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Tag: NaBloPoMo posts

KISS: Keep it simple, stupid (even if you’re a rocket scientist)

At breakfast today my boyfriend said, “Did I ever tell you about the special pen NASA developed so that astronauts could write in space?” I told him I already knew about the Space Pen, ‘cuz I’d seen it advertised in the back of my dad’s Popular Mechanics magazines as a kid. (I also wanted a spy camera, and one of those hovercraft kits they advertised. I could easily imagine flying over the wheat fields behind our house in a hovercraft – so cool!) “The Russians faced the same problem with their space program,” my boyfriend continued, unwittingly interrupting my wheat…

Gotta love Facebook

I’m not much of a beer drinker, but this ad made me laugh. They had another one a couple months ago which read, Beer: Because it’s election season again. Hard to argue with that, no matter what your politics are! In my opinion, Belgians make the best beer in the world, specifically Belgian monks. I’m not a big Stella Artois or Hoegaarden fan, but when it comes to Belgian trappist ales, I must say – yum. To my palate, that’s what beer is all about! But enough about beer, what do I really want to talk about? I am not…

British English vs American English and an Uber Cool Blog About Words

I really need to go blog-hopping and see what my tens of readers have been up to lately. It’s been a very offline week for me, though. So if you are wondering why I haven’t checked out your blog lately, that’s why. I’ll be back! I wrote an article about a restaurant today and came up with a line that amused me. Wanna hear it? OK. Here ya go: “What the decor lacks in taste, the cuisine makes up for in flavour.” Yeah, I wrote “flavour” ‘cuz it’s for a British-based company. When writing for British publications, I try to…

Viral vs Meme

Driving home tonight, I heard an interview on NPR with a “meme researcher.” I wonder how a person gets that title. I also wonder what the difference is between a meme and something that has gone viral. The dude being interviewed tried to explain, but it only made things murkier for me. Any understanding I had of the difference between the two completely disappeared, mainly because he used a viral video as his example of a meme. Are the two terms really so different? A few minutes ago, as we were eating dinner, my fiance remarked that, “From what I…

Not on my grocery list

Company’s on the way, so I am tossing up a quickie post just to stay in the NaBloPoMo game, y’all! Today’s photo is something that caught my eye in the store and made me think, “Now that is something I definitely do not want to get this holiday season.” I’ll try to do some blog-hopping later on and see what other folks are up to, and answer comments, but right now, a belated Thanksgiving feast is waiting to be prepared…

Confessions of a Recovering Barista

I often describe myself as a ‘recovering barista,’ because when you have brewed as many shots of espresso and steamed as many pitchers of milk as I have over the years, it alters you. Y’know how you can spot a former ballerina by her splayed feet? It’s kinda like that, except that the Zen-like discipline of making wonderful espresso leaves mental marks rather than anything physical. As a result, when I enter a coffeehouse, I can’t help but eavesdrop on the baristas. By ‘eavesdrop’ I mean listening to what they do, not what they say. I can tell by sound…