On November 3rd, John C. Liu made history by becoming the first Asian-American to be elected into a city office.

From previous posts on this blog, you saw that Liu was this blogger's number one choice for New York City Comptroller.

In the audio clip below, Liu speaks about how he envisions the future on WNYC with Brian Lehrer the day after the election.

You can find out more about Liu and his term plans on his website.

Enjoy the clip!

John Liu on WNYC

It all started with a bus ride home. On the Q35, which travels from Brooklyn College/Flatbush Avenue to Queens, Beach 116th Street, this blogger saw something that would hurt any English major's eyes: A professionally done store sign with an error.

The bus passes by a place where I guess you can find out information on become a home health aide or a nurse. The sign was amusing and incorrect. Instead of saying "Nursing and Home Health Aide" as I guess it should have said, it said "Nursing.Home.Health.Aide", adding unnecessary dots in between the words that made it look rather silly. What's even more amusing is that I have not seen that sign for about two weeks or so. Maybe they relocated or maybe people noticed the sign and that affected their business.

Since then, I have been curious about other misspelled signs. Of course, as with anyone who is a whiz at the computer or at least navigating the Internet these days, I googled "Misspelled signs of New York."

To my surprise, there was a website that was filled with pictures of all these misspelled signs. Apparently, an anonymous man made a website full of random things he was interested in. If you look around the site, there is not a single page that leads you to contact information. It was built on the server prodigy.net and his username is Pizza Bagel, so I guess that's what we shall call him here in the Write Queen's world.

Pizza Bagel's website is filled with other 300 photos of misspelled signs. They are taken in parts of Queens and Brooklyn. It was rather amusing and one could spend a couple of hours there for a good laugh.

There was also an article by the New York Times discussing this from 2005. This article talks about how and why this affects us culturally and how certain popular neighborhood stores are identified by their incorrect signs. 

Inspired by these things, I walked around in my neighborhood for some photos and air. I wanted to see if the neighborhood had anything incorrect in their signs. At first, I thought that I had the worst luck to live in such a literate neighborhood until I started to walk around and really look at each sign I encounter. Here are ten things I discovered while looking for signs (other than that people will look at you like you are crazy when you are staring at a sign really hard).

1. Unless you are looking real closely, most of the time, you won't notice the mistake.
2. Missing letters are most common mistake made in these signs.
3. A lot of these signs are done by professional sign makers and printing shops.
4. If you start noticing the obvious mistakes, you will also start noticing mistakes in grammar and tense.
5. When looking for these signs, you will start to question if you know how to spell.
6. When hunting for these signs, do it with a friend. Sometimes they notice things you don't.
7. Handmade signs are funny too. Especially when the owners can easily make another and don't.
8. Store owners are sensitive about the mistakes. They don't take too kindly to questions about why they have allowed such a mistake to be on their sign and do not anything about it.
9. Sign makers will claim most of the time that they did not make a mistake. They will say that it was written that way on the order form. I just have to say that if they are well versed in English, they should correct mistakes or at least question their customers on what they want.
10. Searching for incorrect signs will make you think that there are mistakes in every sign, if you do this for more than a hour. Take a break or know when to stop before you start getting to debates with people about how to spell simple words like "alteration" and "pheasant".

Below is a little slide show of my discoveries. See if you can catch the mistakes right away. There is also an interview at the end with a fellow resident from my neighborhood in South Ozone Park, Queens. Please pardon the amateur editing. This is not a blog on the New York Times.

"You could say I'm very vocal about shopping local!" said Borough President Marty Markowitz in a press release about his latest campaign, "Shop Brooklyn". Take a look at the clip below to find out more information and you can visit http://www.ishopbrooklyn.com/ for a list of participating stores and for coupons being offered.

Good Night!

I hope that everyone had a good Thanksgiving. The semester is slowing down for me, so I am thinking about what I am going to do with the site (after all, I am paying a yearly subscription for extras). I really want to try to blog in one place (preferably here). I like the features of other blogging platforms, but trying to manage more than one blog is hectic. Plus I would really love to drive more traffic to the site.

If you have noticed, the blog actually has a name! "The Write Queen" is currently the name of my blog for my multimedia journalism class. However, since the class blog is a subscription service, I will not have it for much longer. Plus it's a cute name. I am a writer from Queens after all.

One thing I am hoping to do here (and keep up with) is a 30/30, or in the case of December, a 31/31. A 30/30 is when a poet writes 30 poems in 30 days. I would love to post my poems here. With my last 30/30, I posted the poems on Facebook. I still will only I will do it via import from here. The next post will contain today's poem (before we hit day 2 of course).

I will finish importing all my old blog post from different blogs by the end of the month. The reason I am doing that is because I feel that these are good post. They say you should have a niche when blogging, but since I don't have one that I want to settle on at the moment, I might as well present a mixed bag of material and see what happens.

Well, off to post my first poem of my 31/31 and then to sleep!

Have a pleasant night everyone!