LOCAL

LOCAL
A Christmas meeting
CANTON -- The Greater Canton Writers' Guild will be joined by members of the Canton Poetry Society for a Christmas Party on Dec. 10 at 6 p.m. at 140 Santa Clara St. NW.
Members may bring a guest. Please RSVP: caltotn@aol.com. Members may also bring a small gift, humorous, white elephant, or other, not exceeding $5 in value, as well as a food item to share.
Guild business and election will be held after refreshments.
For information, contact president Dan MacIntyre at (330) 823-1079 or vice president Bob Stewart (330) 492-3775.
GUIDES
English spoken here
NEW YORK -- A foreign-language guide is invaluable on trips abroad. But it's no help when English-speaking travelers to foreign lands come across attempts at English that prove disastrous.
In "Here Speeching American," authors Kathryn Petras and Ross Petras have compiled "A Very Strange Guide to English as It Is Garbled Around the World."
The book offers hundreds of examples, in sections that include signs at the airport, hotel and on the street, brochures and maps for tourist attractions, directions for driving and using public transportation, product names and restaurant menus.
Think your job is bad?
NEW YORK (AP) -- Plenty of people are looking for better jobs. But there are worse jobs, too.
Some of them are described in "50 Jobs Worse Than Yours" by Justin Racz.
Along with substitute teacher, gravedigger, skipper of a garbage barge are jobs one might not have known existed. But somebody has to do them.
There's the cheesecake-tin quality controller, employed by a London bakery to gently press down on the lids of cheesecake tins -- 8,000 per hour -- to make sure they are closed tight.
Work clothes and anonymity are among the few perks enjoyed by the cell phone sales promoter, who stands outside the wireless store handing out fliers and dressed in an inflatable cell phone costume.
Nobody wants to be a rat-catcher, except people in Bombay, where there are plenty of applicants (and, apparently, rats) for openings in both day and night shifts for a job that pays about $1.80 per 25 trapped rats.
And who says Hollywood is all glamour? Not the maggot-wrangler, who collects larvae to place on movie corpses.
"50 Jobs" is published by Bloomsbury in hardcover at $14.95.