Yes! It’s here! The challenge 800+ bloggers (many of them writers) – and their hangers-on (sorry, followers) have been waiting for. It’s….
THE A TO Z BLOGGING CHALLENGE!
DAY ONE. Brought to you by the letter – A.
Last night I was pondering my first post. I enjoy the quirky randomness Google can bring to the proceedings, and thought I’d see what the hits were for…a. All by itself. Excluding hits for the same/ very similar things, the first 5 were:
- A (Wikipedia article) – an article all about the letter A.
“the first letter and vowel in the basic modern Latin alphabet. It is similar to the Ancient Greek letter Alpha, from which it derives.” So now we know. - Youtube – including ‘Noah takes a photo of himself every day-‘
Well I had to look that one up, my writer’s curiousity was burning like, like… a chicken curry that’s being ‘kept an eye on’ by a 14 year old (bitter voice of experience). Now I suspect I may be late to the party here, but that intriguing sentence in full is: “Noah takes a photo of himself every day for 6 years. ”
Yep, that’s right, it’s a 5 min 46 sec video of photos that Noah Kalina has taken of himself, every day, between January 11, 2000 and July 31, 2006. Noah is a photographer from Brooklyn. To see the photos individually (perhaps a good idea, the video is quite fast and makes you feel seasick!) go here. He is still taking a picture, every day, of just his head and shoulders – boy, there’s a book in there somewhere! - A dictionary of slang http://www.peevish.co.uk/slang/a.htm
The first entry in this fascinating dictionary is abdabs: noun Terror, the frights, nerves. Often heard as the screaming abdabs. Also very ocassionally ‘habdabs’ [1940s]. This site is well worth a visit – great stuff! - HTML a tag
a is an anchor tag in HTML. This is not interesting unless like me you like to walk on the wild side and play with your HTML. ‘Nuff said. - The world’s rubbish dump: a tip that stretches from Hawaii to Japan – An article from The Independent
This is a genuinely interesting article from 3 years ago about ‘A “plastic soup” of waste floating in the Pacific Ocean’. Back in Feb 2008, it covered ‘an area twice the size of the continental United States’. I’ll be looking this up later to see what’s happened to it since.
I can only hope you find this randomness as interesting as I do. Or perhaps, like Elizabeth Crieth, I’m just ‘interested in too many things’ – this is what her careers guidance person told her at school! Doread her excellent post on ‘composting’ your mind. This in particular is sterling advice: “I’d encourage every writer, or would-be writer, to cultivate a compost heap in her mind. Learn something new every day, even if it’s only a bit of trivia or some Believe-It-Or-Not oddity. Read widely. Talk to people. Ask questions.”
Hear hear, Elizabeth!
This looks like so much fun, Alison! Thank you for including me in this first day of your challenge!
Thanks for visiting Elizabeth, and it was a pleasure to include you 🙂 Us composters must stick together!
The challenge is only on weekdays so on Monday, I have to rake through the heap for the letter B!
I remember that article about the garbage island – unfortunately until it causes real trouble (like an oil spill) no one will do anything about it. And then it will be too late.
Nice post. Happy A Day!
Thanks for stopping by Tara :-). And you’re right, that’s the way with most of these problems – governments are always fire-fighting rather than taking measures to prevent them.
Looking forward to the rest of your A to Z topics!