I remember planning to mention Matthew Baldwin‘s Tricks of the Trade site when it was launched but Google reckons I didn’t get around to it. So here it is, prompted by the news that it’s about to become a book. The site was started when Baldwin read an intervew with a clown:
At one point the interviewer asked, “What if you’re dying out there? What if the kids are hating it?” And the clown revealed a fascinating trick of the birthday clown trade: Every year, it seems, there are two or three funny words that invariably crack kids up, and when things are going sour, you can blurt one out and bring the house down. But a clown’s got to keep up to date, because the funny words mysteriously change over time. Where “booger” might have killed in 1998, 2004 demands nothing less than an “underpants.”
This turned into the subject of one of Baldwin’s regular columns on the Morning News, then a website of its own, and soon a book detailing tricks of various trades.