When will Israelis get a real weekend?

One of the first things I had to get used to in living and working in Israel was the fact that Sunday is the first work day of the week. Sunday is actually called Yom Rishon ("First Day") in Hebrew. When it comes to naming the days, Hebrew is quite sensible:

• Yom Rishon ("First Day") [Sunday]
• Yom Sheni ("Second Day") [Monday]
• Yom Shlishi ("Third Day") [Tuesday]
• Yom Revy-ee ("Fourth Day") [Wednesday]
• Yom Chamishi ("Fifth Day") [Thursday]
• Yom Shishi ("Sixth Day") [Friday]
• Shabbat (the "Sabbath"- day of rest) [Saturday]

As you can see, the names are quite practical and straightforward. No messing around with borrowing from the gods, celestial bodies, or whatever. The formula is quite simple - name the day by its number in the week. Except for the seventh day. It had to be different:
And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because it was the day when he rested from all his work of creation.
And so the seventh day was given the name Shabbat (the day of rest).

But things didn't stop here. Not only was Sunday the first work day of the week, Israelis also seemed to have never heard of a two day weekend. They should be given credit, though, for coming up with the whole concept of a day of rest, far before others. The Romans didn't come up with the idea until the year 321, when the Roman Emperor Constantine declared the dies solis (Day of the Sun) [Sunday] an official Roman day of rest. And another twenty centuries would pass until the Western world came up with the idea of the two day weekend. Apparently this was first instituted by a New England cotton mill which wanted to allow its Jewish workers to adhere to their own religious Sabbath. Ironically, it was Henry Ford (who was considered by many to be an ardent Anti-Semite) who, in 1926, was among the first to standardize the two day weekend, shutting down his automotive factories for all of Saturday and Sunday, while still paying his workers the same wages. As for Israelis - "If the one day of rest was good enough for our forefathers..." - well, you get the message.

I may have adapted better to this one day weekend in Israel had it not been for the fact that there were no buses on Saturdays (you couldn't go anywhere unless you had your own car), no stores were open (no opportunity to plan shopping for the end of the week when you actually had the time), and no television (no afternoon ball games on the tube). If  you were an observant Jew, this worked out just find. But if you were secular, you really did want to have the right of choice.

And if all this weren't enough, I was rudely introduced to the seven day work week. Yes, you heard me right. And no, this isn't something that came straight out of a Charles Dickens novel, although it might have.

I should clarify here that the seven day work week was not something common to all Israeli society. Rather, it was an essential part of the kibbutz way of life: the dreaded toranut. Back in the days when most of the kibbutzim were still communal in  nature, kibbutz members took turns in working in essential services on the Sabbath - services such as the communal dining room, children houses, milking and feeding the cows. Which meant that every three or four weeks, you didn't have a weekend.

Now, I don't think I have to tell you how important the weekend is to maintaining our sanity. Already by midweek, the promise of the approaching weekend keeps us going. And when the weekend arrives, we heave a huge sigh of relief and lapse into denial for two days. No matter how bad the week has been, things suddenly get better. But when the weekend is taken from you  - even the one day with such limited opportunities as the Israeli weekend - one is prone to enter into the pits of despair. There is nothing to hold onto to keep you going during the week. I kept telling myself that this was my choice, that this was an integral part of maintaining a communal way of life, but I could never get used to it.

Things have changed since then. The cows have been sold, the children now live at home with their parents, kibbutz members no longer go to eat in the dining room... and somewhere along the line we decided to leave the kibbutz. Sometime after that the kibbutz was privatized. Meanwhile, Israelis unofficially got a two day weekend. I say unofficially as the schools are still open six days a week, as are many businesses. But most people are now taking the Friday off, as well (which has always been a half-day workday in any case, as people are given time to welcome in the Sabbath which begins at sunset on Fridays).

But voices are beginning to be heard that are calling for more. Silvan Shalom, an Israeli government minister, has suggested making the two day weekend an official one - with people having Saturday and Sunday off. And Friday would be  a work day until noon. This would enable schools to move to a five day week and it would also be easier for the Israeli business community to coordinate things with business communities around the world whose weekend is Saturday and Sunday.

And most of all, as Silvan has been reported as saying:
"It is time Israelis got a real weekend."

The loneliness of a long distance writer

Loneliness is a state of mind. You need not be alone to feel lonely. Nor do you need to feel lonely if you are alone. Perhaps the greatest loneliness is not in living thousands of miles from the people closest to you, but in being surrounded by people every day who seem so far away.

A writer should write about what he knows. Or so the saying goes. Perhaps this could be worded differently.  A writer should write about the things that he yearns for, but are always just out of reach. Running the marathon of his own emotion and lack of experience. There will always be something missing.

It's a question of maturity, I suppose. Wine gets better as it ages. But should we really compare ourselves to wine? Perhaps we are more like water, which evaporates.

How can there be loneliness in writing when you are reaching out and speaking to the world? Instead of keeping your most intimate thoughts to yourself, you are sharing them with strangers, with little knowledge or control as to where they may finally end up. True, you may clothe it as a fictional account, leaving it to your readers to guess where you are in all of this. But when it comes down to it, it is all you. And when you have finished writing, you are just another stranger reading the words, wondering who this writer may be, hidden between the lines on a page with no ending and no beginning.

I once thought that the loneliest part of writing was in the writing, itself. But I have slowly come to realize that it is in the emptiness and echoes which follow. It distances you from others, rather than bringing them closer. You have set out by yourself on a long and sometimes treacherous journey, but for them it is as if you never left. And the more you write, the less they know you.

What is it that a writer and a long distance runner have in common? Is it the distance we must travel? The pain and anguish in getting there? Or the loneliness which encases us in our solitary cell, moving almost unnoticed among the others until we reach the finish line. Even then, we may disappear into a sea of faces. But our journey has been recorded. Whether or not this has meaning for others, it surely must have some meaning for ourselves.

Yet there is no finish in writing. Just as the long distance runner never stops running - even if his body betrays him and he continues running only in his mind. Although at times we become so tired, we wonder what would happen if we simply stopped.

I can't imagine stopping, for I can't imagine living without even the echoes.

Sir Andy Murray and Dame Kim Sears

So, that's it. After a 77 year drought, Andy Murray - the bad boy from Scotland who once said, "I'll be supporting anyone but England." (referring to the 2006 World Cup) - has won Wimbledon for the Brits, and brought back that old English pride.

Much credit has been given to his girlfriend of many years - Kim Sears. She not only led him to leave behind his reckless boyish behavior and become a more mature representative of the United Kingdom, but she is also credited for the increasing maturity in his play - being viewed as the rock of his success in the tennis world. During the Wimbledon final, the camera didn't seem able to get enough of her, panning back and forth between her - in her Victoria Beckham designed dress - to the play on the court. Some may feel that she didn't warrant such exposure, but I admit that I found her stunning and I enjoyed every minute that the camera zoomed in on her. Her facial expressions, in watching Andy Murray struggle towards his place in history, were as much a part of the spectacle as anything else Actually, the last woman I found so stunning was Kate Middleton. Both women appear to have captured our imagination, bringing back the magic to a jaded empire: each regal in her own way. And there is already talk of Andy Murray being knighted. He, himself, has stated that he doesn't think this victory deserves such an honour, but millions of Britains appear to disagree.

But I may be jumping the gun here. Andy and Kim aren't even married. Apparently they are also not talking about marriage, at least Andy isn't. Before the beginning of the Wimbledon final, bookies offered 66/1 odds on Andy proposing to Kim at some point during the Wimbledon final. After his Wimbledon final victory, the bookies slashed the odds, now offering 8/11 odds on Andy proposing to Kim before the start of Wimbledon next year.

But let's give Andy and Kim a bit of a breather, eh, and let them enjoy some deserved privacy in their six bedroom mansion. Back to the world of tennis, and a little bit more about women and tennis.

During my teenage years, I used to play tennis with one of my best friends - let's call  him Greg (in order to protect the seemingly innocent). This wasn't as simple as it sounds. Tennis was in no way popular then as it is now. Greg and I had to actually ride on our one speed bikes for miles (at the time we still used miles) to reach the nearest public tennis courts  (down by Birchmount and Kingston Road, for the Torontonians among you). I think we put more energy in getting there and back than in the tennis, itself. But we had a lot of fun. Those were the days of Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, Margaret Court and Billie Jean King - with Bjorn Borg bringing in the new age. Like most kids,  we imagined ourselves to be Laver or Rosewall out there on the court, but we never kidded ourselves into believing that we could be anything nearly as good - much in the same way we knew we could never emulate a Rocket Richard, Jean Beliveau or Johnny Bower (hockey heroes, for those of you who are clueless).

Oh yes, I promised you something about women and tennis. Well, Greg and I didn't get into tennis because of women. I don't think girls were even on our mind when we started playing tennis.But later in our teenage years, Greg and I started going on double dates. Safety in numbers. You know what they say. Anyway, we discovered that our best double dates were when we went out with two girls to play tennis. Perhaps because we didn't have to talk much. (Greg and I had the habit of finishing each other's sentences, which drove the girls crazy). I mean, how much trouble can you get into playing tennis? Unlike taking two girls to see "Love Story". A bit of advice to you guys out there - never laugh at a movie when your date has taken out a tissue and is sobbing profusely into it. And beware of girls like M who believe that the perfect double date is going out with both of you at the same time. One of you is going to get dumped in the end. And it wasn't Greg.

But we couldn't depend on double dating and tennis to save us for too long. One day you are bound to find yourself standing there without a tennis racquet, and A is crying. That is another thing about doubles. One partner goes and the other leaves the game also. At least that was the case with R. Paul... I mean Greg (where is the backspace on this thing) never forgave me for that. I am not sure whether it was because he lost R as a date or as a very good tennis partner. (Which is harder to find, do you think?)

I didn't do too well with girls and tennis after that. Perhaps it was because I set my sights too high. I would never go out on a second date with a girl who didn't like tennis and Monty Python - a lethal combination. I remember watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail with X. She didn't even laugh once. And I didn't see any point in giving her a chance to prove herself on the court, after that. But I don't think she left that broken up.

Now, I don't know if Kim Sears even plays tennis. But I am less rigid now and would suffice with her watching me play with that special adoration in her eyes which until now has been reserved only for Andy. And I'm sure she loves Monty Python. You can tell just by looking into her eyes.

Working our way backwards through time

Will Google glasses one day allow us to relive past moments? Walk down a street, click (blink) on a date and observe all that happened at that point in time and space? Is this really that far fetched? And if we can go that far, why not a time machine that allows us to become active participants in past events? Yes, I am aware of the argument of logistics. If we can go back in the past and change something, then the present will change also. But if so, then it must have already happened. It must have already happened.

But what if logistics is simply our excuse for not being able to break out of the confines of our present level of comprehension. Logistics once seemingly proved that the world was flat. And there was a time when no one would have even conceived of the possibility of the light bulb, let alone the computer. Each generation appeared to entertain the smug belief that the greatest possible enlightenment had already been achieved.

Inventions reached their limit long ago, and I see no hope for further development. ~ Julius Frontinus, 1st century A.D.

Everything that can be invented has been invented. ~ Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899,

Is time travel another electric light bulb waiting to happen?

Let's borrow from the world of computers in order to offer one possible theory of time travel. Computer systems have a backup utility which allows us to go back and restore our system from a restore point in the past. This is particularly useful when something corrupts the present and we prefer to return to an earlier point and start over, erasing everything from that point on, as if it had never happened. Apple even calls their MAC backup utility - the Time Machine.

Tempting, eh? Start over again from an earlier point in our lives.

I suggest something similar in time travel, but with a significant twist. The restore point is only created when a time traveler goes back to a specific point in the past and does something that will change that world in some way.

"You are about to change this world. Click save to accept, or cancel to cancel. Warning: this change is irreversible and you will lose all future data."

But wait! Before you go back and present your old self with Sports Almanac so as to become rich through gambling - as Biff did in Back to the Future - you must realize that any change that you inflict will not affect the world that you go back to. Rather, you will have created a parallel world with a different future from that point on. Would there be any point, then, in making a variant of yourself rich in another world? A world whose future you cannot witness? Or would this be similar to wanting to leave a legacy for your children? You will not witness the effect of your legacy after you are dead, either.

Now some of you may claim that the universe cannot house an infinite number of parallel worlds. Yet you don't appear to have a problem with the millions of new souls that are born into the universe every day - each new soul with a new consciousness, sending bouncing thought waves everywhere. Others among you may worry about the ever-increasing possibility of meeting yourselves coming and going. It may just take one errant wormhole and there you are, standing in front of  yourself face to face. Do you recognize your other? Is this a meeting of matter and anti-matter, which will perhaps cause the universe to explode, or implode?

I can see some of you looking for the price tag. Sounds promising, but what is the cost? The going price of a ticket for space travel is $250,000. Can we expect time travel to be in the same ball park?

Word on the street has it that not only does such a machine exist, but that it is in the hands of Google. And word on a Tel Aviv street corner will tell you that it was originally an Israeli startup. The last thing I heard is that Google is looking for beta testers. Any takers? Here is your chance to try out time travel for no cost. You may disappear into a black hole somewhere, but hey, we'd still be back contemplating the wheel if we weren't ready to take chances. Will Google be willing to add this to the Google+ profile, depending on advertising alone for monetary benefit? Will this be the straw that breaks Facebook's back? How long will it take Microsoft to clone the invention, somehow side stepping patent law?

What good is it then, if we can't go back and help avert calamities and foolish decisions, both for the benefit of mankind and the benefit of ourselves? Maybe it is time for us to simply accept the past as something that can't be changed, at least not in this world. At the most, we can try to understand it better, and through this understanding make the world a better place. The best place is to start with ourselves. Too many of us keep repeating the same mistakes.

So, if you were offered the opportunity to go back in a time machine, what part of your past life would you choose to visit - for whatever reason?

Oh, I forgot to tell you. You can only go back as an active participant to some point in your past life. You can't interactively visit someone else's life, or interactively visit a point in the past before you were born. However, you can go back as observer only, to any point in the past. This is definitely one up on reality shows and will definitely change our conception of history. They say that history is written by the victors, but here we have our own direct line to the past.

If I were to go back in the past, I'd choose the sixties. Why? That will have to wait for another blog posting. Right now the ink in my pen is running dry, and the more that I write - the greater the chance that I will meet myself coming and going.

Facebook status: Grandparent

My daughter in-law, Sharon (with significant help from my son, Noam) gave birth to a beautiful baby boy and I am now a grandfather. Adva and I are still getting used to this new status. Grandparents... wow!

Soon after being told the news,, a picture of the baby - taken with an iPhone - appeared in Adva's inbox.
"Come see the picture of the baby!" Adva called out to me.
"Wow," I exclaimed, looking proudly at my grandson.
"But Noam said that this is only for us privately," she added.
"Oh, you mean..."
"No facebook," Adva said, dejectedly.
It took us a while to digest all of this.
"Well, I need to change my facebook status," Adva said.
"Yes," I nodded, "I hadn't thought of that."
I went into facebook to make the change in status which would be broadcast to the world.
"You know what?" I called back to Adva.
"What?"
"You can't change your status to grandparent in facebook. When it comes to - in a relationship - it can only be something like: single, married, it's complicated."
"Really!"
You'd think facebook would have thought of that. Here is a major event in our lives and facebook doesn't even have a place to mark our new status (or would that be an addition in status.)
"Well, I'm going to write something in the status box at the top of my page," I called out to Adva, now that she had got me going.
"I'll probably wait and write something this evening," she called back.
So I announced to the facebook world (or more exactly, to my facebook friends) that I am now a grandfather.

Soon after that, pings began to sound from my computer, somewhat like popcorn seeds beginning to pop.
"What are those sounds?" Adva asked me.
"People commenting on my announcement of being a grandfather, I suppose," I answered.
"Oh," Adva answered, and then she disappeared.
A little later, suspicious as to her whereabouts, I went into her facebook page. There she eloquently expressed her joy in being a grandparent. She already had over 50 likes. Hmm...

A day passed and we received more pictures, but still with no permission to put them up on our facebook pages.
"I think Noam and Sharon are punishing us," I said to Adva.
"Why?"
"For putting their wedding pictures up on facebook without permission."
"That was a long time ago."
"Lloyds know how to hold a grudge." I said.

Fade out to Noam and Sharon's house, where they sit looking at wedding pictures on Noam's parents' facebook pages.
"We are going to have to do something about my parents," Noam said. "They are becoming incorrigible."
"Maybe we should cut off their facebook access," Sharon said.

The evening of the second day, after arriving home from the hospital, and sending pictures of the baby to relatives (that we did have permission for), Adva asked me, ever so nonchalantly.
"How many likes do you have on your announcement?"
"Likes? What, are we in a competition?" I asked.
"No, just wondering."
"Let me check." I went into my facebook page. "47 likes and 31 comments. How many do you have?" I asked suspiciously.
"Oh, I don't know," she answered, trying to sound a little aloof, "I would say, offhand, about 84 likes and 57 comments."
I tried not to let my sulking appear too evident. The thing was, I needed a good picture of the baby to get things moving again. Maybe if one appeared innocently on my facebook page from an anonymous source. No, Noam and Sharon would never buy that excuse.

Now, don't jump to the conclusion that after 30+ years of marriage, Adva and I are in a competition for public recognition. That would be just sad. Mainly because I'd have little chance of winning. Despite my wide presence on the Internet with all of the initiatives that I have started and developed, when it comes down to it, Adva has the contacts. I mean, she even had our President Shimon Peres personally autograph his biography (in English) for my mother (my mother is a huge Shimon Peres fan).
"That was nice of Adva," my mother said. "Do you know Shimon Peres also?"
"No, but Adva introduced me to him, once."
"Hmm...."

But now that we are grandparents, Adva and I must start behaving ourselves and acting our age... well, let's just say, start behaving ourselves. Otherwise, Noam and Sharon may not let us babysit our new grandson.

Someone pass me the remote

I grew up before the days of cable or satellite TV, in Scarborough - a small suburb of Toronto. Like everyone else, we picked up broadcasts by means of a roof top antenna, with a very limited choice of stations. There was no remote control at the time - just a knob that we turned to change stations. When there were only about six stations to choose from, that wasn't much of a problem. Which doesn't mean that this station  control wasn't mobile. When my parents went out and left my sister and me alone, the channel war began. At the time, my sister was obsessed with anything to do with horses and I wanted to watch pretty much anything else. After we were unable to negotiate agreement, the channel knob came off the TV and the race began. Which meant that instead of actually watching TV when my parents were away, we spent the time wresting control of the channel changer, which couldn't do much of anything until it was attached back to the TV.

So much has changed since. And as the technology continued to develop, I somehow appeared to always be one step behind.

It all started when I decided to leave Canada and see where my travels would take me. After working my way through Europe, I ended up on an Israeli kibbutz, and just as my friends back home were entering into the world of colour and cable TV, I entered into a world of black and white and one state-run TV station.

It's not as if I missed TV. At the time my whole life was still an adventure, and TV was of little interest to me. Of course, when the Yom Kippur War broke out about four months later, I did squeeze my way into the television room and watch as generals used maps to explain the present situation. Luckily I didn't know enough Hebrew at the time to understand that we were very close to being pushed into the sea. All I knew was that Israelis kept telling me: "Yihyeh  beseder." (Everything will be okay). It was only much later during my Israeli experience that I realized that Israelis only said this when things were really bad, or out of control.

We had to go to a communal television room, at the time, to watch TV because kibbutz members didn't have TV in their apartments. All to do with socialistic values which have long since disappeared.

Watching Israeli television at the time was like going back in a time machine to the fifties and sixties. And since the whole nation was watching the same programs, it was quite easy to find someone with whom to discuss a program from the previous day. And it was remarkable to see how the whole country appeared to shut down once a week to watch a new episode of  I Claudius. There was almost no traffic on the streets. You could hear a pin drop.

When it was finally decided to introduce TV sets into the apartments of kibbutz members, my future wife to be and I would go to her parents' apartment to watch TV with them (TV sets were handed out according to kibbutz seniority and we still had to wait). I found myself watching things that I would have never watched - had I a choice. And although there was a vibrant TV world developing out there, Israeli TV was basically a collection of grade B reruns. This was still before there was any real Israeli Hebrew sitcom content. What original Israeli content there was on Israeli TV was mainly made for TV documentaries and children programs. Israeli Educational TV was the shining light in the early Israeli television experience.

In the meantime, I missed a whole generation of North American TV. I never saw the Watergate broadcasts; I never saw Wayne Gretzky play in a regular season hockey game; I  never saw Seinfeld until the last episode was finished and all that was left were the reruns. But I rationalized: "If you are going to leave a culture behind, leave it behind. Don't expect it to follow you to wherever you end up." Just another reason for my friends back home to proclaim me crazy.

But TV is somewhat a measure of the ever-changing Israeli experience. Israel before and after colour television is not just a question of colour, but also a question of social fabric. Why, we must ask ourselves, did Israel wait for over ten years to implement Israeli TV broadcasts in colour when it already had the technology and equipment? Moreover, when Israelis began to import colour televisions in order to watch imported TV programs in colour, why did the government order the state-run TV station to use a special mechanism to erase all colour from the broadcast? Then Israeli Prime Minister, Golda Meir, described colour television as artificial and unnecessary. Political elements in the government went even further in claiming that the import of colour TV sets would only widen the gap between the Haves and the Have Nots. But Israelis, known for their ingenuity, began to purchase TV sets which had a built in anti-eraser mechanism which returned the colour that had been erased.

The kibbutz also struggled with the social impact of television on the kibbutz way of life. Bowing down to increasing pressure, it was finally decided to introduce black and white TV sets into kibbutz members' apartments. But by the time that that happened, Israel had started to broadcast in colour and the rest of Israel was moving over to colour sets. It took a while for the kibbutz to catch up to that, too, but by then we had decided to leave the kibbutz and were headed south, deep into the Negev desert.

That was when we really began to feel the technological gap. But what do you expect, living in the desert?

The first development was the creation of a second Israeli TV station - this time a commercial one. Soon, not only were friends back home in Canada telling me what I was missing, but friends back in the centre of Israel, as well.
"You have to watch Seinfeld!" they told me.
"It is only on Channel 2," I told them, "and the signal doesn't reach us."
The children were complaining and my wife kept pointing out what we were missing, but what could you do - it was out of our control.
"Yihyeh beseder," I said.

And then Channel 2 only made things worse, by increasing the signal, just enough to tease us, but not all the way there.
"What are you doing on the roof?" my wife called up to me one day, as I stood precariously above twiddling with the antenna.
"Trying to get Channel 2," I said.
"Are you crazy!", she exclaimed. "You will kill yourself."
"That program you told me about last night, that you really want to see, is on."
"I'll turn on the TV" she said. "I'll let you know when we get a picture."
"Do you see it now?" I called down to my wife, through the open window.
"I see something."
"And now?" I asked twisting the antenna just a bit more.
"Better!"
One more little twist.
"Good! That's it," my wife called out. "Don't move!"
After about ten minutes, I decided it was time for me to be rewarded for my efforts and let go of the antenna, starting to make my way down.
"We lost the signal!" my wife cried out.
It was then that I discovered that I am a good human conductor.

But if I am known to be one thing, it is obsessive. The signal was out there taunting me, and I wasn't going to give up soon. I found a long iron pole that had been discarded in a nearby junk yard and brought it home. Attaching it to the house, outside of the living room window, I attached the antenna at the top. I could then lean out the window and slowly turn the pole, turning the antenna, until I got the best picture. I even managed to pick up Jordan TV at times. But because of usually strong evening winds, I had to hold the pole so that the wind wouldn't cause the antenna and pole to turn. But at least now, hanging out of the window, I could keep a hold of the pole and watch TV at the same time.

It was then that cable television reached Israel. Israel was finally catching up to the rest of the world. Well... most of Israel. The cable company (a monopoly) informed us that it was too expensive to lay cables down in our remote desert neighborhood. And here we were again, way behind everyone else.

It's not that I had to have such access to the boob tube. It wasn't totally necessary, as Golda Meir would say. But I wanted the ability to choose, even if it were the choice not to watch.

And along came an Israeli satellite company and the cable company's monopoly was over. For the first time, anyone, anywhere, could be hooked up to hundreds of stations. Since we were one of the first communities to hook up to the new service, we were offered the opportunity to sign up to the unlimited package, something I jumped at, and something they soon no longer offered to new subscribers. And just like that, everything changed. It wasn't long before we got a digital recording box as well, and access to VOD (video on demand). Suddenly, all those years of drought were behind us. We had better access than many of my friends back home in Canada.

So, what is the punch line? Patience, perseverance? What comes around, goes around? I don't really know. Right now I can choose not to watch 90% of the stations available. And I like that - just fine.

And now the book: Why I May Still Be Canadian

A few months ago, I was approached by a publisher to turn my blog - Why I May Still Be Canadian - into a book (paperback).
"Turn a blog into a book?" I asked myself. "Isn't that going in the opposite direction?"
For blogs seem to be almost an antithesis to the printed word. One rests in cyberspace, expanding in elastic time and space - while the other is encased in a limited number of physical pages between two covers.
I may not have seriously considered this request at all, hadn't it been for a remark made by a good friend a short time earlier:
"Your blog would make a good book," he said.
"A book... yes. But what's the point?" I asked myself.

The point, according to the publisher - bloggingbooks, is quite clear:

Blogs deserve being published!
Millions of people share their point of view with the world in real time – This is how blogs have
become part of our everyday lives. Blogs focus on the present and thereby provide continuous
commentary on daily happenings. Events and content, that are presented in a chronological
order on the internet, get a new dimension through books. Books create systematic snapshots
through collecting, compiling, categorizing and commenting.

Are you convinced?

I still wasn't, although they had definitely captured my interest. I think that what may have convinced me in the end was the revelation that a blog is like sand sifting through our fingers. We see it as it passes through, but then it is swallowed up in the collecting mound of sand below. Although one may jump back in time and sporadically read earlier postings, a blog is more like a newspaper than a book. It is archived like many newspapers are, but only a small percentage of people work their way back.

I know that I am subjective, but in transforming the blog structure into book form (a huge task in itself), I really enjoyed reading the postings from old to new. A blog can make a good book, strangely enough.

So Why I May Still Be Canadian  is my second book - the one most people can understand. And this blog posting may be seen as a watershed separating the blog, which is the book, from the blog which still bravely carries onward into the virtual darkness.

If you do purchase my book, drop me a line and share your thoughts. Always good to know that you are not alone.