A.M. Offenwanger's Blog, page 47
April 26, 2016
Speaking Shakespearean
So the Internet was flooded with Shakespeariana the last few days, thanks to the big 400-year anniversary of his death last Saturday, April 23rd, 2016. I kind of missed it, as I don’t go online as much on the weekend, which is why I’m only now weighing in on the issue. But my excuse is that today is the Great Man’s Christening Day (452 years! Significant figure!), so that’s still an anniversary and I can still shove in my oar on the celebrations.
Did you know that even though we celebrate Sha...
April 21, 2016
The Ants Go Marching
I was going for my walk this morning, and found myself having to cross a couple of highways: ant highways, to be exact. There they were, hundreds, if not thousands, of little black ants, marching on a path not more than a centimetre or two wide all the way across the road (I measured – six metres, or 25 feet).
I saw the first Ameisenbahn on my way up the hill. A little further, there was a lone ant walking about the road, looking a little lost. Ten minutes later, when I came back down, there...
April 20, 2016
April 13, 2016
April 12, 2016
The Editor Pontificates: Past Perfect
No, I’m not talking about the perfect past – you know, where your grandma keeps going on about the Good Old Days in the Past, When Everything Was Perfect. What I’m talking about here is the grammatical “past perfect” tense.
Bear with me for a moment here. I keep stumbling over this matter in my work as editor (ahem – I almost feel like I should capitalise this: My Work As Editor. Spoken with a suitably declarative intonation, so that the capitals become evident and everyone is duly impressed....
April 6, 2016
April 4, 2016
Slow Writing
You know we’re in the first few days of Camp NaNoWriMo. And NaNo is all about cranking out the word count. Fast writing! The quicker, the better! NaNo has word sprints, NaNo has word wars (who gets the most words written in the shortest time, that sort of thing). There’s a Wrimo in one of the local groups who can produce something like 1000 words in ten minutes – she literally sounds like a machine gun when she’s typing (I was at a write-in once where I experienced that live. It was impressiv...
March 30, 2016
March 28, 2016
Easter Eggs
Happy Easter Monday, to those of you who celebrate it (Germans, Canadians, Brits, Down-Under-ites?). Here’s Steve, being the Easter Bear, to add his good wishes.
Yes, we still have Easter eggs at our house, even though the Offspring are a few years past the Easter egg hunting stage. Much like I can’t imagine Christmas without cookies, I can’t have Easter without eggs. When we were kids, we always got some in our Easter baskets, or rather, we hunted for them in the garden. (One year, one got m...
March 24, 2016
Zootopia and The Power of Story
I’ve been thinking about the importance of Story again. My friend E. L. Bates recently posted the transcript of a talk she gave at her local library on that topic (read the full thing here, it’s well worth it). “This is what stories do,” she says, “they sink into our hearts and give us the tools we need to live more fully, more richly, in the everyday world around us.” Yes, exactly.
Last weekend, we went to see the new Disney movie, Zootopia. I’d heard that it was good, so while I wasn’t exp...
