Christmases past
As the festive season approaches, people will start reminiscing about past festive holidays with family and friends. Most of my recollections of Holidays Past are good ones. I say “most” because I don’t remember enjoying the Christmas in 1961 when we woke up to overcast skies, plus temperatures, fog and rain. The interesting thing is […]
Heavy on the fluff
Ontario’s next election will be held on Jun 2, 2022—and already Doug Ford’s Conservatives are pawing at the ground. There is a limit on the amount a political party can spend in the six-month period before a campaign begins, and the party is flush with cash—so they’ve been spending some of it recently on ads […]
Game on
It’s shaping up to be another holiday pizza-by-ourselves festive season for LOML and me. It’s hard to ignore the climbing COVID-19 case numbers. I’m afraid it looks as if we all sat back and took a breather, literally, when the numbers started to fall a couple of months ago. We just might be hard-oflearning. According […]
Funny at the time
It gives me no pleasure to report that the Supreme Court of Canada has recently let a ‘comedian’ off the hook and upheld his right to freedom of speech —because it comes at the expense of a severely disabled young man who has experienced ridicule for most of his life. The case was brought to […]
We won’t forget
A person I know, who lives way out on the Canadian Prairies, always puts one of her family’s Christmas Trees up on October 30th. Personally, I think it’s a long haul from the 30th of October to the twenty-fifth of December, but she’s a Christmas-loving kinda gal. And she’s the only person she has to […]
The Legacy of Monty Hall
I have to confess at the outset that I have never taken any instruction in the subject of mathematical probabilities, as the rest of this piece will no doubt demonstrate. So it was when I started reading Harvard celebrity intellectual Steven Pinker’s new book Rationality: What it is, Why it seems scarce, Why it matters […]
Time flies when
Well, we can put paid to Hallowe’en 2021! How the H E double hockey sticks did we get so close to November so quickly? I am purely blown away by how fast time seems to pass these days. Is it just me? Sometimes I’m very aware of which day of the week it currently happens […]
Big John and Stan
Big John has been sold. For $9.5 million. That’s a lot of money to pay, especially considering he’s a skeleton. But not just any skeleton. Big John is the largest Triceratops ever documented—and officially recognized as such by the Guinness World Records organization. Triceratops were ferocious three-horned dinosaurs that roamed the earth some 66 million […]
Trick or Treat, Smell my Feet
Hallowe’en!! Yep, one week from today (Sunday) it’ll be Fright Night. Did you Trick ’r Treat when you were a kid? We sure did. In the 1950s, in a semi-rural community, going “shelling out” was a big deal. It wasn’t much past the first week of school in September when my older sister and I […]
Embracing the Opportunity
The experts predicted the pandemic would produce a baby boom, with all those young parents-to-be sitting at home having nothing else to do. But the experts were wrong: they obviously hadn’t taken into account the adverse effects on fecundity that Netflix-binging would have. Instead, according to a report in last week’s Globe and Mail, Canada’s […]