Clear Language and Design Thesaurus

I was cleaning out some old files and came across a printout of the Clear Language and Design Thesaurus. CLAD was an organization in Toronto that promoted clear language. If my memory is correct, were working with the TSX and their business communication staff around the time that I started working there. 

I found their thesaurus quite useful and used it and another internal document of mostly business-related jargon to create a wordlist that a Word macro would scan for words and phrases to avoid. I was often asked to copy edit documents written by business analysts and project managers, and this saved me significant amounts of time. 

As far as I can tell, CLAD as an organization is now part of the Toronto Centre of Learning and Development. The thesaurus lives on as a PDF file and is still useful. The resources listed on their website may also be useful, though the pages are now rather dated.  

Photo of the Week - September 20, 2026

This week's photo is of some dying trees that I took with my Pixel 8 Pro earlier this week. I thought the composition was interesting but that it would look better in black and white. I converted it in PIZLR Editor using the Monochrome filter set to Kodak Tri-X, which used to be my film of choice when I was shooting black and white with a film camera. I guess I was channeling my inner Ansel Adams. 

Dying trees by the side of the road

Saturday Sounds - John Coltrane

YouTube keeps surprising me with great videos that randomly pop up in my feed. Last night, Nancy and I had just finished watching season 4 of Reacher and we didn't have time to watch another show, so I opened YouTube and it came up with a video of John Coltrane performing "Afro Blue". Given when Coltrane was performing, it had never occurred to me to look for videos of his performances. But lo and behold, there are quite a few. 

So today's musical treat is a selection of live performances by John Coltrane and his quartet. I was a bit too young to have a chance to see him live (though I did get to see McCoy Tyner and Pharoah Sanders several times), so this will have to do. Given the era, the video quality is not great, but the sound is just fine. 

First up, the John Coltrane Quartet live in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1960. 

Next, some performances from Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual TV show: "Afro Blue", "Alabama", and "Impressions". 

Finally, here's a spectacular performance of "My Favourite Things" by the John Coltrane Quartet in Comblain-La-Tour in 1965.

YouTube has many more videos of Coltrane performing, but that will have to do for now. Maybe I'll do another post one of these days. Enjoy!

Interview with Peter Watts

Peter Watts is a Toronto-based marine biologist, science fiction writer. and futurist. If you haven't read any of his books or stories, you're missing some of the most intense and well-thought-out SF published in the last couple of decades. I highly recommend his work, including his novel, Blindsight and his Rifters trilogy. And check out his blog, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.

He has a new collection, Fold Catastrophes, which he discusses at length in this interview published in Clarkesworld. Here's an excerpt. 

Back when Beyond the Rift came out, my clenching gut said Wake up, people, we gotta hit the brakes before we go over the cliff! But in the years since, things have only got worse—and not only have we failed to hit the brakes, we’re actually flooring the accelerator. The planet falls apart faster than our worst-case scenarios predicted, and we care less than we ever did. The world is on fire, and the nations of the world have scuttled forty-five climate-related initiatives in the past year alone. And while it’s easy to blame the plutocrats and the oligarchs, to say j’accuse at the handful of multinationals responsible for most of the devastation, you have to wonder how those assholes got their hands on the levers in the first place. And the answer is: we put them there. We didn’t see the writing on the wall, or if we did, we ignored it.

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Don’t say nobody told us. Sure, Exxon knew the truth back in the seventies, and they hid it from us. But you know who was talking about global warming back then? Weird Al Yankovic. He wasn’t a scientist. He had no access; there wasn’t even a public Internet in the seventies. He was a nerd who played novelty accordion, and he ranted about the melting of the ice caps during his high-school valedictory address. Sure, he played it for laughs, but it wouldn’t have landed if it wasn’t already part of the zeitgeist—and that was 1976. He saw it coming. A lot of us did. Not enough, clearly.

Now it’s 2026, and it doesn’t even matter if Trump gets the boot at this point. The fact that he ever polled above single digits in any capacity is perhaps the most scathing indictment of the ‘Murrican Mindset one can imagine, and the US is hardly the only villain on the field. So who put those sociopathic shitstains in power, hmmm? There were always alternatives, and we were always told that they were fringe, that voting for an environmentalist would be throwing away our vote, and anyway, it was the Economy, stupid. Enough of us swallowed that line to go out and make it true, year after year, after scorching, drowning year. Now we’re wiping out somewhere between 60,000 and 130,000 species annually (according to the estimates I’ve seen); next year’s shaping up to be the hottest of our lives (but let’s not forget, the coolest of the rest of our lives). And we’re still hitting the gas.

So my gut has long since given up on saying We’ve got to stop before it’s too late, as it did during the Beyond the Rift era.Now it says Fuck you; you had it all, and you threw it away. Enjoy the apocalypse, assholes. I hope you enjoy watching your children burn in the shade. I know I will.

I'm looking forward to reading his new collection, though I probably won't be devouring it in one sitting.  

Google Docs Is Getting Better

Back in the before times, a couple of years before I retired, management at the TSX decided to change the office systems from SharePoint and Microsoft Office to Google Workspace. I fought hard and managed to convince the PTB that I really did need Word and Adobe FrameMaker to do my job, but I still had to use Docs and Sheets for some of my work. 

Since then, I've gradually transitioned most of my personal writing and home accounting to Google Docs and Sheets. I actually prefer Sheets to Excel, mostly because it has far better dark mode support than Excel, and is generally easier to use. As for Docs, I now use it for the few documents I need to create and have even used it to edit a friend's book. I'll probably not renew my Microsoft 365 subscription when it comes up for renewal next year. 

In the eight years since I left the TSX, Google has gradually added features to Docs. Jeremy Caplan at Wonder Tools has published an article listing his 20 favourite Google Docs features. Most were not available when I was at the TSX some duplicate features available in Word. Some require Gemini, which might be a problem in some organizations. 

Here are a few from his list. 

• Match a prior doc's format. This might be easier for some people to use than creating a document from a template.
• Add a quick link to any text. May be easier than Word's linking feature. 
• Create typing shortcuts. Similar to Word's Autotext but probably easier to use.
• Use markdown for formatting. Developers will love this.
• Insert interactive elements. Similar to Word's fields or Quick Parks.

There's more, like tables of contents and sections, which Docs calls tabs. I don't see any support for indexing though, which is something that I needed for some larger documents. 

I think it's clear that Docs is now a suitable tool for many technical writers. Those who are working with large documents, need complex print formats,  or features like footnotes/endnotes or indexes, will probably want to stick to more established tools like Word or FrameMaker. 

My Home Town in the Times

My home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario has been featured in an article (gift link) in the New York Times. The subject is, of course, the ongoing tariff war between the US and Canada, and how it's affecting the Sault (or just Soo, if you're local). It's not affecting it in a good way. 

To cite just one example:

More than half of the steel produced in Sault Ste. Marie used to be shipped to the United States, and the 50 percent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have devastated the company’s finances.

In March, Algoma Steel, one of only three major Canada-based steel producers, abruptly laid off 1,000 workers it had planned to phase out over two or more years through retirements and reassignments.

Mr. Shoemaker believes the real toll could reach 3,000 jobs, once the layoffs’ full impact makes its way through the city’s broader economy. And things are not getting better soon.

This makes me sad. Growing up in the Soo, my family and friends never paid much thought to the border. My eye doctor was across the river in Soo, Michigan. I had an exhibit in a science fair at Lake Superior State University. My parents would gas up the car over there and come back with cheap bread and I'd bring back Estes model rocket engines (you couldn't buy them in Canada). In later years, when I was visiting family, we'd go over the bridge to the casino to lose money and see a concert. 

But for most people, that's now changed. Traffic across the bridge dropped by 25 percent last year and is staying down. If I'll be going across the river to visit family, I'll leave my phone at home. But that's the only way I'll be visiting the US as long as Trump or the Republicans are in power. 

Photo of the Week - September 13, 2026

This week's photo is from my walk this morning along Frenchman's Bay, which is a major bird habitat. Today there were over a dozen swans in the bay, but most were out too far to make a good picture. But this one was closer. Taken with the 5x zoom on my Pixel 8 Pro. 

Swan on the bay