Does the blog lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?

Woke this morning to a patina of snow covering my little part of DuPage County, Illinois. Just enough to dandy up the landscape for a short time, till the slush comes. Which may be a while. According to the weather savants, it will be cold enough to freeze off your kippers for much of the rest of this week.

In my line of work, editor of a trade magazine, I receive press releases by the bushel — or at least I used to, since these days press releases not only come on paper by U.S. mail and fax, which do bushelize on my desk, but also show up in the form of e-mail. I suppose e-mail could be measured in bushels, but the image isn’t quite right, since electronic messages occupy little physical space, and you can’t trade their futures on the Chicago Board of Trade. In any case, I get a lot of press releases as e-mail, that communications marvel of our age.

(I had to check: a bushel is four pecks. So being in a peck of trouble is one thing, but for serious problems, you’d be in a bushel of trouble, even though that doesn’t quite have the right ring to it. Maybe it’s the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony.)

I digress. A few weeks ago, a press release came to my attention. Only the first paragraph was worth my attention:

“With a record-breaking attendance of over 90,000, the International Builders Show last week in Las Vegas was filled with new products, ideas and wood, wood, wood. And its [sic] not Las Vegas without Elvis. If you missed it, the Wood Promotion Network's (WPN) Viva! Wood campaign employed a team of roving Elvi singing the praises of building with wood.”