You’re probably wondering what happened to last week. Honestly, so am I.

As you may have noticed, no Voice Magazine came out last week.  What started off as a massive migraine that took me through Friday and lingering effects throughout Saturday basically delayed this issue.  By the time it came to Sunday and I was able to get to work again, I realized that posting these articles at that point would be giving them short-shrift.

So instead, I decided that last week would be an impromptu vacation week, and I’d resume normal programming this week, like now.  Usually I try to keep everybody informed ahead of time when I’m taking some time off but it just seemed like the better option to make sure these articles, including a great Minds We Meet with a 17 year old AU student, got the full week and a weekend for students to look them over.

On top of that, I finally discovered today why my email has been so uncharacteristically quiet.  I have an open email address published on the web, and I can’t have a spam filter active because what if a writer sends me a great article about how to deal with spam?  Or maybe one on how to cook SPAM?

Also, any voicemagazine.org address that I haven’t specifically assigned somewhere else comes to me directly.  (And this is for that script kiddie out there who keeps trying to phish my writers by appending voicemagazine.org to their name and pretending to be me.  I get every single one of those, so you might as well just stop now.) So, you can imagine how much of my day is just dealing with spam and other emails. (It’s amazing how many people out there have been following the Voice Magazine for a long time now and just love the blog(?), but they found a bad link (dude, it’s in a story from 14 years ago.  You’re lucky there was a link in there to begin with.) and how fortunate that they just happen to have a new link that is an even better reference to that type of material.)

Except this week.  This week, my email was lovely and quiet for a good part of it, and, me just being myself, I failed to question why. As it turns out, there’s been an update to my email program and rafts of the stuff have been put into a spam folder I didn’t create. Yay.  Guess what my weekend is doing?

Fortunately, things seem to be back on track now, and this week’s issue is a pretty good one. It’s short, but sweet, you might say.  Starting off with the aforementioned student interview, we also have a look at what going green in China means, and why those arguments you get into comparing the emissions of Canada and China don’t make a lot of sense, and we take a photographic tour of Helsinki in Cities in Six.

Plus, we’ve got some upcoming events, scholarships, social media wanderings, comics, some inspirational material, some thought-provoking stuff, and even some advice on what to order the next time you’re in a Korean restaurant.

Enjoy the read!  And I’ll see you next week. Promise.