Chandra Clarke's Blog, page 9

‘Tis the season for sneezin’

  The scene: a lonely, dark alley way. It’s raining. The players: an intrepid reporter holding a camera and microphone, and a nervous man with a paper bag over his head. CC: Hello ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to Soft Copy your local investigative reporting show.  We are here today with someone known only as […]

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A View From the Stands…

You read this space for the unusual opinions and the occasional laugh, right? Keep that in mind. I say that because I’m going to talk about professional sports. Even worse, I’m going to be sympathetic to the players. There’s always a lot of talk about “fat-cats” and “greedy vs. greedier” in connection with professional sports. […]

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Thank You For Your Concern

  Dear Valued Customer, Thank you for contacting us about: [PASTE CUSTOMER’S COMPLAINT HERE AND DELETE THIS LINE] Why the heck are you wrapping green onions in non-recyclable plastic film now? Every time I go to the store there’s MORE plastic, not less. Enough already! Scofflaw Companies Limited takes Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) very seriously. […]

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It’s Time For Action

‘I wish it need not have happened in my time,’ said Frodo.’ ‘So do I,’ said Gandalf, ‘and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.’” – JRR Tolkein, Lord […]

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Weed it and weep

  It’s finally summer-like here in the northern hemisphere. That time of year when, suffering from cabin fever, we all race outdoors to do something — anything — in the fresh air. For an increasing number of us, if you can believe the market analysts and demographers, that something involves gardening. I know I’ve been […]

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5 Interesting Things – June 8, 2021

  I read a lot. Articles, clips, books, magazines. I quite often come across things that I wish more people knew about. Recently, it dawned on me I could actually do something about that. (I’ve only been running this blog for several years now. I guess I’m a slow learner.) Soooo, today I’m introducing what […]

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Talking to the animals…

As depressing as the environmental news is from day-to-day, one thing never fails to amaze me: how well certain animals manage to adapt to the presence of man. I thought of this the other day I stepped out on the porch. I caught sight of a squirrel ambling across the yard. I should tell you […]

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Free Excerpt: The Entrepreneurial Parent

  Today, I’m posting a free excerpt from our latest book, The Entrepreneurial Parent: Run Your Business, Raise Your Family, Keep Your Sanity! It’s available at Amazon or Barnes & Noble. Introduction It was a miserably hot and sticky July afternoon. Earlier that day, we had discovered that our house, a triplex located in a […]

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Too Fast? I Wish…

I write a lot. There are letters to friends, replies to readers, articles, texts, social media comments, columns, and books. Some days I  live in front of the computer. I think my fingers are flattening out at the tips — a modern day version of the scribe’s middle-finger callus I suppose.

I hear a lot of people say that computers are hard to use. Apparently, folks feel that technology is moving too quickly, and it’s scary.

Personally, I also have difficulties using computers. I’m no techno-peasant — if it has buttons, and beeps, I own it. I’ve been using the home version of the computer since the first VIC 20 came out years ago. (Yes, I am that old.) For me, computers are difficult to use because technology isn’t advancing fast enough.

The thing you have to realize you see, is that computers are essentially stoopid. Using one is very much like talking to a three year old. When you a tell a three year old what to do, you have to be clear, concise, and keep in mind that they are very, very literal.

For example, if you’re on the phone, and you need to write something down in a hurry, you can tell your kid to go get you a pencil from your desk. However, if there are only pens on your desk, your kid will come back empty-handed, and look surprised when you get annoyed.

Likewise, computers follow your instructions down to the letter. Way back when, using your computer consisted of typing in lines, no, pages, of programming instructions. (Who else wants to date themselves by remembering PEEK and POKE commands?) No matter how carefully you typed, you almost always missed a small detail. If you tried to run the program, the thing would get a serious case of electronic indigestion. And, almost always, the thing you missed would be a @#$%^! comma in line 4657. No, I’m not bitter about it. Honest.

Computers today are a little better, but not much. The one I’m working on now doesn’t know I’m Canadian. Consequently, every time I run the spell check, it tells me I don’t know how to spell `colour,’ `centre,’ and `Tuktoyuktuk.’ I could add these things to the program’s dictionary, but this makes everything an agony of decisions. How many times am I likely to refer to Newfies in the future? Is the conservative leader O’Toole going to be around long enough to warrant the disk space?

Finances on the computer are fun too, because we’re still in a transition stage. We’re not an entirely cashless society yet, so you really can’t use the computer efficiently. To issue a paper cheque right now (and yes, there’s an astonishing number of places that still insist on cheques), I’d have to turn on the computer, access the program, enter the data, turn on the printer, oh yes – change the paper in the printer, or . . . I could go into my pocketbook and sign on the dotted line.

Likewise, my bank keeps haranguing me to go paperless with my bank account statements, and my accountant still wants everything printed out… which makes me think the bank isn’t really concerned about the environment so much as it wants to offload it’s stationary costs onto me. But I digress.

Yesterday, while trying to update the firmware for a monitor, my computer kept insisting it couldn’t possibly find the monitor I was trying to update… by displaying an error message on the monitor I was trying to update. My iPad insists that I update its operating system and assures me that it will be able to update itself overnight as long as it’s kept plugged in, yet every day for a week now, I’ve received the message from my plugged in iPad that it wasn’t able to update itself. I guess I need to make some time later to hold it’s digital hand?

So you see, I can’t wait for computers to get smarter. I want mine to take orders like the one on the bridge of Star Trek does (without reporting what I’m buying or doing to a corporate headquarters). I want it to learn my version of shorthand. I can’t wait for a “smart” home with a genuinely self-cleaning oven, and a freezer that knows when I am running perilously low on rocky road ice cream and adds it to the grocery list. I want my phone to know who’s on the other end of the line, and to only ring when it’s someone I want to talk to, and not the fake Canada Revenue Agency scam call (which I’ve received 12 times today and counting.)

Bring on the window-washing robots. Send me the automated lawn-mower. Ship ’em direct, and rush the delivery!

Image credit: Andy Miccone/Flickr

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Papers of (Broken) Record

 

Thank goodness for small town newspapers. What’s left of them, anyway.

I once read that a small town is a place where everyone knows what everyone else is doing, so the only reason they read their paper is to find out who got caught.

More importantly, small town newspapers are usually staffed with writers who either are just getting started in the journalism business, or who have decided they want nothing to do with the bigger presses. Either way, they haven’t yet been indoctrinated into the school of reporting I’m going to call “journospeak.”

I’m not sure if journospeak comes from ‘having seen it all’ and developing shortcuts for reporting on the same sorts of stories over and over again, or whether it’s just laziness. But you hear it all the time. For example, no matter where in the world they are taking place, wars `rage.’ They never just stomp around in a bad temper, they rage. Likewise, jets never just fly overhead, they scream. What they are screaming, I don’t know.

As every one knows, there is almost always some sort of conflict going on. Every day, one hears about a riot, or political protests, or a shooting. Yet announcers, perhaps in an attempt to make today’s round sound more interesting, insist on prefacing every report with “this is the worst violence since…”

There are numerous other examples. Police, for instance, are always making grisly discoveries. Personally, I had no idea we had so many bears running around loose, and I think it’s high time we did something about it. Protestors out on a cold day are always going about “braving the elements.” There could be a total of three snowflakes on the ground, but the protestors are always brave.

Canadian journalists seem to have a fixation on weather analogies. We refer to “a hail of bullets,” or the fact that “bombs were raining down on the countryside.”

On the financial side, deals are always forged. This usually brings to mind an image of some anonymous accountant, sleeves rolled up, glasses reflecting the light of the fire, pounding away on a two-foot thick document with a hammer.

Granted, there is a reason for the way journalists talk. They have to be succinct, and to the point. We certainly can’t have them talking excitedly about a bloodbath in terms of “oh gross, there’s lots and lots of red stuff all over the place!” However, it would be nice if they varied it, and maybe gave us some depth in their reporting. At least half of the dissatisfaction people feel with most “mainstream media” coverage is that it’s shallow, clickbaity, tries to evoke negative emotions, and doesn’t provide any background or explanation.

I’m not sure why small town papers don’t get clichéd writing. I’d like to think that it’s because small towns don’t normally have things like war zones, crime wave,s and serial murderers. Reporters don’t have a chance to get jaded and blasé about such nastiness.

On the other hand, I suspect it actually has a lot do with the fact that things that happen in a small town simply don’t happen in other places.

Take this incident as an example. A livestock trucker had stopped somewhere in a town, and parked the vehicle for a few minutes. An enterprising pig in the truck, finding itself alone with a loose board on the side, hopped out. What followed was a rash of swine sightings, ending with a quick capture early on a Saturday morning. Yours truly was called out for a photograph of the porker.

“You want me to come out and take a picture of a what? In where?”

Nope, it’s pretty hard to become jaded as a small town reporter. There are just too many surprises. And thank goodness for that.

 

Photo by Roman Kraft on Unsplash

 

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