40,572 words and my Viagra dude

Everyone gets spam, right? Comments on your blog that are trying to link you to penis enlargements or Viagra. Usually the comments are written in busted English have absolutely nothing to do with your blog post. I don't know about you but I pretty much delete spam on contact.

Something weird is going on, though.

In the last few days I have gotten a TON of comments from an address that is pushing generic drug buying online... you know, drugs like Viagra – not the kind you buy from Cheech & Chong, I don't think.

The address was spammy but the comments were actually related to the posts.

Huh, I thought, but deleted them anyway.

On Wednesday my e-mail inbox was filled all day long with comments from the Viagra dude. Really, really good comments. This guy (or girl) was not only reading the posts but was offering intelligent, thoughtful insights as well.

He wrote this regarding a post I made about a camping trip to Killarney Provincial Park:

xlpharmacy reviews has left a new comment on your post "Killarney by Canoe": wow amazing trip you had made, i remember that i made one a few years ago to the yellowstone park, was awesome we get permission to do camping, was pretty awesome to be 3 days without a computer. 

He wrote this about a story about the authors of a new local book called The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock. I was embarrassed, at the time, because the only commenter was one of the authors! But my Viagra buddy not only read the post but commented on it, too!

xlpharmacy has left a new comment on your post "The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock": Thanks for your insight for this method great story; this is the kind of feature that continues me though out the day.I’ve long been seeking around for your webpage following I learned about them from a companion and was pleased when I was able to come across it just after browsing for a while. Being a devoted blogger, I’m happy to determine other people taking effort and surrounding to the neighborhood. I just wanted to review to exhibit my thanks for one’s submit as it is quite encouraging, and many writers don’t get the credit they ought to have. I’m positive I’ll be back again and can deliver a number of my mates. 

And I had to laugh at this comment he wrote on a post about why people visit my blog. The number one reason? Because they're googling potato chip bags – I had posted an image of Lay's Potato Chips.

xlpharmacy reviews has left a new comment on your post "Popular Posts": Googling photos of potato chip bags?, are you serious? is people really looking for this on the web?? 

I giggled because I think it's funny that a possible spammer is commenting on what people are "really looking for" on the web.

I told my friends at work about him and what we figured is, this Viagra dude was doing what we all do when we're bored at work – surfing the Internet (well, I never do that, ahem, of course, because I am Practically Perfect and besides, I'm never bored at work because I love my work so very, very, very much).

Is this guy's actual job spamming the internet? And if it is, does the job of spamming get boring so he surfs and blogs just for fun?

My friend at work speculates the spamming business might be operated just like a call centre. But we don't know. All we know is the Viagra dude seems really dedicated to reading my old blog posts. It seems like he is methodically going through everything I've ever written. I mean, who does that? It's a blogger's dream, I guess, to have someone read all your back stuff and enjoy it. So it's all good, right?

I hope so!

What I'm hoping is my Viagra dude reads this and leaves me more information about him or herself. I'd love to know where he's from and what his job is like. I always thought the business of spamming was done by computers, not people, and the idea of connecting with someone like this intrigues me.

So who are you, Viagra dude?

Tell me everything ....

An Ugly Picture of Me

And from the Ugly Pictures of Me Department, here's a real beauty that was taken last Sunday during the book launch of The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock.

The two good-looking people on either side of me are author Andrew Wagner-Chazalon and photographer Bev McMullen. They hosted a rather nice shin-dig over at a fancy schmancy golf club ... the kind of place where they might frisk you at the front gate to see if you're rich or you're rabble. Nice place, yes, but man it was hotter than the hounds of hell in there. You mean to say you can afford to build a place like that but you can't afford air conditioning? I was dripping sweat. The back of my hair was soaked. Perspiration was running off my chin like a leaky faucet.

And there I was hobnobbing with people I'd never met before, introducing myself with soaking wet enthusiasm to people I have long admired. There was fellow blogger Malcolm Robertson, cool as a cucumber, and there I was all fat and flustered and soaked, goofily trying to be cool, and there was that look in Malcolm's eyes – that scared look like he was dealing with a lunatic. You know the look, right? You don't? Well, I'm pretty familiar with it. If you looked as bad as me, you'd know it, too.

Oh, and what's with my t-shirt? Why's it hanging all funny like that? It looks like I'm wearing a flour sack. OMG, and the neck is all stretched funny. Andrew and Bev are probably thinking, who is this flour-sack-wearing hick dripping sweat all over our shoulders? And why won't my eyes open?

To think I lost 19 pounds before this picture was taken. Can you imagine what I looked like before??? GAK.

By the way, the book is Fab. You. Luss. You can buy it at the Muskoka Bookhouse in Bracebridge or by going online at www.muskokabookhouse.com. I promise, there are no ugly pictures of me in it.

The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock

Bev McMullen.

I admired her long before I started working with her. I was working on the magazine Sideroads of Muskoka, in the Huntsville office, and Bev worked in Bracebridge, and even though the two towns are only 25 minutes apart and we worked for the same company, we never met. I think I saw her at a Christmas party once. She was as loud and gregarious as she was tiny. Like a little blonde blazing ball of personality.

Photographers from all over would submit photos to Sideroads and the best of them came from this woman named Bev McMullen. She had such an eye for it. Her pictures were always painted with rich, strong colour and other photos paled beside hers. I remember wondering who this Bev person was and, when we finally met, I was a little bit starstruck. 

Andrew Wagner-Chazalon. 
Omgawd, I never get his last name straight. For some reason I want to put a Chase in there. Like, Andrew Chase-Wazalon. Even now, as I write this, I am double-checking the spelling of his name. As with Bev, I knew of Andrew’s work with the glossy Muskoka magazine Beyond the City long before we met. Glossy makes it sound hard and unapproachable so maybe glossy isn’t the right word because everything Andrew does is approachable, like the man himself. When I started in Bracebridge, Andrew was away on a leave of absence, living in Australia with his wife and their children. He showed up one day with a big smile on his face and the trace of an accent. Bev describes him as an English professor and he does have that way about him. Bespectacled, bearded. Tousled curly hair. Khaki shorts and sandals, I think. Professorial, yes, but sweet, too. Always takes time to listen, no matter how imminent the approaching deadline. 

Tomorrow Bev and Andrew will launch the latest book they have published together. The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock is a purse-sized treasure of short stories written by Andrew with drop dead gorgeous photos by Bev, all about one rather ordinary place in Muskoka, the heart of Ontario’s cottage country. The launch takes place from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. in the Rock Grill at Red Leaves Resort in Minett. If you’re in the neighbourhood, drop by and and pick up an autographed copy. Because the book is tiny in stature (kind of like Bev), it’s also not expensive. I think it retails for under 20 bucks – forgive me if I’m wrong, guys. But it is a sweet bargain at that price. For anyone who lives in or loves Muskoka, it’s a perfect gift; a perfect microcosm of one seemingly inconsequential place that harbours a ridiculous wealth of fascinating stories and, until now, hidden secrets.

“It’s really clear that this is a special place to many people,” says Andrew. “One guy told me he proposed to his wife up there. Someone else was married there. Another person has a stained glass art image of the place, which his parents gave him as a wedding present. People have scattered ashes up there. While I don’t know of any births, I’m pretty sure some babies have been conceived up there. It’s just a remarkable bit of landscape that so many people call their own.

“I was thinking about my favourite places in the world, and realized something: they're almost all rocky places. The Tongariro Crossing in New Zealand (an amazing hike around the mountain that played Mount Doom in Lord of the Rings); Gros Morne in Newfoundland; Peggy's Cove in Nova Scotia; Mount Wellington in Tasmania; Uluru (aka Ayers Rock) in the Australian outback. And most of them have the added beauty of rock meeting water, a feature they share with Huckleberry Rock, as well as the added bonus of being able to sit up high and look down low. I think that's one of the reason Huckleberry Rock is so treasured, because it's one of the few places in Muskoka that allows that. Lots of rocky places, lots of water, but not that many places where you can climb up on a rock and sit high and look out over water far below you. It's also got the bonus of being a place where your view transforms dramatically as you climb. You start out in woods, and in a very short time enter a place where there are almost no trees. That makes it a more interesting place, too.”

If anyone knows an interesting place when they see it, it’s Andrew and Bev. They’ve done more traveling than anyone I know. Bev just returned from a once-in-a-lifetime journey with headhunters – and not the kind who find you employment!

Bev says, “Andrew and I are born adventurers and explorers, we quest to see new things and simply go to the ends of the world to have this wow effect. He to Australasia and me to the Orient and South Pacific and South China Sea. We have both travelled further and to other places but the itchy feet and need to escape is always there. Muskoka offers both of us the escape appeal as simply around the corner is something to marvel at; if that isn’t enough a two hour ride will take you to a ghost town, or a great mining town, or waterfall. We both love kayaking and canoeing.

“We were offered the project of doing the book on Huckleberry Rock last year. We worked on it diligently and Andrew did the writing and I did the photography and found stories as well. We both do everything to make the book happen. The fresh new idea of new size, great little stories and lots of pretty pictures with an affordable price point should be a hit. The traditional coffee table books sold for $50 to $60 and now people can’t afford them. Our books are a series and are great cottage and hostess gifts. We no sooner finish one book when we are on about the next. Both Andrew and I are obsessive about the need to create. We both, when time permits, will be writing about our travels. I have chapters finished and my publisher Yellow Toadstool has agreed to make it into an e-book so I will have some writing ahead of me this winter.”

Bev and Andrew seem an unlikely pairing. They don’t hobnob around the office and if you didn’t know they produced books together, you’d never even guess there was a connection. But people who know them, people who see them together professionally, or see and appreciate their work, say they carry on like an old married couple.

Andrew agrees. “Yes, we work well together. And there is a marriage-like element to it, as we learn to put up with each other’s idiosyncracies and draw on each other's strengths. We've laughed at the fact that many people don't know what to make of our relationship, particularly those who have seen Bev and me together but have never seen me with my real wife, Sharon.

“Bev and I started working together around 2002. She came into the office as a would-be freelancer – I thought she was another crazy photographer, until I saw her work. Then I knew she was a really talented crazy photographer. I soon had her shooting freelance assignments, then got her doing a column once I realized she had a real knack for finding interesting stories. Her columns – Chasing the Light, later renamed to Worth a Thousand Words – were very popular additions to the Muskokan (a local summer newspaper).

“We soon started going to stories together, because Bev can’t write and I can’t shoot! (Well, neither of us does the other’s job as well, at least). We started talking about doing a book, which resulted in Muskoka Traditions, which Boston Mills Press published in 2005. We then started work on a second, called Forgotten Muskoka, but that ended up getting left by the wayside while we worked on other projects. It will probably be revived, because there are too many good stories there to leave behind. I did a book without Bev (Grace and Speed, with painter Doug Dunford) while Bev worked on Carve Your Own Totem Pole (Firefly books). I was brought into that project as an editor and ghost writer, which was a lot of fun,” Andrew says. “When I came back from Australia, we started talking about doing another book together, which became The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock. The topic was suggested by a mutual friend who had a great love of the place. Bev had been shooting there for years, and had a great store of photos, but I wasn’t sure how I was going to get stories. But the more people I talked to about it, the more I realized how special it was to so many people. Nobody had any big stories – no epic tales of adventure – but everyone has a little story. That just seemed to be the way to do the book – gathering those little stories, those anecdotes together. 

“I started out just mentioning the project to people, and soon found people telling me their stories, or telling me about people who had stories. Many of the didn’t make it into the book, partly because they’re still coming in. I’m planning to set up a facebook page, so people can go online and share those stories with each other.”

Stories .. it’s all about the stories, this book. Wonderful short real-life stories, all written with Andrew’s classic style. I’m not the only one who appreciates Andrew’s natural storytelling abilities. Bev happens to be one of his biggest fans.

“Andrew is a great writer, I compare him to Pierre Berton and Roy MacGregor. I truly love Andrew as a mentor and best friend, he is genuinely that nice, he never gets mad at me which is hard to believe.”

Andrew says his favourite story isn’t even in the book. “It's the story I was told by one of the guys who owned the property, and who ended up donating it to the township to make it into a park. He bought it as part of a package of land, and didn't really know what he had until someone took him up there. He looked out and said, ‘This is gorgeous. Too nice to belong to one person – it should be a park.’ That's such a marvellous sentiment, followed by terrific actions. I love the spirit of the place that inspired him to do that, and to then convince two other owners to sell or give away their land up there as well.”

Bev has hundreds of photos of Huckleberry Rock and it wasn’t easy for her to choose which of her babies to publish.

“Trying to sort the pictures for the book was hard for me,” she says. “Each image has a story or a tail, it was hard but Andrew was great and in the end I got what I wanted. However I did lose a disc and I was so upset because it was my best stuff. We found the disc when the book was on the press and was able to get a couple of those images of timed exposures into the final copy.”

Thank goodness for that. Already people have commented on how beautiful the cover photography by Bev is. The inside pages are just as beautiful.

I asked them, how do they do it? Have busy jobs and busy lives and manage to produce such exceptional books?

Andrew says it best. “Why do we keep writing books? I think it's because there are always more tales to tell. Bev keeps shooting, I keep hearing stories, and eventually we look around and realize we've got something that should be put into a book.”

Best of luck with The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock, Bev and Andrew. And best wishes also for all the projects you two talented folk produce in the future. Knowing you guys, there will be many more. It’s a pleasure for me to write about your latest book, and to see you in the kitchen, heating up coffee or putting a lunch salad together or talking about plans for the weekend. You’re one of the reasons I love getting up in the morning and going to work.

See you at the launch!

Coming Soon

Tomorrow I am going to have an entire story but this morning I have only a tease.

Two very dear people I work with are launching their new book on Sunday and they're inviting everyone in the Muskoka area to come help them celebrate.

Bev McMullen is a talented photographer and charming sales rep at the newspaper I work for in Bracebridge.


Andrew Wagner-Chazalon is the equally talented editor of some of the company's slickest publications, including Beyond the City magazine. Both are sweet and fun to be around, as well as being prolific collaborators on some pretty amazing books.

Their latest, The Hidden World of Huckleberry Rock, is GORGEOUS and it's being launched this Sunday, September 4 at the Rock Grill, at Red Leaves in Minett. The launch runs from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. I am going to be there with bells on – wouldn't miss it!

I've been working on a wee bit of a feature story about Bev and Andrew. I plan on posting it tomorrow morning. I hope you drop by, give it a read and, if you live in Muskoka, pop by on Sunday to congratulate these two and give their talented hands a shake.

Till tomorrow then!