Name My Smutty Font's Colon for Triple Word Score

Weekends are the perfect, lazy time for inflicting (I mean sharing) my collected curiosities.

1) Proving words have power, in several African countries, Scrabble is a prestigious national sport. And these intrepid word lovers play in a foreign tongue!

2) A New Zealand family judge takes pity on a 9 year-old calling herself K rather than the given name her wacked-out parents selected: Talula Does The Hula From Hawaii. Read about other disgraces from the annals of baby naming.

3) The Greeks used them as question marks, but Poe declared himself mortified by printers using too many semicolons. Vonnegut disdained them as ivory tower puffery, and legendary NYC mayor Fiorello LaGuardia mocked any egghead bureaucrat as a 'semicolon boy.' In Slate, Paul Collins asks: Has Modern Life Killed the Semicolon?

4) The Telegraph reports that within a 10th century codex, researchers believe they've discovered Britain's oldest recorded joke. It reads: “What hangs at a man’s thigh and wants to poke the hole that it’s often poked before?’ Answer: A key.” Other examples of ancient yuks include Egyptian ribaldry and Sumerian fart jokes. Dirty jokes, puns, and toilet humor are evergreen.

5) Fellow font geeks will love this skit from College Humor. The Fonts Council is heatedly debating whether Zapf Dingbats should be extended membership when evil Ransom kidnaps Courier and sweet little Curlz MT. Luckily, Windings knows the location of the villain's lair. "...Mouse-Scissors-Bomb...mailbox! Mailbox! MAILBOX!!!" Oh, the fontmanity.

When It Works, It's Not Work

What's the difference between a hobby and a job? A job and a career? And where does a calling fit in? Is it a matter of a paycheck? If so, how large? Job satisfaction? Goals? Recognition in your field?

These questions might sound like navel gazing (not nearly as much fun as Naval gazing on Fleet Week), but they're valid and important to people who blog. On Monday, over on GalleyCat, Ron posed the question, "What If The Blogosphere Decides To Pack It In?" He points to a few blogging reviewers who have been so overwhelmed by ARCs and review requests that what started as a fun hobby has become a chore.

I know this feeling. Before I started any of my businesses (all of which, by the way, started as hobbies before they became jobs), I should have read Seth Godin's The Dip. Instead, I got lucky for the most part. Godin says that despite the old adage about winners and quitters, the truth is that winners quit frequently, and without guilt. They do it when they realize that they are in a "cul-de-sac", where powering through will only leave them running in circles, rather than just in a true dip, where powering through will lead to "mastery."

Guy Kawasaki has a great interview with Godin on his blog that gives you the "Dip" philosophy.

It’s time to quit when you secretly realize you’ve been settling for mediocrity all along. It’s time to quit when the things you’re measuring aren’t improving, and you can’t find anything better to measure.

Smart quitters understand the idea of opportunity cost. The work you’re doing on project X right now is keeping you from pushing through the Dip on project Y.

...What’s the worst time to quit? When the pain is the greatest. Decisions made during great pain are rarely good decisions.

But back to blogging and books.... Publishers, according to Galleycat, among others, are leaning heavily on the Internet for low-cost advertising and reviewing, especially now that the traditional means and methods are either gone or very expensive. Can't send your authors on tour? They can go on a blog tour. Can't find a hardcopy reviewer any longer? Go for a bookblog with a substantial following.

But it's not just reviewers who find some aspects of this strategy tiresome. I hear from authors that they don't want to take the time out of their schedules to blog. I hear from bloggers that they're sick of being the "next stop on the self-promotion express," even for people they generally like. (And from blog readers, I hear that they're sick of seeing the same person "guest posting" on every blog they read.) I hear from forum and listserv members that they feel as if authors are taking advantage of them by popping up out of nowhere to promote their work.

"New media" may be changing the way publishers and authors market themselves and their work (and, yeah, they're tied together), but I don't think we've gotten through The Dip yet. I suspect there's a lot more change before things stabilize. At least I hope so, because I fall into more than one of the above categories myself. It's a long slog through the change, but if you're willing to do what's necessary, there may be a brighter future at the other end.

And then, over at Dear Author, Jane has a post about the things publishers could do to make it easier for genre readers--unlike those Jonathan Karp assumes will disappear--to find the books they want, buy them, read them. None of them are expensive, either. In direct opposition to Karp's assumptions, the Janes believe genre readers will continue to be a viable market, even after The Dip, and that publishers, if they work at it, can come out even stronger on the other side stronger than they are now.

Fire in Texas

For those of you who know our blogger friend Travis Erwin, you might know that he lives in the panhandle of Texas where lightning strikes brought fire raining down from the heavens.

To read about his good luck, check him out at: http://www.traviserwin.blogspot.com