A different kind of New Year’s celebration

JAN. 2, 2012 — New Year’s Eve around the Brack household has developed into something of an odd tradition. For the last four years, we’ve avoided crowds and stayed home to watch the celebrations on television. But with a twist: We watched the Spanish-speaking network.

We generally have no idea what the folks were saying on Univision, but one thing was clear: they were having a whole lot more fun in a studio filled with cheesy male pop stars with bad haircuts, wannabe divas with push-up bras and shiny dresses, and an ancient host who seemed to revel in peering down plunging necklines.

Make shur u know yur grammer and chek yur speling

We’ve all seen crazy, funny signs caused by misspelling and horrible punctuation — grammatical blunders where people wrote “your” instead of “you are” or put an apostrophe in a place that would cause your English teacher to have a hissy fit.

Charleston resident Sharon Eliza Nichols saw so many of these bloopers that she started a Facebook group that blossomed into two books, the latest of which is just out — “More Badder Grammar!”

She says she got started thinking about the grammatically challenged when walking along King Street as a College of Charleston student and noticing how a restaurant was “now excepting applications.”

About campaigning and fixing things

OCT. 17, 2011 — Campaigning is a lot more fun than you may think.

More than anything else, it has made me feel even more connected to Charleston and what’s happening here. Not only have I met kind people, such as the retired KLM pilot from Amsterdam and a man who wants Savannah Highway traffic to slow down a little, but I’ve learned more about our community that I ever thought.

Wadmalaw Scout camp offers fun, brings back memories

JULY 18, 2011 — A visit last week to a Wadmalaw Island camp run by the Boy Scouts’ Coastal Carolina Council was a trip down memory lane.

Thirty five years ago as a 15-year-old, I served as a counselor at a brother camp in the north Georgia mountains. That entailed sleeping in a tent for six weeks (on a cot with a wooden pallet floor), highly- structured days that began and ended with bugle sounds, sweating with mosquitoes, and teaching campers about knots, cooking, camping and First Aid.

Barbecue should be state’s official meat

South Carolina seems to have an official everything – other than a state meat. It’s time for barbecue to be the state’s official meat.