Plain words, uncommon sense
Hop Studios has a casting call out for ducks.
Quote: Hop Studios is auditioning for a new rubber duck icon.
If you have a rubber duck with a nice face and great body that looks great on camera, let me know and we’ll arrange to bring it in for a photo shoot.
I noticed that I have a lot of ducks. Here’s my duck team.
Several months ago Patricia Storms of BookLust created this amazing bookplate for me.
I love it.
And, you might come across it in Geist issue 63.
What do you think of my little ad? Do you love the bookplate as much as I do?
Clare Clark is the author of two very fine novels, both of which deal with elements of the underground and unsavoury human behaviour. Her first novel The Great Stink is set in Victorian England, more specifically in the labyrinthine London sewer system. Hence the great stink. But Clare’s writing far from stinks, it is tight and interesting.
Yes, The Great Stink is a historical novel, but not one with a familiar setting. The Great Stink deals with a sewer engineer, William May, and the solstice his finds in cutting himself in the solitude of the sewers. That is until a murder is committed in the underground and he is implicated.
See what I mean? Underground and unsavoury.
Don’t be dismayed by the setting though, the details of the sewer structures, their repairs and the times of Victorian England are in perfect harmony with the strange and complex story of William May.
Not only do I highly recommend The Great Stink, I’m a fan of Clare’s latest novel, The Nature of Monsters.
In 1718, pregnant Eliza Tally is packed off to London. She is to work as a maid for apothecary Grayson Black, have the child or get rid of it, and do so while protecting the perception of her own virtue and the good name of the father of the child. What transpires instead is a tragic and twisted tale of scientific experimentation on mothers and unborn children. Eliza and a second maid, Mary, are psychologically tortured by the apothecary and his wife in hopes that they will bear monsters instead of healthy babies.
Eighteenth-century England is a time of deep interest in science, medicine and literature, but it is also a time of home remedies and superstitions. A pregnant woman caught in a fire can expect her child to be born with a red birthmark. If a hare runs across a pregnant woman’s path she can expect the child to be marked by the animal–perhaps it was a hare that created half-moon Mary.
Half-there or not, Mary charms Eliza, who discovers the apothecary’s goal and is driven to save Mary. It is too late for her own child.
Both novels are visceral. There is the putrid smell of the sewers in The Great Stink, the descriptions of cutting and the horrors of murder. In The Nature of Monsters it is the monsters of the novel–Grayson Black, his wife and the apothecary’s assistant, along with Eliza’s lover and her mother–who act as monsters. Betrayal and sacrifice for science are the elements of horror here.
Most horrifying to the reader are the descriptions of leeching, bleeding and opium use, which are counter to our modern-day understanding of medicine. We have 250 more years of discovery under our belt, and yet it is the many scientists of this time whose experiments inform today’s understanding of the mind and body. So it is the readers’ good fortune to have such an adept storyteller and historian weaving the tale of Eliza and Mary with the medical curiosities of the day.
I am a fan of Clare Clark. Both novels are great and I truly think readers of The Great Stink should seek out The Nature of Monsters and vice versa. My only caveat for newbies to Clare’s work is to be prepared for the world she transports you to, it is inevitably underground and unsavoury, in the best of ways.
I’m at the Northern Voice blogging conference today. This post will be updated throughout the day.
Random Thought #1: Next year’s tees must be red. We’re going through the rainbow spectrum: year 1 was green, year 2 was blue, year 3 (this year) is purple. See where I’m going with this? It’s got to be red next year.
Really quickly here’s what I’m up to (but I’m paying attention so you’re not going to get a lot of details right now):
Anil Dash, good keynote.
Jason Mogus and Kate Dugas on social change websites and online activism
Dave Olson, really great paper point presentation on podcasting.
Dave Olsen is just getting underway Three Ps of Podcasting and he’s got Penmachine Session 2 playing.
Hi Derek, we miss you.
MooseCamp Schedule is up. This post will be updated throughout the day as I add session notes.
Session #1: Mashups for Non-Programmers
My first session of MooseCamp, part of Northern Voice. A great demo session on cool tools that non-programmers can use to create pretty cool websites, applications or aggregators.
The Mashup page has links to the speakers’ demos, the tools they use and examples.
Session #2: Identity and Privacy on the Web
How many logins do you have? How many email addresses? How do you manage your multiple identities? How do you manage what companies know about you?
There’s no real answer.
One example: OpenID from www.sxip.com
AND, Boris Mann kindly mentioned that Old Skool logins for www.Flickr.com are being phased out. Ack, that’s me. I don’t read the messages sent to my Flickr inbox. Bad Monique. I also don’t read the text around the login box–I’m busy logging in. Bad Monique. So, without Boris I would have been very upset on March 17 when my Flickr login no longer worked.
So I now have yet another digital identity, this one with Yahoo.
Imagine if all your logins are store loyalty cards in your wallet. I’d need a minion to carry them around for me. But unlike store loyalty cards, I can’t refuse the login. I can’t limit the relationship between myself and the company. If I want to use the service, I have to fill out all the required fields: name, email, birthday, username, password, favourite colour, mother’s maiden name, blah blah blah.
Session 3: PhotoCamp
Kris Krug and the photo geeks talked white balance, tools and techniques.
Session 4: Favourite Tools Session with Tod Maffin
I’m sold. Just check out the wiki and the links to the tools: These are my favourite tools
Hey Kids! General Motors is running the Great Canadian Writing Contest .
The contest is open to kids across Canada in Grade 5 or Grade 6. You just write a short story (200 words) in English or French on the contest theme of family, and you illustrate a book cover to go along with it.
The contest runs through to April 16, 2007.
Here’s the contest details:
http://www.abc-canada.org/gmac/en/
Today was a day of tap dance. I have a class on Sundays that I take with the venerable Jim Hibbard. The class this morning was fantastic. Then this evening I attended a fundraiser and “thank you” dinner for the great Lynn Dally of Jazz Tap Ensemble.
Now here’s a little Fred Astaire for you to watch. I love this number.
Friday.
I had beer at lunch.
This makes for a good Friday.
I also was pointed towards Chocomap.com.
It is never too late in the day to drool over the chocolatey goodness that is a Google map indicating all sources of heavenly bites in my neighbourhood (as if I don’t know them already).
But it’s not all beer and chocolate.
I attended the SFU, Master of Publishing, Magazine Fair this afternoon.
Three magazine proposals were on tap, complete with trade-fair booths featuring business plans, schwag, bubbly and buttons. There were short presentations from the groups: Traffic, a mag for Vancouverites in transit; TBSP, a foodie mag for those of us who like messy kitchens, playing with our food and are just on this side of hip, “this is not your mother’s food & wine magazine”; and last but not least and online only mag, jibe.ca (I was paying attention but the correct name eludes me). Jibe is an entertainment filter–the best source for “have you seen that video? that article? that photo?”.
Geist magazine, Modern Dog, The Tyee were also in attendance with goodies, free mags and other promo pieces. I walked away with issue 63 of Geist, which features a fancy ad for SoMisguided.com (thank you Patricia and Siobhan).
P.S. Sio have you seen this?
This came firing over the transom this afternoon.
Books are hard. Watch the video.
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