I’m not into show tunes but I do love myths and legends so I followed up on the Maori history. They believe Cook Strait was discovered just over a thousand years ago by Kupe, a great chief of Hawaiki and great navigator. He’d tried to bump off his cousin, kidnapped the cousin’s wife and set sail. Along the way he sailed through the Cook Strait when chasing a giant octopus named Te Wheke-a-Muturangi. Eventually Kupe killed it by chopping off its arms with an adze. James Cook in 1770 was a mere parvenu and a bit boring after attempted murder, adultery and killing a god’s pet octopus!

Restraining the deranged? Some of you will be ahead of me here – straitjackets. I was disappointed to learn that “straightjacket” is acceptable – it just doesn’t look right. Consolation came with the finding that the plural word “straits”, in the watery sense, is one of the few English plurals which take a singular article. A bit anorakky of me, I admit, but I do love words and their quirks and peculiarities.

So, a little bit of free-ranging word association and a good half hour filled with things that weren’t the things I should have been doing. And the next time Microsoft Project seems a little uninviting there’s the further adventures of Kupe to look out for.

All of you bloggers and lovers of correct English, please have a look at Common English Errors and let me know if I’ve included all you think should be there. Comments and suggestions are welcomed. So are corrections but I’m hoping there won’t be many of those!

A Purple Star Award is only given to lenses that are of a high standard, and also they must have been created by a Giant Squid, a lensmaster that has created at least 50 lenses of a high standard.

This week I was awarded a Purple Star for my latest lens, which is The Top 25 Tom Hanks Movies, and which I hope to make the first in a series.

Previously I have been awarded 3 other Purple Stars, for:

• Bournemouth – Sun, Sea, Sand, Beaches
• My Pet Peeves – Things That Annoy Me
• Zecharia Sitchin – Author Of The Earth Chronicles

If you haven’t seen any of these lenses, I hope you have time to take a look.

If you are interested in creating your own lenses on Squidoo, CLICK HERE to learn more about becoming a lensmaster.   It’s FREE – and a lot of fun creating lenses too.

The Squidoo City Guide group contains hundreds of lenses about cities all around the world.   By adding your lens to this group, you are increasing the exposure of your lens, since not only will there be a link to your lens from the Group page, chances are that Jim will write about it at some point on his blog.    If you link back to the Squidoo City Guide from your lens, you are increasing the exposure for the Squidoo City Guide, and the better that fares, the more benefit you are likely to get from it.

If you have lenses about the USA, my suite of lense about each State are another place where you can add your lenses.  Based on a State rather on a City basis, both Jim’s Squidoo City Guide and my USA States suite complement each other well, and each of my State lenses links to Squidoo City Guide and vice versa.

So, to get maximum exposure to your USA lenses, I recommend adding them to the Squidoo City Guide as well as to my suite of USA State lenses.  Link back to my State lens and I will add a Featured Lens link back to yours, as well as you having a link on the list.   Don’t forget to Lensroll too.

You can’t go wrong!  Add your lens to these two, link back to both, and watch your traffic increase.

Also today I noticed that my Fan Club on Squidoo now numbers 501!   That is an awful lot of fans, and I consider myself very fortunate and favored.

While Debhie has been working on her collection of lenses about Hampshire, I have been working on my USA States lenses, and also a local one about my daily walks.

Firstly, Debbie created a lens about Southampton, the city where she lives.  Southampton is one of the largest ports in England, in the middle of the South Coast, and has seen many famous ships sail down the river, including The Titanic, Queen Mary and Elizabeth, and also their successors the QE2 and QM2.

She just completed another about Netley, a suburb of Southampton which has a lot of history.  Netley has ruins of an Abbey, as well as an old military hospital, the remains of which have been turned into a country park.

Meanwhile, I just completed a lens about the morning walks that I take where I live in Deer Creek in South Florida.  The lens has over 80 photographs from the walk, including some nice homes, lakes, and much of the tropical foliage and wildlife of the area.

I have also been working on a set of lenses about the states in the USA.  I am creating these in alphabetical order, and so far have completed Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas and California.   Each lens has background information on each state, and a list of other lenses about that state.  If you have a Squidoo lens about any of these states, please feel free to add it to the list of lenses to get some free promotion.

If I haven’t got to your state yet, why not subscribe to our blog so you can be kept up to date with progress.  I hope you enjoy what you see here.

What is a Purple Star?

The definition says:   This page was handpicked by Squidoo’s editors as one of the most remarkable pages on the entire site.

It seems like it was a long time ago now (although it was only 10 days) that I found out that my  lens had earned the coveted Purple Star award on Squidoo and started to create this post.   I was so excited, and  was all set to publish this new post about this, when I got busy with some other tasks for a few days, and then my laptop decided to crash on me.   The Hard Drive got horribly corrupted, and having realised that it wasn’t going to be possible to get the system restored, I decided to buy a new 500gb Hard Drive to replace the 120gb one that came with the laptop.  The existing drive was already 90% full, despite my offloading my Music and Movies, so getting a larger drive was the best solution.  Since it only cost $90, it was well worth it.

The problem is that any system restore like this takes time, and in my case 4 days!  It’s not just restoring Windows, it’s downloading and installing all the programs, remembering your logins and settings etc.  Lots to do.

I was very fortunate in that I took a backup 4 days before, and since I keep 7 days of mail on the server, I only lost updates to a couple of documents, and any emails that I had sent out in the last few days, but nothing else.   PHEW!  I am so relieved to have the system back…

And now it’s time to play catch up, and work on creating another lens that might get an award…

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CHEF!  And many more to come!

I thought I would add this little song that you are no doubt familiar with, in honor of a little story that you shared with the Squidoo community about you and a bear up in Alaska…

Enjoy

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogQ0uge06o