost my own blogging mojo. It appears to have started slipping away during a frantically busy week leading up to a week off in San Francisco. Once back in town, the pace continued, and between my freelance writing business and networking/volunteer activities and personal life, I would find myself shutting down the computer at 11:30 p.m. and thinking, “I’ll blog tomorrow.” Or before writing a post, I would just “dip into Twitter,” which quickly ate up my allotted non-work time. Meanwhile, Dr. Evil cranked the Mojo Vac on high and “tomorrow” kept getting farther away.

When I launched this blog in January 2007, I worried about getting into a regular rhythm of posting, having found it difficult to keep up a hand-written journal. But for the most part, I managed to maintain a regular two- or three-times-a-week schedule. So I know if I can only get my mojo back, I’ll be good to go.

If you’ve got any advice for getting blogging mojo back, I’d love to hear it. And if you’ve seen my mojo, let me know. If I see your mojo, I’ll be glad to do the same.

Woke up this mornin’ (da DA da da)
Sun shiny and bright (da  DA da da)
Finished writin’ my articles (da DA da da)
They were lookin’ tight (da DA da da)
But wait just a minute (da DA da da)
What’s that I see (da DA da da)
A note from Legal, sayin’ “we just don’t agree”!
I got the legal beagle blues, yeah, they get me ev’ry time
Legal don’t want no ’splaining, no, say folks don’t need no bottom line.

Had three employee newsletter articles fall under review by my client’s Legal department in the past week. One article was completely thrown out, or maybe deferred a couple of months. One was cut in half (“eviscerated” is the word that springs to mind) to remove “too much detail.” And I am waiting with only a faint hope that the third makes it, after being revised to take out certain potentially “dangerous” words and references.

Have you ever met a more cautious, seeing-monsters-in-every-corner bunch in your life? No wonder lawyers as a whole (and this is totally an opinion based on observation of every lawyer I have ever known) seem to go grey early.

A thunderstorm blew through Oakville on the weekend, and it brought me back to summers spent at my grandparents’ cottage in the Laurentian mountains in Quebec.

The cottage was built in the early 1900s, on a hillside with glimpses of the lake just visible in between the trees.  A screened-in porch wrapped around all sides of the cottage, where we would listen to the thunder rolling closer and watch the dark skies and flashes of lightning as the storm made its measured way across the lake. The sound of rain on the leaves in Oakville, slow at first, then steady, then gradually fading to a soft drip, drip, was remarkably similar to those rainy mornings.

Oakville is dotted with trails, where my dog and I frequently walk. As we duck into a cool leafy trail, the noise of cars fades and nature takes over; again, it takes me back to the cottage. Blue jays squawk, red-winged blackbirds call and woodpeckers tap, tap, tap. Occasionally I hear a screen door slam, or smell bacon cooking on a Saturday morning.

Sounds, sights, smells, tastes — they all have the power to transport us to another time and place. What transports you?

Everyone can write, can’t they? But it takes real skill to come up with truly awful writing, like that celebrated by the annual Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.

This is almost as much fun as the Oddest Book Title of the Year contest. But instead of just finding existing examples — in this case, that fit the requirement of a bad opening sentence to a novel — entrants are asked to create their own lead to an imaginary novel that thankfully has not seen the light of day.

The contest began in 1982, and “honors the memory (if not the reputation) of Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton.” He’s the man who gave the world, “It was a dark and stormy night” in the opening to his novel, Paul Clifford.

The winner of the 2009 contest is David McKenzie, a 55-year-old Quality Systems consultant and writer from Federal Way, Washington. Apparently he is a repeat winner, having propelled his awful writing to the top of the Western and Children’s Literature categories before. Oh, yes, there are categories, such as Fantasy Fiction, Detective, Purple Prose and Vile Puns, with winners, runners-up and “dishonorable mentions.” But this year, he won the top prize and all the fame that goes with it.

Here’s his winning entry, in all its 88-word glory:

“Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin’ off Nantucket Sound from the nor’ east and the dogs are howlin’ for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the “Ellie May,” a sturdy whaler Captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin’ and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests.”

Most of the entries are pretty funny. Some are short, but most cram as much detail as possible into a longer sentence, like this winner of the Detective category (Eric Rice):

“She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.”

I’d better not turn my attention to writing until I’ve cleared my head of these!

In the movie, “He’s Just Not That Into You” (seen on the plane on the way home from San Francisco), Drew Barrymore’s character laments the sorry state of communication with the opposite sex:

“I had this guy leave me a voicemail at work, so I called him at home, and then he emailed me to my BlackBerry, and so I texted to his cell, and now you just have to go around checking all these different portals just to get rejected by seven different technologies. It’s exhausting.”

She didn’t mention it, but you can get rejected by Twitter, too. Or at least, this is what I imagine are the Twitter signs he’s just not that into you (inspired by a friend who shall be nameless):

1. He doesn’t retweet your clever tweets.
2. He tweets when he’s out with you, but doesn’t mention you.
3. He doesn’t send you sexy DMs any more.
4. He unfollows you, and then…
5. He blocks you.

What other signs are there?

My car insurer claims it is working on “greening” its operations, and not a moment too soon. I’m drowning in paper.

True, I laid a number of changes on the company over the past two months. I bought a new car that had to be added to my existing insurance policy. I had to keep the old car on the policy until it was sold, bumping it to #2. Around the same time, Son #2 got his full driver’s license, so had to be officially added to the policy. I also asked that they make Son #2 “occasional driver” and Son #1 “secondary driver” because they had the reverse. Then I sold car #2.

But even though the various representatives I spoke with each time KNEW the other changes were coming, they still mailed me a paper confirmation and “change endorsement” every time. That’s a cover letter and four or five sheets of paper. And they mailed two credit notes; one is a rebate for the month left on car #2’s insurance, now cancelled, and I’m not sure what the other one is for. You’d think in all that paper, there would be an explanation.

Sure, I needed the new insurance card that listed both cars, and then a new one with just the new car. But the final thing I expected never came. That’s the renewal listing just the new car, detailing the premium components and showing “here’s what this all means to you, Ms. Horner.” You know; here’s how much you have to pay for your insurance for the year. Because it’s due July 20.

So I called my friends at the insurance company again today. Asked how much I owe. The fellow told me, and seemed surprised that I wanted the paper detailing how they came up with that number. He offered to e-mail it, which would have been perfect; I wondered why they didn’t e-mail all the other papers. Except what he e-mailed was just the “Automobile Insurance Confirmation.”  When I pointed that out, he said they would mail the documents.

Sigh. Probably I’ll get four or five sheets of paper, including new insurance cards that I don’t need.

So here’s my advice to companies that wonder how they can get rid of some paper:

• Look at how you automatically generate documents. There’s senseless duplication in there; find it.
• If you have your customer’s e-mail address, ask if you can use it to send routine confirmations.
• Don’t waste an entire page just to say “this confirms your recent change.” Build those words into the document.
• If you know there are going to be more changes over a relatively short time, wait until all the changes are made before you mail the document. If you must, think about using a temporary form that attaches to the original.
• Get your lawyers to be reasonable about what kind of files you have to keep and how many ways you have to cover your, um, assets.

End of rant.

In honour of Canada Day and our 142nd birthday today:

• A catchy and clever rap; we know that you wanna be Canadian!
• Canadians share our 100 favourite Canadian things. Hmm, a lot of food listed (back bacon, poutine, maple syrup, butter tarts…).
• I love that Google has a Mountie (Royal Canadian Mounted Police) saluting in place of the “L” today.
• Speaking of which, everyone loves a Mountie. Maybe the RCMP doesn’t want us taking liberties, though. They have a long list of rules about what may be worn and when, to look this good.
• My friend Donna Papacosta has posted an amusing “primer” for our American friends on some of the differences between our two countries.

Happy Canada Day! I’m getting off the computer now to go buy some plants, a pretty common thing for summer-starved Canadians to do on our day off.