As always, I would appreciate hearing from you, regarding things you like about the site, things you don't, and especially things you would like added to the pages here. Ideas, links, stamps in the news, and even illustrated articles would be appreciated.
As well, if the various club members would submit their schedule and information for inclusion here, that would also be appreciated.
All can be directed to me at webmaster@calgaryphilatelicsociety.com. Here's hoping to hear from you, and I'll do what I can to follow up on your suggestions.
Also a note of caution: The street in front of the Kerby Centre is under LRT construction. Please be careful.
Society News
OUR NEXT MEETING: Our regular Wednesday meeting, March 7, at the Kerby Centre.
THE NEXT BNAPS GROUP MEETING: February 8.
THE NEXT LIVE AUCTION: February 15.
THE NEXT CAPE MEETING: February 22.
OBITUARY: Andre R.P. Chaplain - Know that he passed away peacefully on Dec 1, 2011 at Brentwood Intercare long term care facility. He was a long time member of the society and won awards for his exhibits. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Alberta Cancer Foundation.
NEWS STORIES
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POSTAL TRIBUTE MARKS QUEEN’S 60-YEAR REIGN
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RANDY BOSWELL POSTMEDIA NEWS OTTAWA
Canada Post has issued its official Diamond Jubilee commemorative stamp to launch what will ultimately be a seven-part postal tribute to Queen Elizabeth this year to mark the 60th anniversary of her ascent to the throne in February 1952. Gov. Gen. David Johnston unveiled the stamp designs on Monday at the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau, Que., which also houses the National Postal Museum. Canada’s “definitive” Diamond Jubilee stamp shows the 85-year-old Queen as she appears today — clad in her tiara and royal robes — and it’s available to Canada Post customers this week for routine use in sending mail. The first collectors’ stamp, also available this week in a “mini-pane” of four, honours the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign and features a reproduction of a four-cent stamp from the time of the Queen’s coronation in 1953. Subsequent issues will each mark other decades of her reign with similar “stamp-on-stamp” designs reprising popular portraits of the Queen from the past. The seventh stamp, to be released in May, recalls a famous two-portrait design issued for Queen Victoria’s jubilee in 1897, which showed side-by-side images of Victoria as a young, newly crowned queen in 1837 and in her 60th year as monarch. Like the 1897 stamp, the Queen Elizabeth double-portrait is engraved in a vintage, two-tone style common in the 19th century. “Collectors still speak glowingly of the 1897 stamp,” Canada Post noted in a statement. Johnston paid homage to the Queen’s “wise leadership throughout her remarkable 60-year reign,” describing the stamp series as “a wonderful tribute” to Canada’s head of state. And Senator Marjory Lebreton, leader of the government in the Senate, said Canadians “recognize not simply the importance of Her Majesty’s position in our constitutional monarchy, but the steadfast devotion she has demonstrated over six decades.”
From the Calgary Herald Tuesday, January 17, 2012 Page A2 – Top News |
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THREAT OF BAD PRESS PUSHES CANADA POST TO CORRECT ERROR AMY HUSSER POSTMEDIA NEWS OTTAWA
VICTORIA • An errant Christmas package mailed from Vancouver Island that criss-crossed the country before being put on the right course has arrived safely at its destination. Kelly Albucz, of North Saanich, B.C., mailed the parcel on Dec. 1. It included clothing that her 71-year-old mother, who lives in the small town of Callander outside North Bay, Ont., could wear over the Christmas holidays. Albucz watched in dismay as Canada Post’s online tracking service showed the present making five trips across the country without getting near her parents’ house. It turned out that a coding error had resulted in the package looping from Richmond, B.C., to Mississauga, Ont., and back again. Albucz complained twice to Canada Post, but got no response until the Victoria Times Colonist began asking questions Wednesday. Then the Crown corporation pulled out all the stops, located the package and delivered it to the Callander post office where it was picked up.
From the Calgary Herald Saturday, December 24, 2011 Page A14 – Canada |
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CANADA POST EMPLOYEES EMBRACE SPIRIT OF THE SEASON
Jason Franson, Edmonton Journal Canada Post worker Marlene Sharpe shows her Christmas spirit despite the long holidays hours
‘CHRISTMAS IS OUR TIME TO SHINE’ ANDREA SANDS EDMONTON JOURNAL
Canada Post worker Marlene Sharpe loves to spread Christmas cheer through the mail-processing plant where she sorts a steady stream of parcels and packets during the holiday season. Sharpe stands out against the grey concrete floor of the 260,000-square-foot industrial building wearing a colourful string of battery-operated Christmas lights that glow against her black work apron. Shiny red and green garland and spirals of gold ribbon are pinned in her hair. Green Christmas ornament earrings dangle from her earlobes. “I started at the beginning of December and I’ll be wearing this every day till Christmas. I was thinking of putting a (date) on my back and changing it every day,” Sharpe said with a laugh. “Last year, I had necklaces that flashed, but I used to catch them on the parcels.” Thousands of Canada Post employees like Sharpe — some dressier than others — are working extra shifts and long hours across the country to make sure people’s Christmas packages, letters and online purchases are in time to make the season bright. |
“We go 1.5 million kilometres a day, which is to the moon and back, twice,” said a Canada Post spokesman, Jon Hamilton. Busy Canada Post employees and retired staffers also volunteer their own time to run the popular Santa Claus letter-writing program, Hamilton said. Children who address letters to Santa at the North Pole, postal code H0H 0H0, will get a personalized response from one of the big guy’s helpers at Canada Post. “This is its 30th year,” Hamilton said. “This year will hit 20 million letters that we’ve helped Santa reply to, and we do that with 9,000 volunteers across the country.” Volunteers in Edmonton have really embraced the program, said Laurie Paradis, who co-ordinates the Santa letters program across northern Alberta. About 60,000 letters went out last year in the region, she said. “The volunteers love it. They decorate the letters up for the kids. They personalize them, but they can’t make any promises,” she said. “We like to make it magical for the kids.” Paradis responded to letters herself for about 18 years before taking over as co-ordinator this Christmas. The most memorable was one from a six-year-old girl who wrote that her only Christmas wish was to receive a warm tuque and mittens. Paradis’s daughter, who was about 12 years old at the time, used her own money to buy winter gear for the girl. However, Paradis and her daughter were dismayed to discover the Santa letter had no return address. “She was devastated,” Paradis recalled. “Please make sure there’s a return address so the kids can get these letters.” It’s an intricate dance between employees and machines that will get the vast amounts of mail delivered on time this Christmas, said Ben McCutcheon, director of mail operations at the Edmonton mail processing plant. This month, about 150 extra employees will reinforce the 800 regular staffers who work in the plant, which is running 24 hours a day, six and a half days a week, handling parcels and letters. On the plant floor, there is a steady hum of machinery as forklifts cruise around and workers sort incoming parcels into stackable, metal cages called monotainers. The 1.5-metre cubes sit under hanging signs that indicate various destinations — Winnipeg, Fort St. John, Whitehorse, Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary. One machine weighs and measures parcels, then scans their bar codes and uploads the data so customers can track shipments. Six letter-sorting machines handle 44,000 envelopes per hour, reading typed and handwritten addresses and postal codes. Mail is delivered and hauled away through 26 loading docks. A fleet of about 75 regular drivers plus 25 extra drivers brought in for the holidays are delivering packages, McCutcheon said. They have started delivering parcels on weekends, he said. “Our goal is to have every parcel under the tree by Christmas Eve,” he said. “The key to our success is the employees themselves. We’ve got a lot of great people here. Christmas is our time to shine.” About 2.5 million pieces of mail move through the plant on an average holiday weekend, McCutcheon said. Between 35,000 and 40,000 parcels are processed every 24 hours.
From the Calgary Herald Saturday, December 17, 2011 Page G2 – Working |
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POSTAL RATES ON THE RISE FOR DOMESTIC, INTERNATIONAL MAIL POSTMEDIA NEWS
OTTAWA • Canada Post is expected to up its rates in January for lettermail, both within Canada and internationally, with proposed jumps ranging between two cents and 40 cents per piece. The changes are set to take effect on Jan. 16. For standard-sized lettermail within Canada, the rate is expected to increase to 61 cents, up from the current 59 cents. For medium lettermail in Canada, up to 20 grams in weight, the rate will rise two pennies to $1.05 in 2012. For medium mail between 20g and 50g, the rate jumps four cents to $1.22. For U.S.-bound letters, the standard size price also jumps by two cents — to $1.05 — while letters to other international destinations are up a nickel to $1.80. For more on mailing rates visit www.canadapost.ca/rates.
From the Calgary Herald Thursday, December 15, 2011 Page A5 - Top News |
CHINA SETS UP POSTAL SERVICE FROM ORBITING SPACECRAFT AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE BEIJING ● China’s post office is hoping to boost business by allowing customers to send letters postmarked from space. E-mails will be sent to a computer aboard Tiangong-1, a spacecraft currently orbiting the earth, and rerouted to a special China Space Post Office branch on the ground in Beijing, the country’s space program said on its website. The e-mails will then be printed, placed in space-themed envelopes, stamped with a new galactic postmark and sent on in the mail. The gimmick, which features China’s first astronaut, Yang Liwei, as head of a so-called “space post office,” is the latest initiative devised by the postal service to drum up business as more and more Chinese go online. Last year, it launched a service that allows people to send letters in sturdy envelopes to be delivered in the year 2020. The Tiangong-1 unmanned spacecraft launched in September as part of China’s ambitious plans to set up a manned space station by 2020.
From the Calgary Herald Saturday, December 3, 2011 Page A27 – World |
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CANADA POST HANDLES IT
Photos, Stuart Gradon, Calgary Herald Postal clerk Tim Sullivan sorts through packages at Canada Post’s Calgary mail processing plant Tuesday. Letter volumes are down, but online shopping is boosting demand for parcel delivery.
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CHRISTMAS STILL BUSIEST PERIOD
MEGHAN POTKINS CALGARY HERALD
“They visit your house, they see your mail, letters and magazines. They know everything.” JON HAMILTON CANADA POST
Santa might know when you’ve been bad or good, but your mail carrier is the one who knows the real dirt. “You would be surprised at how much your letter carrier knows about you,” said Jon Hamilton of Canada Post. “They visit your house, they see your mail, letters and magazines. They know everything.” Many mail workers begin their day at the massive Canada post-processing warehouse in the city’s northeast, which at this time of year is deluged with parcels, postcards, letters and gifts. A peek inside the plant’s parcel hub is also a revealing glimpse into the holiday plans of Calgarians. There are care packages addressed lovingly to faraway family members in places like Poland and South Korea. There’s a beat-up guitar case covered in stickers from its owner’s travels. A priority-shipped package of Spanx “body shaping” undergarments seems destined for some woman dreading the onset of the party season. This plant, which ordinarily processes around 500,000 parcels, packets and courier items each week, will handle an additional 200,000 each week in December. While postal workers are carrying fewer letters every year, more and more parcels are being shipped, and Christmas is the busiest period of the year. “The parcel business is growing because of the amount of online shopping people are doing,” said Hamilton. “We’ve seen a 17 per cent decline in mail, but people are increasingly doing their Christmas shopping online, and we are shipping it to their door.” But every year, Canadians make some avoidable mistakes when it comes to posting holiday gifts and letters.
PARCELS: AVOID RED FLAGS
Hamilton has a piece of advice for all the grandparents out there planning to send little Timmy his electronic robot with the batteries already inside. “If we’ve got a parcel that is making strange beeping sounds while it’s going down the line, then we’re going to take a look at it,” said Hamilton. “It’ll get there faster if you keep the batteries separate.” Another red flag is any form of powdered substance, so make sure that cookie mix you’re sending to Aunt Eustace is tightly sealed. And last but not least, if you don’t want your gift to languish in Canada Post’s mail purgatory known as the UMO or the Undeliverable Mail Office, then print the address clearly. Your mail carrier might know a lot about you, but he can’t read your mind.
From the Calgary Herald Wednesday, December 7, 2011 Page B8 – City & Region |
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Custom Designed Postcard On The Run
JEN LEO LOS ANGELES TIMES
WEB BUZZ ● Postcard apps are getting better. Many send real postcards from smartphone images; with this app, though, postcards are created so quickly that you can spend more time taking the perfect photo. Name: Postcard on the Run Available for: Android and iphone. What it does: Helps you turn smartphone camera images into real postcards that can be sent anywhere in the world. Cost: The app is free, but mailing the postcards starts at $1.49. What’s hot: Don’t sweat it if you don’t have a person’s mailing address. Postcard on the Run will request that address for you with an automated email or text to the contact on your phone. You can send your custom-designed postcard — with your signature — to more than one recipient at once. The process is quick and painless — and even more so if you use Paypal to check out. What’s not: I like the idea of having an optional GPS mini-map on the back of the postcard, but this feature didn’t work when I was ordering my card. Instead of a map my only option was an image from a local theme park. Worth it: Even though there are lots of other postcard apps, I like this one because the process is quicker and there are fewer fields to fill out when paying.
From the Calgary Herald Saturday, November 5, 2011 Page I5 – Travel |
humour
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From the Calgary Herald, Tuesday, December 20, 2011, Page E5 - Comics |
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From the Calgary Herald, Tuesday, December
13, 2011, Page E7 - Comics |
From the Calgary Herald, Saturday December 10, 2011, Page C17 - Comics |
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From the Calgary Herald, Friday December 9, 2011, Page C11 - Comics |
From the Calgary Herald, Tuesday December 6, 2011, Page D7 - Comics |
