A dear friend of mine shared a cute gimmick of a bag of peanuts stapled to a peanut-shaped card. The photo shows the front and back of this card, which is from a 2005 campaign by the Mood Disorders Association of Ontario, Canada. I think mental health is an invisible disability that gets too little coverage. I know people who have serious mood disorders and who are (fortunately) getting regular help. Is that person who “acts funny” or behaves “differently” an eccentric person or someone who needs care and attention? I like knowing about the serious problems because I feel it makes me more capable of helping out when they are in serious trouble. You can help them remember to take their medications or contact someone who is equipped to help them properly. People who walk away from a “crazy person” make me sad – they can compound the issue…
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In my technical writing circles, the name of Edward Bulwer-Lytton is well-known for a writing contest. The contest is to write a deliberately bad opening line for an awful novel, for example, something beginning with “It was a dark and stormy night…” Well, that’s the beginning of a line by Bulwer-Lytton. He may have been popular in his day, but now, we giggle at his style. Recently, I came across one of his books, The Last Days of Pompeii, and had to share. Without further ado, I present Chapter 1 from the 1926 edition published by Charles Scribner’s Sons for your reading pleasure. (Note the sentence that begins with “He wore no toga…” – it contains 149 words!) Chapter 1: The Two Gentlemen of Pompeii “Ho, Diomed, well met! Do you sup with Glaucus to-night?” said a young man of small stature, who wore his tunic in those loose and…
2 CommentsNic Steenhout‘s photo of fresh-baked bread sent me more than 30 years back in time. I’ve always loved baking bread. I know I learned to bake bread when I was a teenager, but I have few recollections of those breads. I know some were sweet and most were incredibly flat and heavy despite being baked in a form and using yeast. I may have been heart-broken, but my dad never complained. The bread disappeared completely when in his care. I wasn’t afraid to experiment, either. An uncle was coming over for dinner in my early bread-baking years, and I thought I’d make some special dinner rolls. I added blue food coloring, blue being my favorite color. To my great disappointment, no one wanted to eat them! Years later, I became more conscious of the beauty of the creation of bread. It wasn’t doing something fancy like adding blue coloring. It…
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