writing and writers – Page 185 – don't confuse the narrator

taxing my patience

Buying blank cds to back up my ever-growing collection of photographs, I am reminded of university days when I studied Adam’s Smiths canons of taxation.

Every blank cd sold in Spain is subject to el canon – popularly referred to as “un impuesto por si acaso“. That pretty much describes it: a “just-in-case tax”.
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According to a story on the BBC website, Don’t be 404, know the tech slang, new words and expressions are entering the language, driven by modern technology such as Oyster cards, the internet, mobile phones and “textese”.

This probably won’t come as much of a surprise to many of us already happy to include abbreviations like b4, u, @ and wld in our msgs in an attempt to keep the costs down, even if we baulk at l8r and draw the line at ur, wat or y?.
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bubbles, butterflies & baseball

Apparently unrelated, perhaps, but the words in the title do, in fact, have something in common: they are the topics of the three new titles in the T-Tales collection by Topka.

And those are the books I’ll be reading at two separate readings/story-telling sessions in Madrid this coming Saturday, December 13th.
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journalism for beginners

Yesterday I mentioned the 1939 Spectator diarist’s fear of what might happen when the newly invented cheap ball point pen got into the hands of the “inexpert and frankly incompetent”. Of course we’ve gone way beyond that now.

Now, anyone who owns a digital camera thinks he is a photographer; anyone with a computer is a journalist and anyone with a mobile phone is an on-the-spot reporter. And very few of us have any professional training in journalism.
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kilometers of ink?

Although the ballpoint mechanism was first patented in 1888, it was another 40 years before Biro invented and commercialised the first popular ballpoint pen, the Bic, in 1938.

Since then, the technology has come a long way and different “biros” offer very different value for money. At least, so it would seem from this Spanish consumer report.