Shopping locally this Christmas is a gift to the Royal City

Posted on November 25, 2011 by

Check out my new article on Occupying Christmas by shopping and celebrating locally on New West blog Tenth to the Fraser!

As the Christmas shopping season arrives with Black Friday in the US, I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than camping outside of a store in order to buy stuff. Except for shooting, trampling or pepper-spraying your fellow shoppers in order to get at said stuff, of which there were many reported instances this year.

via Shopping locally this Christmas is a gift to the Royal City.

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Usage cartoon No. 3: Do you peddle or pedal a bike?

Posted on November 21, 2011 by

When even bike magazines can’t get the difference between peddle and pedal right, you know it’s time for another super-useful and majestically executed MS Paint usage cartoon.

The two words are commonly mixed up. To peddle (verb) means to sell something and to pedal (verb) means to work a device, like a bicycle, by pushing on the pedals (noun). If you’re not writing about riding a bicycle, chances are you want to use the verb “to peddle.”

And if you are referring to the person doing the action, chances are you’re talking about a “peddler” (someone who is selling something) versus a “pedaler” (someone who is pedaling); the second usage is fairly rare.

Are you peddling flowers or pedaling a bicycle?
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A finder of lost things

Posted on November 14, 2011 by

Today I couldn’t find the bus pass.

I had it last night when I got on the bus home, but this morning it was in none of the usual places: in the pocket of the coat I was wearing, in my purse, or  on the counter where I drop things when I come in the door. It wasn’t under the pile of papers cluttering the counter, or next to the computer, or on the dresser. It hadn’t fallen under the mat with the dog dishes, nor had it drifted under the fridge. I shone flashlights into the shoes, riffled the junk bowl.

It was gone. $110 bucks down the drain. You can’t buy a bus pass in the middle of the month around here, so I guess we’d have to shell out for some books of tickets. Damn, damn, damn.

I had a feeling that I’d probably dropped it on my way into the building last night. Maybe when I pulled out my keys or went to turn off the music player on my phone, the little, valuable piece of paper in its plastic sleeve had gone whoosh, onto the ground. Someone would have picked it up by now if that was the case.

My husband was philosophical about it. “So, maybe somebody gets to ride transit for free for the rest of the month. Maybe our luck will come back to us next month.”

As it happened, just before embarking on the Great Bus Pass Hunt, we’d said the magic word to the dog (“Walk?”) so she was all up in my face too. A dog will only hold out for so long, so we walked down to the park, then back along the busy road to our apartment.

When we reached the front door of the building again, my husband said something about looking on the ground for the bus pass. We had just walked along the road I had walked from the stop last night, but was so involved with heeling the dog and keeping her calm with the traffic (she likes to chase and bark at cars, if she has her way) that I hadn’t even thought about the bus pass.

So I looked at the ground, and something glinted in the driveway. A small object, dense with print. Is that a plastic cover? I went over to look, only half-believing my eyes. It was my monthly bus pass, dropped on the ground just as I suspected, and apparently unnoticed by anyone else.

Was it a stroke of incredible luck, as my husband said, a case of having “horseshoes up my @**?”

Or was it just being reminded to look for the right thing at the right time?

Sometimes my detailed editor’s eye comes in handy for more than just spotting typos.

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Confessions of an e-reader convert and lapsed blogger

Posted on November 9, 2011 by

It’s certainly been awhile since I last blogged here. I could tell you it’s because I was writing copy all day for FortisBC all summer, and coming home to proofread reports and articles for my freelance clients. Or because I was hard at work researching organic dining spots. But the real reason is, other than taking sanity-restoring bike rides, I’ve had my nose stuck in a book. An e-book reader.

I waffled about getting an e-reader in the past … you can’t take it where things might get messy (like a cookbook) and most e-readers don’t display highly visual books or magazine layouts very well (tablets are starting to change this, however). Then I got bogged down in deciding what kind to get – in Canada, the big three choices are Kindle, Kobo and Sony Reader. But on my birthday, the choice was made for me when my husband presented my with a lovely pink 5-inch Sony Reader, which I’ve accessorized with a matching pink case with a booklight.

And I am loving his choice. The Kindle is the big name in the e-book game, but you can only buy (some) content from Amazon and they don’t offer library borrowing capability in Canada (yet). The Kobo uses the more universal epub format as well as PDF, but I am personally conflicted on supporting Chapters/Indigo, having been a bookslave in that empire previously. The Sony Reader, as it turns out, offers lots of titles through its online store. And like the Kobo, Sony Reader lets you  download public domain books for free from a number of sites (hello, Project Gutenberg) and borrow books from the public library.

Sony just came out with a Wi-Fi edition of the Reader, but I like my non-Internet-connected Reader just dandy. I download books to the software on my computer, plug in the device, and then transfer the content manually. Borrowed library books are automatically returned at the end of the borrowing period (up to 21 days). And as my local library recently found bedbugs in several books and had to shut down and fumigate, I am even happier to borrow virtual books.

The reading experience itself is great: no backlighting on the screen prevents eyestrain, I can zoom the text to granny-size large print, and I can turn pages by flicking my finger across the touch screen. The drawbacks are that all the books are in the same font and the design isn’t optimum – big gaps sometimes appear between words and every once in a while there is a random hyphen in a word, perhaps a line-break hyphen someone forgot to take out when reformatting the print edition. I believe some of these problems have been solved in the newer Wi-Fi Reader; I haven’t had direct experience with Kindle or Kobo.

Frankly, I was worried before about what e-books meant for the publishing industry, but I’m now a convert. And according to most released sales figures and trends, e-books are outselling hard copy versions in many categories. Of course, there’s some hand-wringing over whether everyone can afford a reading device to access the content (maybe that’s a weird Canadian quirk, throwing wet blankets on new exciting ideas and worrying about what it all means), but with e-readers coming down in price and content costing about half as much as hard copy versions, I think they’re here to stay.

At least a few Canadian publishers are acting like it, and Google Books recently opened its bookstore to Canadians.

I, however, will try not to let that pretty pink device distract me from blogging for so long again. Even if The Night Circus is totally amazing.

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Misquoted Facebook status becomes misattributed quote in mere keystrokes

Posted on May 3, 2011 by

Anatomy of a Fake Quotation – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic.

All it took was one misunderstanding and the deletion of a couple of quotation marks for one Facebook status update to become a quote widely misattributed to Martin Luther King on thousands of Twitter feeds and Facebook statuses.

That, and the lopping off of the actual words Dr. King said, in order to fit within Twitter’s 140-character limit.

In the above article, an Atlantic blogger traces how, really quite innocently, the quote was altered and memed and repeated all over the Internet. And how a modicum of research and fact checking made it right again.

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Usage cartoon No. 2: Royally bad

Posted on April 26, 2011 by

The second edition of the usage cartoons has been inspired by the fascinatingly endless coverage of the upcoming Royal Wedding. (Which admittedly, I plan to watch.)

In several news articles, both tabloid and mainstream, this huge event is described as an “enormity.” Enormity means something of large size, but in the sense that it is terrible. Enormous or enormousness is the right term for when you want to say something is very large. The distinction is subtle, and some are allowing the usage difference to be broken down by common usage, even the mighty Oxford dictionary. I think that’s an enormity. An enormous elephant of misused usage stomping on the Queen’s English? You decide.

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Social media: hype or hassle

Posted on April 25, 2011 by

Lately I’ve become disillusioned with the whole social media thing. Though I’ve never understood Twitter, I’ve always liked Facebook as an easy way to “keep up” with what’s going on with the people around me. Until, that is, I noticed that it wasn’t really connecting me with anyone I really cared about.

That started me thinking, what is social media really good for? First of all, it makes one’s private thoughts and relationships very public. You have to behave yourself, refrain from saying inappropriate things, remember who is on your friends’ list before you type, etc. I go around saying inappropriate things all the time – in private, to friends, in the moment. Most of the things that come out of my mouth I wouldn’t say online. My friends and family might think I’m funny, but typewritten on the Internet, without context, it’ll look horrible. So there’s one reason to refrain from social media – the exhausting process of filtering my sassmouth.

That’s just me using social media on a resolutely personal level. I’ve taken a few courses in social media marketing and read innumerable articles on social media in business. Companies no longer want to just sell a product or a brand; they want to relate and engage with their customers and use Facebook, Twitter, blogs, etc. to do it. And great, good for them. But going back to what I said about questioning who social media connects me to – I personally would prefer not to friend companies or brands or even celebrities. I don’t want to engage with my breakfast cereal or grocery store to “deepen my brand experience.” I don’t want a relationship with my local morning news anchors, and I’d like as little to do with politicians as possible, please and thankyouverymuch – especially when they’re in oily campaign mode.

The biggest reason I have decided to take a break from the social media whirl, however, is the currency of its world: attention. The getting and giving of. The anxiety of posting a status update, photo, review – or blog post – and wondering what kind of feedback, if any will come back. (Lots of people claim they don’t care about this part. I don’t believe them. Why share otherwise?) And then there is also the process of filtering through all the noise on one’s feed, thinking about what to give attention to. And trying not to pay attention, too – especially to all those “celebrities” who seem only to exist to get attention.

Social media has become a prime way to interact online today, and it has introduced me to some lovely people I might not have met purely by fluke back in the real world. But it’s not the only way to connect, nor necessarily the most important or useful or satisfying. So I’ve decided to become less lazy about connecting to people that I want to talk to. I’m phoning them and talking to them. I’m making plans to see them. I’ve popped off a friendly email or two. I’ve started writing things longer than a status update, things other than a Yelp review, things that aren’t designed for feedback. I feel happier already.

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