The Quack, issue 221
Good morning! It's nice to see you. I hope you had a great week.
When I opened the door to let Lolo out this morning, the world was coated with ice. We had a nasty storm roll through in the last few days that started with snow, switched to rain, and then froze.
I hope you're tucked in somewhere warm this cozy with nowhere to go. Grab a hot cup of something. Let's catch up.
Winter
It really has not been much of a winter so far. We've had a few days of snow (Like Tuesday, above), but they always seem to be followed up a few days later with a warm-up. It's the rare day this winter, the sidewalks aren't bare to the concrete.
I'm trying not to think about the winter of 2014, where we barely had a flake of snow before the third week of January. Later came the first of two consecutive mega winters on PEI.
(I'm completely aware I'm tempting fate here by even talking about this stuff. I figure by addressing the tempting of the fates, I may negate the tempting. But by addressing the addressing, have I negated the negating? Only time will tell.)
The keyboard that may kill me
I've been working from home for my new job for the last year. I like working at home. I'm pretty good at putting my head down to get my writing done, and I can still pitch in around the house as needed.
For most of that year, I've worked directly on my laptop. It's fine, but any time I want to pick up my laptop to go somewhere with it, I need to unplug about four things (mouse, headset, power, phone). It's just a minor inconvenience, but I finally caved this week and set up the docking station my work provided for me. I like it very much.
EXCEPT.
You'd think a keyboard would be a standard thing. We're talking about the main interface many of us have to manipulate the machine upon which we do 90% of our work. It's pretty important we can use it without any obstacles or impediments.
Like, it's called touch typing, right? The very idea is that your fingers know the layout of your keyboard SO WELL you don't even have to look at it to see what buttons you're pressing. WHAT IF SOMEONE INSERTED AN EXTRA KEY ON THAT KEYBOARD IN A FAIRLY HIGH TRAFFIC SPOT?
This keyboard! Has a slash key! Right where my finger is used to there being a Return key!
It's maddening! You'd think, oh no problem. I'll retrain my pinky finger to move one key to the right every time I come to a hard return. AFTER 25 YEARS OF TYPING.
Anyway. This is a very niche beef. I will be hunting down another keyboard with a more standard layout. I'm sure some coder somewhere is very offended by my rant about this slash key, but I'm pretty sure I've never used that symbol before in my entire life.
Strunk and White
Every four or five years, I like to reread Strunk and White's The Elements of Style.
You'd think a writing style guide wouldn't make for good bedtime reading, but you'd be wrong. The book is genuinely funny. Strunk's original snippy insights (more than a hundred years old!) mixed with E.B. White's charm make it so very readable. I honestly think that's where its utility comes from.
Anyway. It's a great book for beginning writers who want to learn a thing or two. It's a great book for established writers who need to be reminded of those same things. It's also a tiny book. I'll be done it in two nights.
PEI Newsmakers 2022
It suddenly struck me this week, we never talked about the PEI Newsmekers list this year.
Sometime in the middle of December 2013, I was at work at the university. I worked in a tiny office with two other fellows. Neal and Ty are the funniest, nicest, sharpest pair of coworkers a guy could ask for.
The news cycle in mid December is usually packed with "best of" lists from the previous year. We'd seen enough lists on our Twitter feed of newsmaking events and people, we began to joke about what a list of PEI newsmakers would look like.
I grabbed a marker and started writing the list on our office whiteboard. The list made us laugh, so we snapped a photo and put it on Twitter. The rest is history.
Every year, we kept a list of the stories that made us chuckle: stories that would only make the news in a place like this. Every December, we whittled the list down to eight, and we shared them on Twitter.
A few years in, CBC Radio's As It Happens took notice. They called me up, and the list went national. It became a big part of Newsmakers Day (as we came to call it) for me to have a goofy chat on the radio with Carol Off. Carol is wonderfully droll, so the conversations were always a lot of fun. She also married a Cape Bretoner, so she has a pretty good understanding of how things work in the Maritimes.
This year, a whole lot of things were different. Since taking a new job this year, I no longer work with Ty and Neal. Carol retired from As It Happens. I wondered whether we'd even do a list.
Mid-December rolled around. The guys and I have a group chat. We started talking about the list. We just couldn't imagine not doing it.
We created out annual Google Doc and started to whittle down the long list. When we were pretty happy with it, we set a date. I took the morning off work and went to the university to see the lads.
We had coffee in the lunchroom. It was like no time had passed. After chatting a while, I grabbed the whiteboard marker and started to write down the list. I snapped a pic and tweeted it.
Shortly after, a producer from As It Happens Called. The new host, Nil Köksal, was keen to carry on the tradition. When she first called, she confessed she'd never even been to PEI, but she handled the conversation like a pro.
You can take a listen, or read a transcript, over here. There are also links to the original news stories, just in case it's not obvious from the list what "joggling" is.
The Losers Guild
I released Chapter 5 of my podcast this week! The little army of listeners for this little podcast seem pretty loyal. According to my stats, if you listened to Chapter 1, there's a pretty good chance you stuck around for Chapter 5. Now I just need a way to have more people find it. You can take a listen over here . (or anywhere else where you might listen to podcasts)
Boom! That's it. That's all she wrote.
Thank you so much to the members of my Patreon. I promise to always keep my creative work like the Quack and the Losers Guild free for anyone to listen to or read. Patreon is a nice way for people to support my creative work financially, if they're able. I'm super thankful for everyone who has become a member.
I hope you have a great week.