Benny, We Hardly Knew Ye

Well, you got your pope pennants, buttons, your pope clothes,
You got your pope binoculars to see him up close
And I cried when I saw that man in white;
I cried, much to my surrounders' delight.
I cried, 'cause I couldn’t breathe anymore; I cried
'cause people were stepping on my feet.
Hey, hey Mr. Holiness way over there,
Maybe we love you, but we're sadly lacking air.
Then he scooted away in that great Popemobile
I was feeling so trampled, I didn’t know what else to feel — Meryn Cadell, The Pope

Civil Debate: Gone Forever?

There is a growing propensity in our culture—which is certainly not new but far more prevalent than ever—to mock or belittle the person with whose opinion you disagree and to do so in increasingly public ways. Are you familiar with the old Saturday Night Live parody of the 60 Minutes' Point-Counterpoint segment? "Jane, you ignorant slut," was how Dan Aykroyd's James J. Kilpatrick lampoon would begin every single one of his "debate" segments and it never failed to draw a laugh because it was so over-the-top. Well, that satire of a mere generation ago wouldn't find a nerve these days because it seems to have become de rigueur to ridicule the other party in any discussion or debate, even if you are good friends with them. Because I hold very strong opinions and I'm not shy about expressing them all over social media, I find that I'm on the receiving end of this sort of behaviour quite frequently. When it comes out of left field, from someone I don't know, I can very easily block or "unlike" them; however, when it comes from a good friend or a family member of whom I am rather fond it's a much more difficult situation.

"Truther": Just Another Made-Up Word for "Crazy"

The three guns used by the Newtown shooter

Last month, while trying to come up for air during my fight with depression, I had the occasional "uptick" in my mood. One of the brightest days was when I went on a "Behind the Scenes" tour at the Zoo and had the opportunity to feed, touch and actually stroke a lovely Indian rhino named Ashakiran. I came home that day full of wonder and incredibly moved by the experience; my spirits were buoyed to the point that I thought I might possibly break my "blog jam" and write about the encounter that evening. But the feeling did not last the afternoon, unfortunately. In the elevator on my way up from the car to my apartment I shared the ride with an older couple who asked me if I had heard about the shooting (they phrased it as a singular) that day. I replied that I had not; they were unable to fill in many details so I turned on CNN the moment I got home. And there I sat for much of the rest of that day, Friday, December 14, 2012, unable to do anything other than stare in agony as report after report came in regarding the horrific events in Newtown, Connecticut. I've remarked, elsewhere, about how odd it was that the reporters got almost every fact about the tragedy wrong at first blush—including the shooter's real name—except for the actual body count which never wavered from the moment I turned my television on that awful, awful afternoon.

But now there is a growing movement that insists that even the number of dead that day is not accurate. They are called the "Sandy Hook Truthers." And they absolutely disgust and sicken me, a born skeptic.

The OpenStreetMap Project

OpenStreetMap logo

A good friend of mine, Richard Weait, is quite heavily involved in a very interesting enterprise: OpenStreetMap. On Monday morning of this week he spoke to Matt Galloway on Metro Morning about the project and about the "Mappy Hour" meeting that took place later that night. (That link for "Mappy Hour" will actually take you to a page for the next meeting, Monday, February 4 at C'est What in Toronto.) If you've ever been frustrated by a lack of detail when using a GPS or a proprietary mapping tool (such as Google Maps), then you might be very interested in this project. OpenStreetMap encourages everyone from all walks of life to get out in the real world and "map out" the points of interest in your area (or anywhere, really) that have flown under the radar up to this point. I've been looking into this myself, but only recently; consequently, I am probably going to describe this idea in very simplistic terms—and may well not be 100% accurate at that—but I hope to convince Richard to create a "Guest Blog" piece on this subject in the future or, at the very least, to send me some more specific things he wishes to elaborate on.

Spacing's Map Contest

The current cover of Spacing

A few months ago, Sarah discovered that there was a contest being run by Spacing Magazine, a publication out of Toronto that focuses on urban design and public space usage; a contest which was right up her alley. They were soliciting entries to their "Creative Mapping Contest" and, even though it was very close to the deadline, Sarah bore down and worked furiously to be sure she submitted a design for their consideration. It was fantastic and she did get it in on time, but I didn't hear any more about it whatsoever.

Until last week, that is.

Big Day for The Grumpy Penguin

Not an optical illusion: the sign Sarah made for my "office"

This won't be a long post tonight because I have spent pretty much this entire day creating content (and much of it about myself) and I really am just about out of energy. But I didn't want to miss the chance to mark this very auspicious occasion in my life and the life of the new company known as The Grumpy Penguin. At about 4:30 p.m. today my business website went "live" and I'm pretty jazzed about it, let me tell you. I am expecting an article to come out in the Career section of the Toronto Sun tomorrow and I really wanted to have a visible presence on the web (other than this blog) before that happened. With the help of Paul Chato and his crack staff at Your Web Department, the past few weeks of tinkering and creating and tweaking and worrying became a really fine website within mere minutes of telling them "let's do it". They even set up the web domain for me in that time; it was really very, very impressive indeed. (Even having Paul call the site "The Rusty Ookpik" was a nice touch: it gave me a chance to take a breath and remember that this is supposed to be fun, this "legacy career".)

Sarah at our celebratory dinner tonight

I owe a great deal of thanks to Lisa Taylor at the Challenge Factory (and Karen Siwak for some of the content currently on the site and more still to come). There are a great many friends and family members that have been yelling encouragement all along this path, too many to name here but I hope they know I greatly appreciate their support and good thoughts. But there is one person without whom this endeavour would never have been more than a gleam in my eye: my partner, my love, the incredible Sarah Gledhill. Her beautiful graphics are what brings life to the website; she spent hours lovingly creating my logo and background images, as well as helping to make The Grumpy Penguin to be visually appealing (at least from the early accounts of the first visitors). However things turn out from here for my business it has to be said that it never would have stood a chance without her unconditional love and support. Tonight after the site went online for the first time we took off for a celebratory dinner and actually relaxed over our food for the first time in weeks.


I will wind this post up here as we still have vacation-type things to do with the rest of this week and I don't want to be lagging behind Sarah at the Zoo. But I just want to say, without further ado: Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you The Grumpy Penguin. Please check it out and let me know what you think; I will greatly appreciate any comments whether positive, negative, constructive or just plain "meh". Everything helps at this point.

And thanks for being along for this ride so far. If it wasn't for this blog, there would be no website.

Another Scorcher in The Big Smoke

Hot again here today, hot and muggy and oppressive. But at least I have been too busy the past couple of days to really notice the weather. I've started playing around with a trial website through a company called "Your Web Department". They were suggested to me by Lisa from the Challenge Factory when we met on Wednesday; they offer a "no-code" website service which makes it very easy to use one of their many templates and add all your own content. As my business will be selling content to other people, this shapes up quite well for me. The company is run by Paul Chato, whose name sounded very familiar to me when Lisa told me about this company the other day. There's a good reason for that: Paul Chato is a former member of The Frantics, a comedy troupe from Toronto. I actually spoke to him today on the phone because he saw that I had signed up for the trial and Lisa had told him about me and my start-up; he actually said he was "excited" to see me sign up for the trial today after Lisa bent his ear this week. If things work out he may be able to send business my way from his site or just take me on for some contract work as a content writer, which would be completely awesome. The momentum of this new venture is really quite something right now: today I registered The Grumpy Penguin as a business in Ontario and signed up for a Facebook page under that name. As I've said numerous times before, things are actually happening almost on their own. It's really exciting.

The Grumpy Penguin: Almost Ready for Prime Time

My business card with the "old" logo

Many of you already know that I am starting to put together a business as a "content writer for small businesses". As I've mentioned many times on this blog, I have been working with The Challenge Factory and, in particular, Lisa Taylor to identify my "sweet spot" for future career work and it sure feels like we have found it. I did my "Test Drive Day" in May and learned a lot about myself and how I need to progress; the blog piece I wrote about it appeared in the Challenge Factory newsletter. In mid-June I attended a Social Marketing Summit which was presented by Enterprise Toronto; that blog piece was retweeted by some of the presenters of the day. The first piece I wrote about the Jays Care Foundation was retweeted by the Jays Organization and it has nearly 1,000 views at this point. Pretty heady stuff; the feedback I have received for this blog has been remarkable and very encouraging. I have a website close to being ready to go live, I will be starting a Facebook Page for my business and Sarah created some terrific cards for me, which I have started to hand out all over the place. But today something really cool happened which I hope will kick this start-up business into overdrive. (This is the "exciting news" I spoke of yesterday.)

The Social Marketing Summit

As I consider what path my recent work with The Challenge Factory is helping me to find, my career "guru", Lisa Taylor, steered me toward a terrific event that took place yesterday under the joint efforts of Enterprise Toronto and Constant Contact. The Social Marketing Summit, a completely free event which quite understandably was fully booked days in advance, was held in the Council Chambers at the Scarborough Civic Centre and featured several informative and engaging people all speaking to the theme, "Learn How Online Engagement Can Drive Business Opportunities". That fourth word, "Engagement", was the theme of the day, both in the way the speakers worked with the attendees and in the messages they were delivering.

First up, after the opening remarks from Katherine Roos of Enterprise Toronto, was Lisa Kember, Regional Development Director of Constant Contact. The big message from Lisa was that many small businesses are too focused on the "numbers" and not nearly enough on engaging with their clients. A company running a Facebook campaign, for example, is far more successful when a few people "like" or, especially, "share" their posts than when a great many people "fan" their Facebook Page but don't get involved in the discussion in any way. Her most salient point, in my opinion: "When it comes to engagement, small = big." She was very strong on the message that we need to pay attention the "social" aspect of "Social Media" and must take every opportunity to "Wow!" our customers, keep in touch with them and continue to engage with them.