Godiva Gems, Free Parking, Grammar - Uncle Orson Reviews Everything

Godiva chocolate bars have always been too much for me -- in the category of fine chocolates on the candy-bar displays, I far preferred "Ghirardelli Squares," especially the caramel-filled ones, or Cadbury's Caramello bar.

But I've also learned that the Ghirardelli squares have a huge drawback: they are delicate enough to get bent and broken, so when you unwrap the package you can find yourself with messy caramel irrevocably glued to the wrapper. The same thing sometimes happens with Caramellos, too, despite their careful packaging with a cardboard stiffener to protect the bar.

Now Godiva, perhaps realizing that their slabby candy bars were just too much at a time, has come out with Godiva Gems, and they are, in a word, perfect.

Each of them is only a little bigger than a Hershey's kiss, and is wrapped in a slightly loose twist of metallic paper. The compact design of the candy makes it less prone to breakage or bendage, and the wrappers serve as additional cushioning.

Solids are UFO-shaped medallions of dark or milk chocolate, thin enough not to have the slabbiness of the bigger chocolate bars.

Truffles are round, with creamy fillings inside milk and dark chocolate shells. They really are as good as many fine filled candies (though I think they still aren't in the league of the truffles at Loco for Coco).

What I absolutely love and am rapidly gaining weight from are the Godiva Gem caramels. These rectangular chocolates -- again in dark or light varieties -- are filled with a caramel every bit as good as -- and maybe a little better than -- the Cadbury or Ghirardelli competition.

Fresh Market usually has a full selection of Godiva Gems not far from the florist section. And Barnes & Noble right now has wedge-shaped sealed bags of the Gems near the cd racks by the checkout line. If you're a chocolate lover, you really owe it to yourself to buy a couple of bags and discover just how good prepackaged, individually wrapped chocolates can be.

I always thought of parking meters as a meaningless imposition on the public for the sake of trivial amounts of revenue -- like toll booths on long-paid-for turnpikes, where the only reason to collect tolls now is to fund the never-ending pension funds of retired toll collectors.

But here's a link to a video in which economist Donald Shoup explains why parking meters are all about making sure there's plenty of parking available -- which greatly promotes retail shopping. "Just because you don't pay for parking doesn't mean the cost goes away," he says.

The idea is that you have to charge enough for on-street parking that people have an incentive -- especially for long-term parking -- to choose to park farther away and walk in, or take the bus, or make sure they finish their shopping soon enough to get that car away from the meter.

Naturally, some people won't care about the cost, so the meter merely takes a little money out of their pockets. But because there are people who will refuse to park at a meter (or stay less time if they do), the parking places keep emptying.

That means that when you arrive, looking for close-in parking, you're more likely to find an open parking place. You strike a perfect balance when the on-street parking is always nearly full ... but not quite. If you can usually find a place to park fairly quickly, but the parking places aren't all or even mostly empty, then you've found just the right price for on-street parking.

Ah, yes. The ruthlessness of the free market. But it makes sense. After all, big "free" parking garages or mandated "free" parking lots at every place of business actually cost a lot of money, amounting to vast subsidies that encourage people to drive everywhere.

If the parking lots shrank, businesses would be closer together and you could walk between them. Parking may be the single biggest land use in our cities -- and, in a way, it's all wasted space that could be accomplishing something.

Good grammar and spelling guides are hard to find -- mostly because the "experts" are usually wrong about something, and often about a lot of things.

This is one area where I really am an expert. I used to be a professional copy editor, and besides, language has been my lifelong study. No, I don't use perfect grammar in speech, and no, my writing is never error free. I make as many typographical errors as anyone, and when I talk I usually speak "informal spoken English," which has a very different rule set from formal writing.

Still, when it comes to writing -- memos, reports; even letters, emails, texts, and tweets -- people are going to judge you by how well you observe the rules of grammar and spelling. Not that they are experts about everything -- but they do know some of the rules, and if you break those, they'll judge you negatively, even if they have their own array of habitual mistakes.

So it is with great pleasure that I call your attention to the most reliable, accurate, and usable grammar guide I've yet found. There, Their, They're: A No-Tears Guide to Grammar from the Word Nerd, by Annette Lyon, actually offers you accurate advice. (Well, she's not perfect, but the places where I think she's wrong are generally grey areas or so rare and trivial that it doesn't matter.)

She helps you greatly through the mysteries of commas, dashes, hyphens, and parentheses. She even tells you how to get your computer to produce the esoteric characters that are sometimes needed (the m-dash and n-dash).

When do you capitalize "mom" or "president" and when do you leave them lower-case? This book will tell you.

When is it wrong to write "into" because you need to use two words, "in" and "to"? She knows the rule and explains it quite clearly.

So from now on, when people express that rare thing -- an interest in learning the rules of orthography and grammar -- this is the book I'm recommending to them. And it's the one I'm keeping by my computer for quick lookups when I don't want to mess with the whole Chicago Manual of Style.

Every Day Is Special

First appeared in print in The Rhinoceros Times, Greensboro, NC.

Thursday, November 18 -- Great American Smokeout

For the 35^th annual Great American Smokeout, it's worth remembering how far we've come in our social transformation. When my family first moved to Greensboro, smokers behaved as if it were the patriotic duty of all North Carolinians to smoke continuously.

How many times was I standing in a long line -- for tickets, at the post office -- and the person right in front of me or behind me would choose that moment to light up. Most of the time, they acted as if they thought they were doing something admirable and cool.

After all, North Carolina was a tobacco state! Who would be so disloyal as to complain? Yankees and yuppies, that's who.

Never mind that we westerners don't think of ourselves as Yankees (my ancestors were all in Utah, which sat out the Civil War -- having been recently occupied by federal troops themselves).

Parking lots were carpeted with discarded cigarettes. People handled the food in the produce section of the grocery store with the same hand that was holding a lighted cig.

In restaurants, you'd ask for the non-smoking section and be shown to a table surrounded by smokers. "Non-smoking?" you'd remind the hostess. "Are you planning to smoke?" she would ask. "Of course not," you'd answer. "Then as long as you're here, this is the non-smoking section." And she thought she'd said something clever!

The rudeness and arrogance of many (though by no means all) smokers provoked the rest of us beyond endurance. You'd go into a store and come out with your clothes so saturated with smoke that you had to get them out of the house and off to the cleaners to avoid having your whole house reek of tobacco.

And let's not even talk about the hellish experience of sitting in the last row of the non-smoking section on airplanes.

So legislation banning smoking in public places began to move through legislatures and city councils. In Greensboro, the tobacco interests tried to pass a "non-smoking" ordinance that actually was more of a "smoking-required" law, and then, when voters saw through their fraud and rejected the law, they complained that we hadn't understood it.

But now you can go almost anywhere in America and expect to be able to breathe. In restaurants, you can taste your food. Your clothes don't reek whenever you come home from the mall. It's heaven.

Do smokers feel persecuted? I'm just the tiniest bit sorry for them as they huddle outside of buildings, freezing in the winter and broiling in the summer, to nurse their addiction. Maybe this poor soul was not one of the rude, intrusive, arrogant ones.

But their personal courtesy does not make the smoke smell any sweeter, or ease the headache I always get within the first minute of being exposed to tobacco smoke.

I'm sorry that they were deceived by the "coolness" of smoking when they were young and stupid, and got themselves hooked on the most addictive substance known to humankind.

I'm especially sorry for the stupid teenagers I see lighting up in the parking lots of our high schools. Personally, I think that becoming a teenage smoker is proof of stupidity far more telling than low scores on the SAT or flunking out of school. But they're the ones who have to live in the bodies they are poisoning -- as long as they last.

O ye smokers, beleaguered as ye are, seize the day of the Great American Smoke-out! Break this habit that is weakening and killing you! Rejoin the airbreathers! We will gladly welcome you back to the land of the food-tasters and non-ashtray-tasting kissers! You have nothing to lose but your chains!

Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, the librettist and lyricist in the comic opera team of Gilbert and Sullivan, was born on this day in 1836. His intricate and witty verse set the standard for clever song lyrics. A few samples of his writing:

"No one can have a higher opinion of him than I have, and I think he's a dirty little beast."

"When everyone is somebody, then no one's anybody."

"If you wish in this world to advance,

your merits you're bound to enhance;

you must stir it and stump it,

and blow your own trumpet,

or trust me, you haven't a chance."

Gilbert died in May 1911 as a result of a heart attack experienced while saving a woman from drowning.

Mickey Mouse first appeared on screen in 1928 at the Colony Theatre in New York City, in Walt Disney's short "Steamboat Willie" -- the first cartoon "talkie."

Push-button phones first reached the general public on this day in 1963 -- in two cities in Pennsylvania. Before push-button phones, everyone hated to have numbers with lots of 7s, 8s, and 9s in them, because it felt like it took forever for the dial to return to its home position.

In fact, the emergency number 911 only makes sense with push-button phones. In an emergency, you don't want to have a number that begins with a long wait. (Though in the old rotary days, the emergency number was 0, with an even longer wait! -- but it was only the one number.)

Long before push button phones, adding machines had been standardized with the 1-2-3 row near the bottom, with zero under it. Why AT&T decided to reverse that is hard to fathom. All the number entry habits of accountants and bookkeepers are stood on their head -- except zero is at the bottom in both cases.

Maybe AT&T did it that way because on the rotary phones, zero came after 9. But that was insane anyway. They could have used the adding machine layout and made everything much more convenient for everybody. But in those days, AT&T was a monopoly, and they didn't have to think of anything but the preferences of their own executives.

Friday, November 19 -- Oratory Day

Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address on this day in 1863. Noted orator Edward Everett spoke for two hours, in honor of the dedication of 17 acres of the battlefield at Gettysburg, PA, as a national cemetery. But in those days, oratory was like television. Anyone who has watched the vapidity of Sean Hannity or Bill Maher for an hour has shown more patience than listening to Everett would have required.

Lincoln rose to speak and less than two minutes later, he was done. Whether anyone there recognized the brilliance of the speech is beside the point. It was soon published and has since become recognized as one of the most eloquent orations in the English language.

As the writer of a sloppy, overweight review column, I can affirm that it's much harder to write a two-minute speech than a two-hour one. But oratory at any length is a lost art. President Obama was praised as a "great speaker," but that only proves that those who said it had never heard a great speech. The best we can hope for these days is somebody who reads from the teleprompter without stumbling over the words.

Five manuscript copies in Lincoln's own handwriting survive, including the rough draft begun in ink at the executive mansion at Washington and concluded in pencil at Gettysburg on the morning of the dedication.

The greatest soccer player who ever lived, the Brazilian Pele, scored his thousandth goal on this day in 1969. Playing for the Santos team, the goal came on a penalty kick against the Vasco de Gama team. The crowd went insane, as well they should. By the time Pele retired in 1977, he had scored an astounding 1,281 goals -- a world record that still stands.

Rocky and His Friends premiered on television in 1959, featuring the adventures of Rocky (Rocket J. Squirrel), Bullwinkle the moose, and Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha. Other popular segments included "Fractured Fairy Tales" and the adventures of Sherman and Mr. Peabody (an intelligent talking dog). It remains one of the greatest kids shows ever created.

Saturday, November 20 -- Name Your PC Day

Why not name your computer? People name their boats! Some people even name their cars and their vacation homes. And many people spend a lot more time with the companionship of their PC than with spouse and children combined.

It sounds so much more personal to say, "I have to spend a couple of hours with Cecil tonight before I go to bed, dear." It gives the implication that you have a life.

Just a word of advice: Men, give your PC a masculine name; women, give yours a feminine one. Just to avoid starting rumors when people don't know that "Cecil" or "Edna" are computers.

On Family Volunteer Day, families are encouraged to take part in community-oriented projects. Working at a homeless shelter, picking up trash in a neighborhood or park -- by doing this just before Thanksgiving, your family might just become one of the things that someone else is thankful for!

And don't miss the Elephant Roundup at Surin, Thailand. Since 1961, this annual festival has featured demonstrations of trained elephants in the morning, followed by elephant races and a tug-of-war between 100 men and one elephant. Though anyone who has a two-year-old has already faced tougher challenges.

Sunday, November 21 -- National Bible Week

You can celebrate National Bible week by gathering with others to read aloud from whatever translation of the Bible you like best -- or reading silently on your own.

You can dedicate yourself to reading one (or all) of the gospels during the week, for instance, or the entirety of Isaiah or Psalms. Or a love story: the book of Ruth is wonderful family reading; the Song of Solomon just makes children giggle, so you should probably confine that to adults.

(I urge you to skip the book of Job, however. The "friends" of Job just go on and on and on, saying the same thing over and over. The only parts worth reading are Job's answers.)

And if you have young kids, there's nothing wrong with teaching them to love Bible stories by reading from the best of the children's modern-language versions that cut out the things that kids won't care about (long lists of begats, for instance).

It's a national shame that almost no one in America these days is really conversant with the Bible. Here's a little test: Which book in the Bible describes a UFO? Which book is the basis of the song about "Them bones, them bones, them dry bones"? (Answer to both questions: Ezekiel).

Which book ends with a long passage in praise of hardworking, virtuous women? Which book talks about the valley of the shadow of death? In which book does a prostitute help some Israelite spies escape from their pursuers? In which book does a woman nail the head of a weary general to the ground with a tent spike? (Proverbs, Psalms, Joshua, Judges)

If you got any of them right, you are in the top ten percent of professed Bible-believers in this country. If you got three or more correct, you must have attended a seminary -- or be my age or older.

Congress first met in Washington DC on this day in 1800, in the north wing of the new Capitol. Before that, they met in Philadelphia.

This is the first day of the 16^th annual National Game & Puzzle Week. While computer games can be wonderful, traditional board games are still a very different and far more social experience. Depending on the ages of your children and/or the interests of your friends, here are games you can have great fun with:

Group guessing and conversation games: Wise and Otherwise, Dixit, Trivial Pursuit, Apples to Apples

Board games: Ticket to Ride, Settlers of Cataan, Carcassonne.

Word games: Scattergories (and the new, quicker Scattergories Categories), Scrabble, Boggle, Upwords

And that's just the beginning of a list. I'll try to give you a more complete (and better-explained) list before the Christmas gift-buying season is over. But this will certainly get you started if you don't already have a game-playing tradition.

And don't forget Games magazine. The current issue has their annual list of the 200 best new games -- half of them computer-based, the other half table games.

On this day in 1789, North Carolina became the 12th state to ratify the Constitution. Only Rhode Island outlasted us in our reluctance to be part of the USA.

Monday, November 22 -- Better Conversation Week

The hope during Better Conversation Week is that we will strengthen personal bonds through meaningful, enjoyable talk among friends and family members. This might sound pointless -- don't we talk all the time? -- but remember that "conversation" means more than talking long enough to work out the transportation schedule for a busy family.

Conversation has topics. Current events, for instance -- you might have a conversation with your kids about stuff going on in the real world. They might be shocked to find out that you actually have rational thought behind your opinions; and you might be shocked to find out just what their opinions are!

Remember that a real conversation is not a lecture. It flows in every direction, and we should be eager to learn what others have to say, not just waiting for them to take a breath so we can start talking again.

And even within our families -- no, especially within our families -- a standard of perfect civility must be maintained for conversation to continue. Everyone has to trust that they won't be put down for speaking their heart and mind (as long as they, too, remain polite and kind in their manner of expression).

If we practiced polite and generous conversational skills at home, maybe, in a generation or two, our politicians would learn how to do it, too, and Congress and political campaigns might become useful again.

The Humane Society of the United States was founded on this day in 1954. That was back when the goal was to promote kindness toward, or at least decent treatment of, animals. The Humane Society is not responsible for the wretched excesses of animal-worshipers like PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals). So I salute the Humane Society for representing a middle way.

John F. Kennedy was murdered on this day in 1963, leading to the far more effective presidency of Lyndon Johnson.

And in 1859, Darwin published On the Origin of Species, leading to vast changes in the way we generally conceive of the place of human beings in the world. It is worth remembering, however, that the fact that evolution had taken place was already widely accepted -- the facts of the paleontological record are plain enough.

Darwin's innovation was to offer an explanation for evolution that did not require divine intervention. His model was inadequate and incomplete, and is still being tweaked and refined to bring it closer to adequacy, but it moved the subject into the realm of verifiable science, so that we could learn more about how life forms change over time.

When Darwin wrote, DNA and the biochemical processes inside the cell were simply unknown; it is hardly a surprise that the more we learn, the more we find out how much we had guessed wrong. Those who claim Darwin had the final answer are simply expressing their faith, as surely as those who claim Darwin was completely wrong or that only intelligent design can explain speciation. Neither side can possibly prove either hypothesis.

Real scientists keep challenging and revising all hypotheses, including Darwin's, and the process continues among that select group today.

Tuesday, November 23 -- Dr. Who Day

Doctor Who premiered on British television on this day in 1963, beginning a cult of trenchcoat-wearing fanatics -- and some pretty good sci-fi in, recent years at least. (I can't vouch for earlier.)

The first magazine of photojournalism, Life, debuted on this day in 1936. The first cover featured a dramatic photograph by Margaret Bourke-White, a picture of Fort Peck Dam. The slick-paper photos were far better than anything newspapers could produce; but competition with cameras-everywhere television networks eventually killed the still photo mags.

Wednesday, November 24 -- Winning Friends Day

Dale Carnegie was born on this day in 1888. His valuable book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, which first appeared in 1936, sold nearly 5 million copies and was translated into 29 languages. My parents gave me this book when I was about ten, and it changed my life by making me think about how my words are interpreted by those who hear them.

As a matter of fact, we'll all do better at Better Conversation Week if we've read Carnegie's seminal book beforehand. (Skip the long and pointless prefaces and forewords and introductions.) In fact, maybe we can all read chapters of the book this week and let each chapter be the topic of our better conversations!