Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

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Papers of (Broken) Record

March 23, 2021 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

 

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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A Book for Entrepreneurs

March 3, 2021 By Chandra Clarke 2 Comments

Combining careers and parenthood is challenging; combining running a business and parenthood is downright nuts. Guess which I did? Yeah, the nutty option.

For those of you who don’t know the backstory: My business and life partner Terry and I managed to take a company — Scribendi.com — from basement startup to successful acquisition, while raising four kids. We’re now battle-scarred and a lot wiser, and we’ve written this book to pass on what we’ve learned to other entrepreneurial parents.

The book busts the myths surrounding entrepreneurship and work/life balance, walks you through the five phases of business life, and teaches you strategies to help you deal with your biggest issues: guilt, stress, and lack of time.

If this title isn’t for you (and it might not be, if you found me through this blog, my sci-fi book Echoes of Another, or my humorous fantasy Pundragon), that’s cool. Keep it in mind for any entrepreneurial friends and family!

If it is for you, you can find out more here. The ebook is available now, and the paperback will be available before the end of March.

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Beware the Unusual Home . . .

February 17, 2021 By Chandra Clarke 1 Comment

You too can have a home that looks like this… if you start with the one on the right and don’t mind not having enough money for food and water for several months.

Rearranging some photo albums today, and found some pictures of a previous home.

The real estate agent had said it was a house with Character. Everyone who ever visited told us it had Character.

Hmph.

Character, I’ve discovered, is simply a nice way of saying “high maintenance.”

It was a 117-year old home. We’d purchased it with the idea of restoring it to something resembling its original state. The motto for that little endeavor ended up being: “It’s not just a job, it’s a career.”

There are numerous problems associated with restoring an old home. It is very hard, we’ve found, to find contractors who can handle the old materials like slate (roofing), or real plaster (as opposed to drywall). If you can find someone here in North America, they’ll charge you more for a single project than you paid for the entire house in the first place.

So, we did a lot of the work ourselves. Due to time constraints (we had to work to pay for all of the materials, of course) this meant we were always living in a half-finished construction site. And anyone who tells you that old home restoration is a labour of love has never had to strip four very thick layers of paint from two dozen intricately carved metal hinges. I have, and I can tell you it actually should be called a labour of  barely-tolerated-mind-numbing-tedium.

The fact that specialized contractors are so expensive means that all the previous owners of the house also engaged in DIY… with… varying levels of competence. Somewhere I still have a picture of the wallpaper job in one bedroom, which featured kittens, bunnies, and puppies… and one poor unfortunate creature that was half kitten and half bunny because no one explained to the previous owner how to line up patterned wallpaper.

Aside from the renovation woes, just living in an old home can be an adventure. In spite of our best efforts, there were still hundreds of little cracks and crevices  for bugs to wander in. Going down the hallway at night is somewhat like watching a National Geographic special on Canadian creepy crawlies. It was really very educational, especially if you like spiders.

Then there were the other frequent visitors. To this day, if you want someone at my house to hit the floor in a hurry, you don’t yell “duck!” you yell “bat!” Works every time.

Those big windows in the old Victorian houses? They look amazing. They’re also single pane and the frames are made of wood that has shrunk over the decades. So they let more air in and out of the house than what flows through a wind tunnel. Give ol’ Ebenezeer Scrooge some credit: he was probably crabby because he was freakin’ cold. And before you suggest replacement windows, do yourself a favour and count the number of windows there are in that house you’re drooling over in For the Love of Old Houses. Ours? Twenty-two. That’s a lot of double glazing to install, at non-standard sizes…

We didn’t use coal to heat the house, of course, but we still froze in the winter while enjoying a sky-high heating bill. That place had a gas flame boiler downstairs that heated up water, which was then pumped through the house to cast iron radiators in every room. The surface of a radiator gets to a temperature that lies somewhere between fry-your-bacon and melt-the-lampshades. Lesson number one in the `living with radiators’ series: do not back into one of these puppies when the system is on. Trust me.

The floors creaked a little; not so much as to be really annoying, but enough so that you couldn’t sneak downstairs to the fridge at 3 a.m. without the rest of the family yelling out their room service requests. The pooches (mooches?) liked get into the act too: if there was a noise in the house they’d rush out to frighten away the burglars. Once they found out it was you, they pushed for the cookie bribe to prevent them from barking some more.

I suppose though, if pressed, I would admit that I understand why some people don’t like modern homes. And it does bother me when I see some of the finer pieces of architecture in other cities fall into disrepair. These places are an important part of our heritage. There was a lot of history in that home. Yes, if these walls could talk . . .

Hmph.

If those walls could talk, they’d probably say something like “Ha. Suckers…”

 

Image credit: Photo by Ludovic Charlet on Unsplash

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Mirror, Mirror… er… in the Sky?

January 28, 2021 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

 

I read an article about climate change geoengineering projects earlier today, which reminded me of a proposal several years ago.

Apparently Russian engineers once thought it was a good idea to place giant mirrors in space to illuminate cities at night in mid-winter.

Why would we do this? If you have to ask, you’ve never experienced a real winter. For those of you south of the 49th parallel, try this: imagine your freezer. Imagine being inside your freezer. Now imagine being inside your freezer for six months in the dark. You will either end up with a tendency to scream at random intervals, a desire to do odd things with fish sticks, or both. Light could only help the situation.

So here’s the basic idea behind space mirrors: take a sheet of mylar (the stuff they use to make those shiny helium-filled balloons) about 75 yards in length, stretch the stuff over something resembling a kite frame, and launch it into space. Once there, angle it so it catches a few rays and gives them the ol’ redirect to Earth.

It sounds far-fetched, perhaps, but it could work. I can personally vouch for the tough nature of mylar, since it took me a little over an hour to break into the bag of coffee beans this morning. (Of course, that could also be because I was attempting to function before drinking any coffee.)

It will be difficult, however. For one thing, scientists have to handle this mirror very, very carefully. Considering the fact that you get seven years bad luck for breaking an average-sized mirror, I’d hate to think what snapping one of these would mean.

For another thing, launching the mirror would mean folding the mylar structure like a road map, packing it into a capsule and then unfolding it in orbit. It is a well known fact that road maps never fold and unfold the same way twice; another well known fact is that the creases of a road map always rip at the intersection of The Road I’m Currently On, and The Road I Need To Be On In Five Minutes To Make This Job Interview.

If these same scientific principles apply to mylar there are two possible outcomes: 1) the robot arm assigned to deploy the mylar mirror will crumple it up in frustration and toss it into the back seat of the capsule or 2) the rips on the creases in the mirror will leave pockets of darkness in certain cities, which will lead to isolated pockets of random screaming and fish stick usage.

There are some dangers to consider if the mirrors are successfully deployed too. I mean, I hope they give these cities some warning when they’re going to turn on the mirrors. Otherwise we’ll have situations like this:

MUGGER IN DARK ALLEY: This is a stick up. Give me all your money or I’ll shoot.

YOU: Okay, okay!

[Mirror is turned on]

YOU: Hey! That’s not a gun! That’s a potato!

MUGGER IN BRIGHT ALLEY: [Blink. Blink] Er, yes, but it’s a big sweet potato. They can really hurt.

YOU: I yam not impressed.

There is also the danger the mirrors could be misused by other species. I mean, if we believe the X-Files, there are aliens traipsing here all the time — and who can go by a mirror without stopping to check themselves? We’ll have Neefnoofians combing their hair and making shadow puppets over Moscow. They may even get so distracted when flying by that they’ll crash into Earth — in which case we’ll have to paint OBJECTS IN MIRROR ARE CLOSER THAN THEY APPEAR on them, which will be a big pain in the glass, if you ask me.

If we can avoid those dangers though, I think mirrors in the sky would be great. It would brighten many a winter day without running up electricity bills. Some astronomers complain that mirrors will ruin the view, but since these same guys currently have to scrape smog off their telescopes, mirrors couldn’t be much worse. Besides, if they’e that keen, they should push for an orbiting observatory where nothing will get in the way — except maybe those Neefnoofian tourists.

And just think of the advertising possibilities mirrors would provide! A soda company could buy morse code message slots, turning the mirror on and off to spell out (carefully) “Coke® is it!” over different cities. Gives a whole new meaning to northern exposure, doesn’t it?

Space mirrors: definitely a concept to reflect on.

 

Photo by Inga Gezalian on Unsplash

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  • Papers of (Broken) Record
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  • Mirror, Mirror… er… in the Sky?
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