This Much is True

Yes, that’s snow falling on my blog. Most of the blog is white so it doesn’t disturb reading much so I decided to do it. I like it. And I don’t have to shovel it. It’ll just be snowing on my blog until after the new year.

Well, I don’t really know you but I love what you said when you called Perez Hilton out as a “talentless dope”. This gives me hope that maybe there could be an end to the whole trend of people, who are devoid of talent, somehow becoming celebrities and being yammered on about on “entertainment” shows. So what will any waitress who has ever “served” Tiger Woods, and Jon Gosselin, and Michael Lohan, and Octomom, and anyone who has come in contact with Michael Jackson in the past fifty years, and anyone who has the last name “Kardashian”, and Spencer Pratt, and Heidi Montag, and…(well, we could go on a long time here but the idea of all these people is making me quite nauseous) do with themselves if the trend ends? Who cares?

Thank you, Sam. You’ve given me hope.

I’m not sure when I became a fan of Coronation Street. I think I watched it my entire life because surely my mom watched it while I was an infant. It was a constant in our home. When Coronation Street was on there was to be no talking and no answering the phone. And somewhere along the line, I started to like it. Maybe it’s how the show doesn’t drag things out for months and months like American soaps, maybe it’s because the people on it don’t all look perfect and they drink and they smoke and they even go to the bathroom. They eat toast in the morning, sitting at their tables, hair sticking off , faces reflecting how tired they are. They don’t look perfectly coiffed and wear their high heels and designer gowns around the house.

And they have memorable characters. Maggie Jones played one such memorable character–Blanche Hunt, a woman who never held anything back and could cut you down with a look or a put-down sharp enough cut through the toughest skin. Maggie Jones passed away this week at age 75. She played her last scenes in October but we in Canada will have to wait a good while to see those as we are several months behind in our episodes of Coronation Street. RIP Maggie Jones and thanks for all the laughs. If you’ve never seen her in action or want to again, here’s a video of her at an AA meeting, there to support her step-grandson. For Canadian viewers, the first part won’t be much of a spoiler as we all know Peter has a problem by now but if you go past 1:55 on the video, other spoilers will be revealed. It’s the first 1:55 that is classic Blanche anyway. No one could deliver those cutting lines like Maggie Jones. Also, check out a BBC video which lets you see Maggie Jones on Corrie in the 70s.

Some things can just make you smile with tears in your eyes. What simple yet powerful things we can do if we just choose to do so.

The geek in me thinks this Project Natal thing looks soo… oh no, there I’ve gone and drooled all over my keyboard. If I win the lottery, or sell the movie rights for my books, maybe I can have this one day.

And while I am excited by the idea, based on my experience with voice recognition software, I don’t think I’ll be winning any trivia games. I can just imagine how it might go:

Machine: Who wrote the books A Few Kinds of Wrong and This Much is True? (What? A girl can dream can’t she? Maybe the trivia game will have that as a question. It’s within the realm of possibility since the books exist and all.)

Me (after fainting and being revived several minutes later): Tina Chaulk.

Machine: No, I am sorry. Team her shock is not the correct answer.

Machine: What is the name of the anthem of Newfoundland and Labrador? (What? That might be a question.  In the super-hard category, you know, for those annoying people who know everything and can quote obscure 18th century poems and whole chapters from the Bible AND every line from the Simpsons. You know the kind I’m talking about. )

Me: The Ode to Newfoundland:

Machine: No, I am sorry. The old do to move the man’s is not correct.

Me: Oh, %*$# off.

Machine: No, I am sorry. Flock of is not the answer either.

This is my new favourite video. If you’re doing NaNoWriMo, just take three minutes or so to have a listen. And if you’re not doing NaNoWriMo, have a listen anyway, because it’s very catchy.

You can catch more videos from Kristina Horner on YouTube or you can read her blog.

You know when someone calculates the Vampire National Product of a nation (and finds it to be $771.5 million annually), that there’s a bit of a frenzy going on. And there is. It’s all about the new sequel to the movie New Moon, based on the second novel from the Twilight series by Stephenie Meyer.  It’s hoped that it will bring in $100 million on this, its opening weekend. I know people who don’t live anywhere near a movie theatre who will drive for hours today to use the tickets they bought last month to see the movie. There’s a whole lexicon to describe, not just Twilight and Twilight related things but the various levels of Twilight fans–from twilighter (a moderate fan) to twi-hard (a more obsessive fan) to twitard (someone really, really out there in obsessive fan love for Twilight), and right back to the people who don’t like Twilight and are called antis. (And if this alleged list of attacks on antis by Twilight fans is true, you might not want to be so vocal about not liking the series.)

And I don’t mind telling you I’m a teensy bit jealous. I really mean a teensy bit because I know the nature of this beast and that even if I could write a vampire book and do it justice, and hit all the right notes that Stephenie Meyer seems to have done with the Twilight series, chances are my vampire book would not create this kind of frenzy. This is an anomaly in the book world, just like when JK Rowling was told she would never make any money writing books for children then released the Harry Potter series, or when Dan Brown published his fourth book about a Da Vinci Code after publishing three novels which didn’t sell more than 10,000 copies each in their first runs. It’s lik e winning the lottery only much better because you made the money by doing something you love. So, the title of this post is facetious but I can’t help being a litle jealous and wondering what would have happened if Jennifer Collins, the main character in A Few Kinds of Wrong maybe drank blood instead of coffee, or could do a few magic spells on the side, or dropped her wrench, left the garage, and ran off to Rome to figure out a Vatican mystery. Hmmm, maybe I should start thinking about a sequel. A Few Kinds of Blood? A Few Kind of Magic? I’ll keep working on it.

Well, the words of the year lists have started coming out and already they have me painfully rolling my eyes (apparently you can’t roll them allllll the way back–once you get so far, it really hurts!) and ranting to my computer. At which time, my computer said, don’t tell me, go post on your blog about it.

Let’s start with the University of Oxford Press. They’ve named ‘unfriend’ as its word of the year. I know they just pick these things to cause debate but for me this particular word and this particular whole list makes me want to ‘unlearn’ what I’ve read on their list. For those of you who don’t know, ‘unfriend’ is a verb and means “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook”. Now, I don’t know what the reasons for this being the word of the year are.  Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program, says that the word has “real lex-appeal” and explains some more in their announcement. It’s not a particularly wonderful word to say as in, say my own personal favourite word, nonchalant. It’s not really a twist on the meaning of words like, for instance, the word Stephen Colbert created and Merriam-Webster named its 2006 word of the year, ‘truthiness’. ‘Unfriend’ seems boring and I’m pretty sure no one will understand it in ten, maybe five, maybe even one year. Really, the whole list has some pretty sad sack words, like ‘hashtag’ (the hash sign you add into twitter posts as a way of tagging certain words) and the ridiculous–I am not kidding you here–’teabagger’ which the Oxford University Press says refers to a person who takes part in the anti-Obama Tea Party protests, but which is much better know as someone who partakes in teabagging which is, um, well, I’ll let Wikipedia tell you about it.

When you look at their complete list of notable words, it’s hard to find one that’s not related to either technology or Obama. Oh, but there’s “tramp stamp’ (a tattoo on the lower back of a woman) which has only been around since about 2003. Oxford University Press, if you were my facebook friend, you know what I’d do, don’t ya? I’ll give you a hint. It’s the word of the year.

Then onto Webster’s New World which has chosen as its word of the year, “Distracted Driving”. Hmm, is that a word? I mean, it’s two words, maybe more of a term of the year. But, maybe some of their other notable words could be more like words. There’s um, well, they say that other notable ‘words’ are ‘cloud computing’ and ‘wallet biopsy’, ‘wrap rage’ and ‘go viral’. Here’s one: Word– “a speech sound or series of speech sounds that symbolizes and communicates a meaning usually without being divisible into smaller units capable of independent use” or “any segment of written or printed discourse ordinarily appearing between spaces or between a space and a punctuation mark”. Maybe you could get your head around that one and then give us a word of the year.

I know, that’s just two words of the year, but the others are not out yet (at least I couldn’t find them). I’ll get back to you when Merriam-Webster’s and the American Dialect Society tells us their picks. I bet they’ll be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. Now, THAT is a word.

Signings and readings of A Few Kinds of Wrong (with more to come):

• Book signing: Saturday, October 24 at Christmas at the Glacier 2:30 pm to 4:30 pm
• Book signing: Sunday, October 25 at Costco, Stavanger Drive 1-3 pm
• Reading: Wednesday, October 28 at the Michael J. McCarthy Memorial Readings Series in the Ross King Memorial Library in Mount Pearl (short reception to follow) 7:00 to 8:30 pm
• Signing: Saturday, October 31 at Costco, Stavanger Drive 1-3 pm
• Book signing: Saturday, Nov 21 Coles (Avalon Mall) 3-5 pm
• Book signing: Sunday, Nov 29th at Costco, Stavanger Drive 1-3
• Book signing: Sunday, December 6 Coles (Village Mall) on 2-4 pm
• Book signing: Friday, December 11 Coles (Avalon Mall) 7-9 pm

I will be signing copies of A Few Kinds of Wrong at Chapter’s, St. John’s tomorrow afternoon from 3-5 pm. I hope to see you there.