It's kind of a mini-tradition in the O'Connor Clarke household to use up the leftover Christmas turkey in a major curry-fest.

Turkey curry is one of my all-time favourite dishes. I roast and grind my own spices to make a balti masala paste, and will happily spend hours in the kitchen chopping, stirring, and generally pottering about over my curry. All sounds a bit pretentious, I know, but I promise it's all worth it.

There isn't really a recipe for my curry, although I might try to write it down this Christmas - if I remember to. Thinking about it earlier today, though, I remembered the extra special rice recipe I invented earlier this year, and thought it might be worth posting here.

My parents were over for a couple of weeks around Halloween, and we served some Arctic Char with this rice accompaniment. It was such a hit, I just might have to knock it together again for this year's curry.

Here's what you do:

Get up in the morning, wash your paws, and then start the process of filling your house with maddeningly wonderlicious aromas for a whole day.

Seriously – start this reasonably early in the day so the milk base for your rice dish has hours to steep.

Peel a large onion and shove about four cloves into it.

Pop it into a pot with a couple of inches of milk, a cinnamon stick, a sprinkling of turmeric, five or six black peppercorns, a pinch of saffron strands, and about a half dozen dried kaffir lime leaves.

(The lime leaves are the most important thing here. They can be hard to track down - if you're in Toronto, you can generally find them either in Chinatown or in one of the terrific Indian grocery stores along Gerrard St. East. Wherever you are, you should be able to find them if you ask in your local Asian food market. Once you've cooked with kaffir lime leaves, the challenge is to resist the temptation to add them to everything you're cooking.)

Bring the mixture to a rolling boil, switch it off immediately, whack a lid on and leave it alone.

When you’re ready to do the rice, remove the cinnamon, peppercorns, onion/cloves, and lime leaves from the milk. Chuck 'em.

Take some really good basmati rice. Don't rinse it or mess around with it. Trust me. Measure about a handful and a bit per person in a good, heavy-bottomed pot with a tight-fitting lid, then pour the milk mixture in on top.

You need just enough liquid to cover the rice by about half an inch (stick a clean thumb into it - the depth of the liquid above the surface of the rice should just cover your thumbnail). If the infused milk isn't quite enough fluid, add some water and give the whole thing a good swill around.

Bring the rice to a boil over high heat, stir it around well with a fork, then switch the heat off, cover the pot with a tight-fitting lid, and LEAVE IT ALONE. Don't move the pot off the ring. Don't be tempted to lift the lid. Just let it sit there until you're ready. Within about 12-15 minutes you'll have perfect rice.

Just before serving, splash in a glug or so of really good olive oil and fork the rice over.

Yum.

Giovanni Rodriguez, an official friend of Thornley Fallis and leader instigator of the Hubbub international PR network, has some outstanding news to share over at the new "Social Media Today" team blog:

"Hubbub client JAJAH has an offer that’s hard to refuse — on Christmas Day, they will pick up the tab for any phone call between the 80 countries in Zones 1, 2 and 3. "

Zones 1, 2 and 3 - in case you're wondering - covers A LOT of countries, including all of my far-flung family members in England, Ireland, Belgium and the U.S.

More details on how JAJAH's free calling system works, here.

I'd love to know something of what the hell happened here...

At 08:31 yesterday morning, a news release purporting to be from Innotrac Corporation of Atlanta, Ga. hit the wires, announcing a "multi-year, multi-million dollar customer service and technical support agreement" with a large corporate client.

Trading in the company's stock went crazy, with the quote doubling and trading volume coming close to 300,000 shares (compared to an average of just 10,000).

Later in the day, the company issued a statement saying that the release "was not authorized by the Company and is totally untrue."

Now would be a good time to call in your crisis communications counsel.

A couple of weeks ago, I posted mournfully about my old 3rd gen iPod succumbing to the infamous battery death problem.

After a little research and some thought jogging from Dave Jones, I found DM Depot -- a company specializing in iPod parts and repairs down in St. Catharines, Ontario.

They sell battery kits and other goodies you can install yourself, but I opted for the professional service for a few bucks extra. Filled out a simple repair request form online, paid my $40, and carefully wrapped my beloved podule in many layers of bubble wrap before shipping it out.

The very next day, I received three emails in succession from DM Depot. I'll let their messages (and the timestamps) tell the tale:

20 Dec 2006 11:22:39
IPOD 3RD GEN HAS BEEN RECEIVED
WE WILL NOTIFY YOU ONCE REPAIR COMPLETED

20 Dec 2006 11:29:48
NEWBATTERY INSTALLED; FIRMWARE UPDATED.

20 Dec 2006 11:33:42
ORDER SHIPPD TO:
Michael O'Connor Clarke
CANADA POST XPRESSPOST TRACKING NUMBER: XXX etc.

My treasured iPod arrived home today. They included the old battery and even the packaging the brand new battery came in. Damn - they even polished it. Needless to say, it works perfectly.

Let the record show: DM Depot just plain, flat-out, utterly ROCKS!

I don't know who these guys are - their "About Us" page doesn't say much - but they're my personal lightning-fast, ultra cheap, iPod-repairing Superheroes.

Tags: ipod repair, dm depot, customer service

Second bit of news picked up from Dave Winer today is that Microsoft have applied to patent certain aspects and implementations of RSS in use.

Dave describes this document as a "patent granted to Microsoft," but I think he misspoke in the heat of the moment. The document in question is an application, filed over a year ago, but only recently published. (According to the USPTO website, this 18-month lag in publishing is entirely normal: "Most patent applications filed on or after November 29, 2000, will be published 18 months after the filing date of the application...")

I read as much of the patent application as I could before my brain leapt out of my skull and attempted to throttle me. It's almost wilfully opaque stuff (written by patent lawyers - go figure).

Seeking insight elsewhere, I found Dave Berlind at ZDNet describing it thus:

"Microsoft has apparently applied to the United States Patent and Trademark Office for a patent on the Really Simple Syndication protocol (RSS)..."

If that were true, it would be a truly scary and insane thing indeed. However, in my attempt to distill meaning from this thing I didn't get the sense that they're actually applying to patent the protocol in anyway.

Thank goodness for Steve Borsch, who has managed to read the whole thing and describes it as:

"...a process patent intended to "own" not the RSS protocol...but most of the ways it will be used."

There's also a related application, here, which appears to describe a browser-based feedreader, as far as I can tell.

Anne Broache has more context and background at ZDNet News.

Tags: dave winer, rss, microsoft, patent

Via Dave Winer (by way of The Telegraph) comes the remarkable news that Brenda - also known as Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II - is becoming a podcaster.

Can we say "tipping point" now please?

Cruising Amazon.ca for last-minute present ideas last night, I came across this:


(Click the image to go to the original Amazon page).

Seems that Julie Andrews, beloved star of Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Victor/Victoria, etc. speaks fluent "leet".

OMGWTFLOLBBQ!!!!!111eleventy

Today, our beautiful, funny, warm-hearted baby boy turned four years old.

Third of the O'Connor Clarkes, second of the BlogSprogs, but first today in our hearts and thoughts.

Happy Birthday Ruairi. We love you so, so much.

One day soon, you'll be old enough to read this yourself, my Ruairi. I'm conscious of that as I write these words, and it adds something to the thoughts that drive my fingers across the keyboard.

There was a time, sweet Ruairi, when we thought - for one awful, soul-chilling moment - that you wouldn't ever make it this far. Seems terribly strange to be writing that now, almost four years later, but you had a rocky start, poor fella. Whacked by an e.coli infection in your blood when you were only six weeks old, then chicken pox - almost an insult on top of the injury - when you were still in your third month of life.

You've grown so much in four years. Everywhere you go, you leave a lasting impression on people. Grandma is just one of the many people to have commented that you've "been here before" - you have that presence about you, that sense of being perfectly in tune with the world, and completely in charge of it at the same time. You'll do great things in your time, Ruairi O'Connor Clarke. Great things.

This has been a huge year for you. You started in big school in September, in JK - so proud and happy as you marched off with your class into your first day. You're swimming by yourself now, riding your bike, writing your own name, counting to 11 - such a big boy.

Just a few short days ago, conscious of the fact that you were growing up, you told me that you wouldn't be going to sleep with your "ba-ba" any more - the bottle of warm milk you've depended on, more for comfort than sustenance, for most of this last four years. We've tried to pry it from you so often before now; tried to persuade you to give it up. And then, after all this time, you just suddenly decided it was time to stop. That was a very Ruairi moment. You know your own mind, little man.

Tonight's birthday dinner was another good example - documented here for your future self to remember. You chose a pork roast with stuffing, mashed potatoes, bundles of asparagus and green beans wrapped with bacon, and gravy. What a wonderful, grown up meal to pick for your birthday supper! You're an extraordinary kid, Ruairi.

(Your birthday breakfast choice, in case you've forgotten, was Chocolate Lucky Charms. Precisely the kind of thing a little boy ought to pick, and we were happy to indulge you just this once. You didn't like them. Who can blame you? Like being punched in the face with a pound of wet sugar. Uck. The box is destined to sit in the cupboard for the next few months until we finally decide it's time to chuck handfuls out for the birds and squirrels.)

I should probably explain some of the earlier links here, Ruairi - for you, and for other people reading this. When you were still growing in Mommy's tummy, I found out that two of my friends - one in England and one in Florida - were also going to be daddies around the same time as you were due to be born. Between the three of us we set up BlogSprogs - the first team blogging effort created by three expectant fathers. We were quite a hit back then - you, Cameron Turner, and Sawyer Matrullo were famous long before you were even born. It was a very 2002 thing to do.

Which reminds me: your rotten Dad managed to miss Cameron's birthday this year. Happy, happy birthday baby girl, and love to your Mum and Dad. Hope you're enjoying your trip to Paris.

So. On my way home to cook your birthday feast tonight, Ruairi, I got to thinking about this recent "Five Things" meme that's been doing the rounds in the blogosphere of late. My mind was going through one of those list-making sessions it sometimes does - running the to-do lists, the "must remember to blog that" lists - and I started wondering about an altogether different list. I was wondering what four things (not five, for obvious reasons) I'd want for you - if I could ever distill it down to just four things. What four things would I want for all of my children, if I could give them anything in the world.

This is not really one of those blogging meme things - it's not something you'd "tag" other people with. It's just a few of the points that seemed important to me as my thoughts cascaded through the flow of fatherly feeling on my walk home.

Four things I want for my children:

1. Health.
Almost goes without saying. I've watched over you, Ruairi, as you lay, fretful and feverish. I've walked the floor with Charlie in my arms, miserable with colic; hugged Lily close as her persistent ear infections racked her tiny body - all the time praying to God to give me the pain, to take it away from you. Be healthy. Grow strong, my babies.

2. Happiness.
We try so hard to give you this. Always. But it's ultimately something you can only give yourselves. Whatever you do, whoever you grow up to be - if you find that you're not happy in some way, change it. Mommy and I will help. That's what we're here for.

3. Balance.
Can you be happy without this? Probably not. Perhaps it's the same thing, or closely linked at least. To live a balanced life seems to me to be the finest thing one can strive towards. I'm still not sure quite how you do that, but you guys are helping me get there. I hope I can help you too.

4. Wealth.
Does that seem wrong? Too materialistic; too crass? Listen: your Mom and I have been poor. We've been (comparatively) rich. Poor sucks. If you can, be rich - and then give all you can to those who aren't.

Let these four things come to you, Ruairi, Lily, and Charlie - and remember to phone home to your Mum at least once a week. You'll do OK.

Happy Birthday, baby boy. See you in the morning.

I hate going to bed angry. Last night, I had to shut off the laptop and scarf one of Sausage's fantastic Chocolate Crinkle cookies before stomping off to bed in a huff. For the first time ever, even La Belle Saucisse's remarkable baking prowess was unable to lift my gloom.

First, there was the whole Sony PSP fake blog fiasco, which still has me seething with indignation. OK, so you massively screwed up - but have the cojones to come out and say that you screwed up, FFS.

No - the sum of Sony's response seems to have been to post one faux-humourous semi-apology to the site, lock off all the negative feedback from view, then take the entire site offline.
It remains offline as of this writing.

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

Whatcha gonna do, chaps? Deny it ever happened? Make like there's no such thing as a cache?

This ostrich-like behaviour, even more so than them committing egregious acts of fake bloggery in the first place, has me practically incandescent with indignation.

So then, as I'm still fuming over this episode, I come across the news that there are individuals and even companies out there building a business around gaming the social bookmarking sites - Digg, del.icio.us, et al. I was spluttering and slack-jawed with disgust at this last night. I still am.

Jason Calacanis has been all over this story, even posting a bounty of US$100 for tips leading to the exposure of social news scammers.

Check this out - here's a site overtly offering a service to drive your bookmarks higher up in the rankings at Digg (for a fee, of course). Gah! There's even one of these flagitious organizations right here in Toronto (according to the info in their Whois record). Bastards.

Vaspers believes this kind of thing will kill the blogosphere. I don't know - I still have some faith in the intelligence and discernment of educated humanity, and the self-policing resilience of the blogosphere (I'm a bloggyanna, perhaps).

The fact that the Sony PSP site disappeared could be read as a good thing. It was clueless; outed as such; and duly killed - helps to ensure more credulous punters won't accidentally stumble into the cluehole.

But I do know that the pollution and stench of this kind of behaviour continues to cast a pall over the actions of the profession to which I belong. Many of the most negative discussions tracking these two areas of unpleasantness (the Sony PSP thing and the emerging practice of paying to stack the social boomarking sites) point to PR people and agencies as the culprits. Not true, as far as I can tell, but it's understandable that the scumbag lowlife label continues to flow towards us. We have got to do better, all of us.

I'm a bit more mellow tonight, sitting on the bed with a glass of Rioja, listening to the soothing downstairs chatter of Sausage's book club friends. I'm resisting the urge to go and check out the comments at Jason's blog - for tonight, at least, I can't bear it getting any worse.

(Pat yourself on the back in a sad and rather geeky way, btw, if you can correctly identify the source of my headline.)

My dear friend Kate Atherley, one of the very best marketing people I've ever had the pleasure to work with (and a damn fine knitter AND married to the wickedly smart Norman Wilner too) just made me blush and giggle at the same time with one tiny email.

She's been reading Randall Munroe's outstanding xkcd webcomic and said, "this one in particular made me think of you":



Awww... thanks Kate. Which reminds me, I keep forgetting to point Kate to this (hat tip to Colin McKay for the link).

Kate's fulltime squeeze Norman, meanwhile, alerts me to the news that Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2006 is "Truthiness". Splendid news.

Humiliated by the cold, unforgiving spotlight of the blogosphere, Sony has posted a statement to the top of the hideous fake blog I pointed to a couple of days ago.

Under the heading "Here's the deal", the site now carries this disclaimer:

"Busted. Nailed. Snagged. As many of you have figured out (maybe our speech was a little too funky fresh???), Peter isn't a real hip-hop maven and this site was actually developed by Sony. Guess we were trying to be just a little too clever. From this point forward, we will just stick to making cool products, and use this site to give you nothing but the facts on the PSP.

Sony Computer Entertainment America"

For the full story of this ignominious climb-down, check out MediaPost's Online Media Daily.

As the MediaPost piece says, "After the confession was posted, comments on the site were shut down." Actually, it's even worse than that. They haven't just blocked new comments, they've removed all previous comments from the site. Nice little display of historical revisionism there. Very "down with the kids", I'm sure.

I notice from this page that Sony is still listed as a member of the Word Of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA). This whole fake blog initiative - even though they've now 'fessed up and kinda sorta semi-apologized, seems to me to be a clear violation of WOMMA's central Code of Ethics, viz. (straight from the WOMMA site):

The essence of the WOMMA Code comes down to the Honesty ROI:

• Honesty of Relationship: You say who you're speaking for
• Honesty of Opinion: You say what you believe
• Honesty of Identity: You never obscure your identity

Looks to me like Sony should be getting the Big Chicken Dinner, if the WOMMA guys have any guts.

[UPDATE: As of 14:45, Thursday December 14th, the Sony fake blog appears to have been torn down entirely. Attempts to reach the site now time out. Nice.]

[UPDATE II: If the WOMMA people prove toothless in this, perhaps the FTC will be moved to respond - this piece in the Washington Post suggests they're getting ready to wade in to this area of deceptive marketing.]

I *promise* this isn't lame. Really. You know me by now. In five years and nine months of blogging, not once have I fallen off the straight-and-narrow path and used this blog to promote a client.

Sure, I've talked about the companies I've been working with before - and probably said nice things about them (at least while sober). But as far as I can recall, not once have I come here frothing over with excitement about a client and wanting to publicly sing their praises like this.

I'm making an exception for Shipping Pal.

About an hour ago, I was in my colleague Chris Clarke's office, trying to figure out the best (i.e. fastest, and cheapest) way to ship my broken iPod off to DMDepot in St. Catharines for repair.

Chris walked me through Shipping Pal's Quick Quote thingy. You give it a From and To address, and an idea of what you're shipping, it pretty much does the rest. The site trots off and checks a slew of different couriers (from tiny little ones all the way up to UPS), and it comes back with a list of different options in a matter of seconds.

You pick the price and delivery date/time that suits you, click the button, and it processes the order, prints the waybills - everything. Simple, but bloody brilliant.

We've just got through a stack of parcels at home, shipping all the Christmas goodies off to our many friends and family members in the UK, Ireland, and Belgium. We did a fair amount of shopping online, of course - Amazon and such. For all the things we bought here and shipped, though, I wish I'd known more about Shipping Pal a couple of weeks ago. Would have saved a heck of a lot of figuring out.

So. There you have it. Not only do I now carry an advert (for the next few weeks, at least), but I'm now posting an absolutely shameless and overt client rave on my blog. Am I selling out? Doesn't feel like it. You can make up your own mind.

To me, it's straightforward: this blog is my space, where I come to write about stuff that genuinely interests and/or excites me. I point to things I think other people - the kind of people who choose to come here and read this kind of ramble - might also be interested in. Shipping Pal fits that bill (ugh - terrible shipping pun); it's pretty much incidental that they just happen to be a client too.

You can tell that I'm still somewhat conflicted - otherwise I wouldn't be so painfully attempting to justify something that probably needs no forced justification. Whatever. Have a look at Shipping Pal. Or not, as you see fit.

Here endeth the pitchery.

How things have changed.

I mentioned that bloody awful Raging Cow (La vache qui rage) fake bloggery in a post earlier today, which set me to pondering how far things have come in the blogosphere in a relatively short few years.

In case you missed it, Raging Cow was, AFAIK, the first fake blog initiative to be launched by a marketing firm, way back in early 2003. It inspired a veritable deluge of invective and blogger backlash, including a boycott (organized by the bloody wonderful Tim Ireland) and even a sort-lived parody blog (organized by Kevin Marks and yours truly). The product, incidentally, was some kind of trendified milkshake thing. Try finding it in your corner store today. Exactly.

We're still seeing utterly contemptible fake blogs, alas (although perhaps no more udderly contemptible ones - it's a long way from the ridiculous Raging Cow episode to the sublime and totally non-bogus Christine Halvorson's Stonyfield Farms blogs).

But in perusing my own archives, looking for earlier posts on the topic of fake blogs, I happened across a post from April 23, 2002 that stopped me in my tracks. Forgive me for recycling my old dust bunnies here...

Way back then, I was moved to comment: "I can't believe I’m the only PR guy in blogdom. There must be other flackbloggers in the world."

Yikes. I don't know if I was actually the only flack blogging in 2002 - surely not. I mean, I know Jeremy Pepper was posting from as early as 1990 :-)

This is not some conceited attempt to plant a "first flack on the blog" flag, btw (I'm sure there were others out there too) - it's more a moment of personal revelation. I'm just tickled at how far things have come from the days when I had to explain to my boss at the gigantic PR firm I used to work for that it wasn't pronounced "B-Log".

Sitting here in late 2006, you can barely fire up a feed-reader without hitting a flack blogger. In Canada, we even have a splendid little Firefox plugin, the Canuck PR Toolbar to help us track all of our favourite bloggers in the Canadian troposphere (and there are many).

I think the closest thing we have to a canonical list of global PR blogs is probably Constantin Basturea's Bloglines catalogue, featuring over 500 individual entries, from Argentina through Latvia and beyond.

My, how we've grown.

My colleagues at 76design, sister company to Thornley Fallis, just pulled the covers off their extraordinarily shiny new website.

Pardon me if I gush with excitement for a moment, but you know you've landed in the right place when you discover that the company you're working with builds a corporate site that features the opening bars of the Clash's "I'm so bored with the U.S.A."

(No particular political or anti-American statement there, btw - the site features an interactive cork board: "Bored of Cork". The song just fits.)

We've seen some particularly egregious examples of fake blogs in the past.

From Raging Cow to the Wal-Marting thing, marketers have been running the entire gamut of authenticity from A to B (my apologies to Dorothy Parker).

But I have to say that this latest PlayStation Portable blog, created for Sony by advertising firm Zipatoni, scales impressive new lows.

So much to fisk, so little time. I'll leave it to AdRants to summarize the main problems with this woefully misguided initiative. I have neither the time, nor the energy to get into it myself.

I did take a couple of minutes to follow the trail of breadcrumbs leading to the Zipatoni site, where I encountered this rather disturbing piece of copy:

"At Zipatoni, buzz marketing means getting into consumers' conversations. We know we can't control the dialogue. But we tap into the right insight to deliver an idea that will get opinion leaders and even entire communities talking about it on their own. Just like that, we've converted the consumer into a passionate and credible message-bearer. Now that's good news."

Further evidence, to my mind, of two things - if you're thinking of including anything even remotely blog-like in your marketing mix:

1. Talk to your PR and communications people first, not your ad shop or, God help us, your "buzz marketing" firm;
2. Your first question, whenever anyone in the room suggests a blog initiative, should be: where's your blog?

I did a three-minute, totally non-scientific search on the names of three of the agency principals at Zipatoni. Not one of them appears to have a blog. I could be wrong, of course. Apologies in advance if my powers of Googling failed me.

Asking an agency-type who doesn't blog to help you create a blog-based marketing initiative is like asking a Nepalese sherpa to guide your Kenyan safari. Don't do it.

As for the whole idea of fake blogs, I find I want to quote Ivy Lee two days in a row:


Where, oh where is Tara Hunt when we need her?

I've got a huge long post brewing in the background here, but it's late and I have an early start. Rather than rush it out, let me share instead a splendid quotation I just stumbled across in my research.

If I didn't know the source, and was pressed to hazard a guess, I'd probably suggest that those words came straight out of the 95 Theses of the Cluetrain Manifesto.

In fact, they were voiced in the early years of the 20th Century by Ivy Lee, offering counsel to John D. Rockefeller Jr.

Often described as the founder of public relations, Ivy Lee has his detractors and critics, but one thing is unquestioned: he had an extraordinary influence on the early days of this profession.

One hundred years after Lee created and issued the first ever news release, we now have a great deal of energy in PR circles being devoted to re-inventing what is, admittedly, a tired and outmoded contrivance.

I hope, for the sake of this reputation-tarnished business, we're all dedicating at least as much effort to upholding Lee's mantra.

Right now, this blog is the #1 search hit on Google (out of 35,800,000) for the search "Canadian media innovations".


That's gotta be worth something.

The latest installment of Charlie's rip-roaring adventure tale is up over at Charlie's Den.

I've also enabled RSS on the site, so my nine-year old son now has his first site feed.

Can't really remember the kind of things I wanted when I was nine. Hot Wheels cars, I imagine, and Sherbet Fountains. Certainly nothing like an RSS feed for my own blog.

(With a hat tip for the link to David Weinberger)

Lawrence Lessig, renowned Stanford Law Prof, who has risen to well-deserved prominence in recent years thanks to his pioneering work on the Creative Commons initiative, a series of excellent books, and his tireless fight against the copyright stupidity of Mammon wherever it is found, has a terrifically entertaining short post simply titled "OK, so I'm wrong."

Warning: do not attempt to imbibe hot liquids while reading this post.

Labels: copyfight, copyright, dead celebrities, free culture, lawrence lessig

As a number of people have already commented, one of the best things about being swept up in the recent Canadian Blog Awards wackiness, was getting to discover some terrific blogs - some new, some just new to me.

Two in particular have now made it into my regular reading list, so a quick, cheery wave of support to:

Sheena - my nominator (nominatrice?) and a thoroughly entertaining writer.

CheekierMeSly - home of one of my former PC DOCS colleagues and one of the smartest, funniest people I've been fortunate enough to come across in business.

Dem's good readin'.

I'm only slightly over a month into the new gig at Thornley Fallis, and things are going bonkers.

That's a good thing, btw. A very, very good thing.

Busier than a moth in a mitten. It's all good.

But I need help. Yes, I know... [insert lame therapy-related joke here].

Want to join the team? Want to work inside one of the smartest, most clueful PR firms in Canada?

Abandon ye the drudgery of your moribund flackshop; come over to the dark side of the force. Wait! No - that's wrong. Um...

Look: there's a bunch of really smart people, free pop & snacks, great clients, a big new business pipeline, all the social media goodness you can handle, outstanding bonus system - you'd like it here. Ping me and I'll explain further.

Oh, I should point something out - in order to get hired at Thornley Fallis you need to be in possession of:

a. more than one brain cell;
b. a personality (no recent charisma-bypass patients, please - but no over-the-top fluffy bunnies either), and;
c. a really solid body of experience - I don't really need junior staff right now, I need ass-kicking seniors. People who want my job.

Plus, of course, you need to be able to write like you're bleeding diamonds onto a page of silk, and never, ever treat a journalist as the "them" to your "us" - that dog don't hunt.

Know anyone like this? Send them my way.

[set rant=1]

I feel the urge to vent. Haven't unleashed a decent tide of invective in far too long, and the pressure cooker's about to pop...

Exhibit A - am I the only one to find the current Bell Solo print ads gob-smackingly stupid?  In particular, they're currently running a series of full-pagers in most of the Toronto papers, with the central pitch being that their youth-targeted mobile phone plans are splendidly affordable. To illustrate this, their creative compares the cost of a Solo package to a range of other things; the hook being "Less than the cost of..."

The particular ad that really has me shaking my head is one in which the cost of a monthly rate plan is pegged as "Less than a day of feeding the meter", with a nice big shot of a parking meter to hammer home the point.  My beef: why on earth would you want to affix a good statement about your product to something most people really hate and resent having to pay so much for?

OK, so maybe I'm just being cranky.

Exhibit B - I found a flyer in the mailbox the other morning, promoting a kind of warehouse sale of Persian rugs. The top line on the flyer managed to flip my pedant bit the moment I saw it: "Enjoy the Colors". This is Canada, mate - we still know how to spell words like "colour" up here.

From there, things just get weird.  Overleaf, the flyer leads with: "Iran U.S. Trade Embargo Is Over".  My first thought was: "Um... but that's not actually true. Is it?" I'll confess I was a little shaky on this; as far as I knew the U.S. trade sanctions against Iran were still in place. A little deep Googling turns up the news that a specific sanction covering the importation of "certain foodstuffs and carpets" was indeed lifted. In April 2000.

Now this isn't directly stated, but the clear suggestion is that the ending of the embargo is recent news. I know one shouldn't necessarily expect absolute veracity in advertising copy, but leading your pitch with what amounts to a brazen deception? That seems plain evil.

The angle for the thing is explained further: "Due to the direct trade of rugs Between U.S. & IRAN a large shipment Of rugs which normally would have Gone from Canada to collectors in New York And L.A. has been assigned to our company To liquidate them by the way of public sale, All types."

(That's verbatim, btw - including the bizarre, random capitalization.)

Examine this pitch for a moment. Starting with a false premise, intended to suggest that there's a wonderful flood of new rugs into Canada due to the easing of trade sanctions in the U.S., they then imply (if I'm reading this right) that their company was previously involved in the illicit business of importing rugs in breach of trade embargoes, using Canada as a back door to American collectors. Is that about the size of it? Or am I still being bad tempered?

Perhaps they're just brilliantly creative. The heck do I know about advertising? Truth is, I probably wouldn't have given this sleazy little flyer a second thought if it wasn't for their use of one other awkward North Americanism; one that is guaranteed to push my grumpy button every time.

Towards the bottom of the copy it says: "First come, first serve". Grrrrrrr....

Those who arrive first will be the first to be served. If that's what you mean, remember the 'd', dammit. 

Unless you were actually suggesting that the first to come would get the first chance to serve later customers. Perhaps you were. Not content with importing dodgy rugs, perhaps you're running some kind of pyramid selling gig here too, where the first come serves the second, who serves the third, and so forth. Enterprising of you.

This particular bit of phrase-buggery sits right up there alongside exclamations such as "that's a twenty dollar value!" - a construction I had never encountered until I moved to Canada. Even though I hardly watch the box these days - just the news and Studio 60 - I can still hear a well-known TV pitchwoman singing out "That's a two hundred dollar value, absolutely free!"

Your discount might be worth two hundred dollars in value, or you might conceivably say that your $200 freebie is a great value - but the construction "a [X] value" just makes my teeth itch.

It's at this point I wish I'd paid closer attention back in the fourth form, to Ms. Williams' endless lectures on articles, determiners, quantifiers, and the adjectival use of nouns. I've forgotten many of the rules, but years of BBC-fed conditioning mean that I can still instinctively hear the flaw. Can't tell you precisely why this particular phrase chafes me so, I just know it's bollixed up somehow.  I'm sure one or other of my more erudite readers will be able to label the error for me.

Tags: grammar, advertising, cranky pedant

I've got at least seven other posts lined up in my head - things I must and will write at some point in the next day or so - but I'm afraid Donna Papacosta just wiped out my focus for the next 30 minutes by tagging me with this "Five Things You Don't Know About Me" thing. As Mitch Joel just said, it's kind of "the social media equivalent of a chain letter", but what the heck - I'll play...

1. My full name is Michael Antony John O'Connor Clarke, but the O'Connor part wasn't always there. When Leona and I married, we agreed to knit our names together - she was the O'Connor part, I was the Clarke, hence: O'Connor Clarke (no hyphen, but remember the 'e' please). John is my Confirmation name, btw.

2. I once turned down legendary football star Bobby Charlton's autograph. I was very young, probably only three or four years old. He was signing photos in Birmingham department store Rackhams, and I got separated from my two older brothers in front of me in the line. By the time the security guy let me through to see Sir Bobby, I was in tears and told him clearly that I didn't want an autograph, "I just want my Mom!" Oh, the shame!

3. I hate socks. If I could go the whole year without ever donning a pair, I'd be happy. But I chose to live in Canada. Not really an option up here.

4. One of my very first jobs was working behind the bar in the biggest Indian restaurant in Birmingham (the Kashmir, in the old Tivoli Centre, Yardley). A typical shift was 9pm till midnight on Friday and/or Saturday nights. I was 15. My Dad was the bouncer. There's a veritable lode of stories from that period of my life, for sure.

5. I was lead singer in a (terrible) post-punk band from around '77 to '81.

Phew. OK, so now I'm supposed to tag some other unfortunates. Hmmm...

Jeneane Sessum, might play. Colin McKay probably will too. Chris Locke, the original Chief Blogging Officer, will most likely snort at the whole idea (even though there are at least 5 gazillion things we'd all really like to know about him). Fascinated to see what Frank Paynter might offer up. And finally, Daisy is usually game for a meme, although her blog seems to have got a bit stuck about a month ago.

Tags: Jeneane Sessum, Colin McKay, Chris Locke, Frank Paynter, Daisy, Donna Papacosta

My 2.5 year old iPod has, sadly, ceased to be a portable device. It now sits pretty much permanently in the Bose SoundDock in the kitchen, where it is still an essential and well-loved part of the daily soundtrack of our lives.

Alas, the sodding thing (podding thing?) suffers from the well-known battery failure issue that affected so many of the early generation iPods - it won't hold a charge for much more than 20 minutes, and has a tendency to shut down for no apparent reason even when the battery is supposedly fully charged.

I was about to dive into an extended grumble about this, having heard through the webvines that there's no easy, affordable fix for the problem. After a couple of minutes of Googling, however, it appears that there may indeed be a fix.

Used to be that Apple would quote almost as much to repair out-of-warranty iPods as it costs to purchase a new one - but it seems they've changed their policy at some point in the recent past, and now offer battery replacements for rather less than they used to charge. This page lists battery replacement at $69 (plus $10.77 shipping). Might be worth checking that out - it's still cheaper than springing for a new podule.

Or I guess I could try to find a mains cable long enough to stretch from home to my office...

Thanks to Qumana, I was able to type this up offline last night, while warming seat 11 in car 4 of the 18:09 Via Rail train from Kingston to Toronto. Bit of a value-free rant, I'm afraid, but there you go.

It's 20:43 right now. The train should have pulled in to Union Station half an hour ago, but we've been parked somewhere east of Coburg for something approaching two hours now. There's some kind of an accident up ahead on the line, and so we're stuck.

No great news or moments of epiphany to impart here. It just sucks to be sitting here breathing the stale, recirculated air with my laptop battery dying, so I'm seeking solace in the simple act of fingers flying across the keyboard. I've caught up with all my feed-reading, consumed three newspapers, scarfed down the free Pringles and pop from the long-suffering Via guard.

Running out of options.

Kicking myself now that I neglected to pack my book for this business trip. I have about 30 pages to go in The Time Traveler's Wife, which is utterly gripping. It's lying on the floor beside our bed at home, darn it.

Staring out across rural southern Ontario in the pitch dark - not a single sign of civilization to be seen out there. Not sure where we are, but it's sparsely populated, for sure. It's just possible the train actually took a wrong turn somewhere and fell off the face of the Earth into the void.

My day started at 04:30 - up in time to iron my shirt and trot out into the flurries towards our local Go Transit station. Caught the 05:56 downtown so that I'd be in Union Station early enough to get the 06:55 train back out eastwards to Kingston.

Battery light flashing. Laptop fading fast. Me too.

...

Next day...

Made it home (battling the crowds spilling out of The Who concert downtown). In bed by 12:10. Dangerously close to a 20-hour day. Apart from the traveling part, the rest of the day was absolutely excellent, though - so I mustn't grumble.

Later...

I finally found out the apparent cause of the delay. Seems some poor soul fell from a train heading in the opposite direction, bringing all traffic on the tracks to a halt.

Sitting in a warm, relatively comfortable train for - even for three hours longer than scheduled - is infinitely better than the lot of the OPP officers who were out in the cold, dark night; scouring the area around the tracks. To say nothing of the mental and physical pain the man who was the cause of their search must have endured. Now I feel bad.

May your soul rest in peace, whoever you were.

Ah well...

So I didn't make the winners' podium in the awards for Best Business Blog in Canada. Pouffe it (as Lily would say).

Still - I'm frankly amazed to see that I ended up coming in fourth. In truth, I was amazed to even get nominated (thanks once again, Sheena); even more amazed when I scraped through to the final round.

The very good news is that while that mysterious Vancouver Housing Blogger easily trounced all others in the category (scoring 52% of the votes), the excellent Kate Trgovac pulled in a very respectable silver medal slot. Yay Kate!

Congratulations to all the winners, and sincere thanks to the 175 very slightly delusional souls who voted for me.

Chapter Two of Charlie's latest epic saga just went up, over here.

If you missed Chapter One, scroll down a bit to read it first (duh).

What has Jorgen found? I can't wait to find out.

This is rather strange. Can't quite recall the convoluted, nested-link sequence that led me to find this page, but earlier today I came across this EmailWeb service.

EmailWeb describes itself as: "...an Internet service that delivers fully formatted web pages by email. Many people who would not otherwise be able to access the web are able to by using EmailWeb. People have this need for a variety of reasons."

The site goes on to give a number of examples of how and why such a service might be of use around the world. This is actually not a bad idea at all. From the broadband-saturated comfort of a major North American city, it's all too easy to fall into the habit of expecting everyone to have the same access to the Web as we have. And it's remarkable how much one comes to depend upon the Web when it's there.

We had an outage in our offices for a few hours yesterday morning - leaving us with no access to the Web, although we still had email. There were things I absolutely needed to pull from online sources to help push my work forward. EmailWeb might have helped.

The strange thing about EmailWeb, though, is a quirk in the subscription model the site offers. For US, Canadian, and EU residents, the service costs US$18 per year. For people outside of these territories "...you can earn a one year subscription to Emailweb, by reading the Gospel According to Matthew and completing a quiz of 12 questions. You will need to get 10 of the 12 questions correct to earn the year's subscription."

Wow. A Web service that aims to bridge the digital divide and simultaneously act as a Gospel missionary. Well, at least he's direct about it.

A one-year subscription to "Uninstalled" is still free, btw. But for a limited time only, I'm prepared to throw in an extra three years for the same low price to the first ten people who read the whole of "Bottersnikes and Gumbles" by the Reverend S.A. Wakefield and can correctly answer 10 simple questions.