Best photo of the day: What is that, Dad?!?

Thank you Chicagoist!

In today's Quick Bites, they dig up this utterly awesome photo of Hungry Mag writer Michael Nagrant's photo of his son gawking at a 23-ounce bone-in ribeye at Harry Caray's.

As JT and I have agreed that our kiddos will be vegetarian growing up, this photo strikes a particular cord with me. (Whooo - and one of them is kicking in agreement right now!)

Best list of the day: list + music, a two-fer

I love random lists of things - I get an appetizer of info that I can later follow up on in greater detail and there's nothing better than a list you don't agree with - it really gets you thinking about your personal Top 20 trashiest starlets or overused Bartlett's quotes, etc.

Oddee is always a great source of these, but today my email delivered a list that has blown all others out of the water: the 25 Greatest Duets of All Time! No. 1 is definitely on my "must have if ever stuck on a desert island with only 25 songs" list.

H/T: the Very Short List

File this under "awesome"

A blog that is entirely dedicated to "unnecessary" quotation marks (as if there were such a thing).

To the writers of The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks:
my fellow grammar enthusiasts - I salute you. Thank you for alerting us to the elusive double comma, the sketchy use of quotation marks in a logo and hand-lettered gradeschool signs that go against everything those poor 6th grade teachers are trying to get across.

- writergrl

hat tip: dittoheston

Ragan.com comes clean on proofreading gaffes

So funny -
Ragan is a firm specializing in communication training, analysis of communication, you name it. In today's email newsletter they distributed this story about unfortunate misspellings and typos.

Great sidebar, too:
Nobody’s perfect, not even the spell check

To help avoid grammar goofs we talked to Julie DeSilva, the director of editorial services at ProofreadNOW.com, a professional copyediting and proofreading firm. She suggested communicators run searches on these common terms the spell check might miss:

form/from
mange/manger (for manage/manager)
polices (for policies)
pubic (for public)
Sleight of hand not slight. Sleight means deceitful craftiness.
Hay is baled; water is bailed.
Interest is piqued not peaked.
Stocks fare well not fair well

Best tool of the day - Percent Change Calculator

For anyone who is a non-numbers type and has to do anything resembling financial PowerPoint slides, consider this my little Valentine's day gift to you:

NewsEngin Percent Change Calculator

The best part -- the only line of extraneous text on the page says, "The fact that you need this tool will be our little secret."

Mwah! xxoo

Best misspelling of the day

Now - I'm not an awesome speller. In the 6th grade I was finally chosen to be in the spelling bee and I was the first one of everyone in my grade school - kindergarten through 8th grade - to have to sit down. The word that outted me? Access. I hesitated on the last 's,' tripped by the bright light of scrutiny. My shame is still acute.

Which is whyI think I perpetually look for others in the same situation. Taking the bus with JT to work, we stopped at the corner of State St. and 16th St. [Ed note - in Chicago, when giving cross streets, you always begin with the north/south street and then give the east/west street, i.e. "Dearborn and Harrison" not "Lake and Clark." You're welcome.] As passengers loaded on, bundled and booted from the weather, I read the signs posted in the corner shop, which appeared to be some kind of mortgage broker or financial services shop.

"Equity Loans" "Refinancing" "401k Rollover" "Business Financing" "Dept Consolidation"

Wait - what? Dept consolidation? On a professionally printed sign in a window. So, if someone is going to handle all the Ps and Qs of paperwork relating to your DEBT consolidation, shouldn't they be pretty detail oriented? And with the current state of the financial industry's reputation for overlooking details (and thus lending people money they can't afford to repay for homes which are overvalued to begin with) I'd think a start-up operation would have the brains to say "Hmmm, perhaps I should not hang this one and order a new sign."


See previous: http://writergrlsramblings.blogspot.com/2008/01/blog-post.html

Voluntary simplicity

Moving in with JT a few months before our wedding, I had to confront a lot of stuff that I'd been hauling around from apartment to apartment as I wound my way up and down Chicago's neighborhoods and suburbs. While he had (and still has) a few boxes of things that are uncategorized mementos, photos, college papers, etc., he had a much easier time than I did with the process of clearing out old stuff in order to make room for "new."

I remember a quote, I think it was attributed to E.B. White re: editing, "You must kill your children." Meaning - when writing/editing, you tend to fall in love with a phrase or a plot point and you then begin writing around it in order to shore it up, make it useful in the context of the whole. These 'children' are too clever to be useful to the reader and must usually, despite your longing for them, be exorcised from the piece.

Cleaning out 10+ years of accumulated history is a lot like that: the fuzzy blue picture frame that holds a picture of friends you haven't talked to in three years, and have no desire to speak with again, really, is a child of your past. It looked "so awesome" on the wall of your first decrepit apartment, but now is forcing you to shore it up, with similar items from a similar era, a box and a square foot of space in which to store that box.


Insipirations:
Extreme Downsizing: How moving from a 6,000-square-foot custom home to a 370-square-foot recreational vehicle helped quell one family's 'House Lust.' Daniel McGinn, Newsweek.com, Feb. 12, 2008

Unclutterer.com

The Simple Living Network

Push - reality and humor

There's lots about my pregnancy that isn't hilarious. Or rather, it isn't hilarious in the moment, but hindsight softens the haze of hormones that I swore would never descend over me, and I can laugh about things like crying over the realization that, at 19 weeks, my feet disappeared from my visual field.

Just found a funny not-blog from a writer at Chicago mag, who with weekly updates, describes his reaction to his wife's pregnancy and all its attendant wackiness and learning. Give it a read - funny writing and, for any who are experiencing the miracle of life themselves, pretty poignant as well.


About Push:
A few years ago, Chicago's deputy dining editor and humor columnist Jeff Ruby, aka The Closer, learned that his wife was pregnant. For 40 weeks, Ruby kept a journal to chronicle the experience. Now, much to his wife’s dismay, he has released the journal on Chicagomag.com. "Not a single dumb argument or disturbing bodily malfunction has been omitted," he says. Push is not a blog, since the events aren't happening in real time (Ruby calls it a slog, "much like the nine months themselves"), but it is an extended flashback to the "most bizarre, scary, and humiliating nine months" of The Closer's life. (Note: you may notice the entries start at week 5. He decided to spare you the conception and the four uneventful weeks that followed.)"

Best Misspelling of the Day

I am definitely one of those poor souls who derive schadenfreude from typos - menus, advertisements thinly disguised as letters to my home, you get the picture.

There are some mistakes made because letters are close together on a keyboard (meet vs neet)

There are those made because the words are homynims (there and they're)

And then there are those made by people who listen, but do not read. Those are my favorite! Check this one out from a CNN blog today:
http://caffertyfile.blogs.cnn.com/2008/01/31/the-obama-clinton-debate/
See the comment by Karl in SF: "The economy is a mute issue."

It's a moot issue, Karl. Thanks for playing.

New versions of myself

Almost immediately after I started this blog, I discovered I was pregnant with twins - identical twins at that. There is nothing else I've experienced that has been so earth shattering - and so time consuming.

Writergrl 1.0:

• when tired, just push through it (i.e. attend grad school while working 55+ hours per week and planning then dismantling a wedding. no problem!)
• eat moderately, struggle a bit to get enough exercise and not gain weight
• never accept the helping hand, even when offered in sincerity because "it's more fun to do it myself."
• take my health completely for granted - never sick, can pretty much do any physical task I set my mind to and (finally) happy with the way I look physically

Writergrl 2.2:

• exhaustion that is literally like flipping a switch: when tired, I'm just out
• struggle to gain enough weight, deliberately limit the number of times I climb stairs, must rest for 30-45 minutes every night after work and before dinner / evening activities
• annoyed when someone on the bus doesn't give up their seat, grateful JT will carry the laundry basket for me
• shock and awe at how out of control my body/hormones are, forced to stop and take deep breaths after each flight of stairs, and I now waddle when I walk

Here's the strangest part: in my ever-more-vivid dreams, I'm not myself. Literally. People call my by my name, but the person who answers is, for example, a 55-year-old Chicago cop, who's puffing for breath at the top of the stairs.

JT even experienced this - he had a dream that I was Oprah.

Best photo of the day - Grand Prismatic Spring

From the WashingtonPost.com,

Grand Prismatic Spring, Yellowstone National Park, captures the essence of Yellowstone's world-renowned geysers and hot springs that are fed by the enormous heat from its active volcanic system. This 60 meter-wide, boiling hot spring has an array of vivid colors produced by thermophile bacteria that thrive in hot water.

Photo by Henry Holdsworth, Courtesy of Robert B. Smith

Best tool of the day - MeetingMeiser

Found at NYT.com:

a sister publication of CNET, BNET has found a way to figure out how much $$ is being wasted by a meeting. Called the MeetingMeiser, it uses the calculator from PayScale.com, which is usually used by job hunters trying to figure out how much to ask for.