The Shark Week surprise
Just when you thought it was safe to venture back into the chilly waters of municipal politics without having to think about the size of council, along comes a shark in the form of Premier Doug Ford and his plan to shrink Toronto’s council effective this fall. Appropriately, he announced it during Shark Week. Many […]
Topsoil therapy
When our kids were much younger and dependent upon LOML and me for meals and a roof over their heads, I discovered the serenity of gardening. (Don’t even think of doing a drive-by to see what a gardener’s garden looks like these days.) I’m not now, and never have been, very good at gardening or […]
Smell? What smell?
I remember about 15 years ago I was staying in an apartment hotel in Toronto’s Chinatown district when I was almost overcome by the stink emanating from down the hall. Venturing nervously towards the source of the odour, I found myself in the presence of an oddly shaped spiky vegetable-like thingy that I now know […]
Cake, Atomic Number 900
On my birthday, last week, I served up an epic cake failure to my family. I wanted to bake my own birthday cake this year. I like baking. It’s one of those things I usually do fairly well. Baking is one of those things I enjoy doing. So I asked LOML if he’d mind not […]
A morning with Mary
“Hey writer guy! You need a dump lift for that truck!” It’s Saturday morning down at the Hillier landfill site: actually when I say down I mean the section for dropping off garden waste that is quarry-like, which promises that ne’er a hint ’o lake breeze will kiss this kiln-baked crater on a morning like […]
Blame it on the breakfast
One of the icons of the late two thousand and teen years is undoubtedly Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House Press Secretary. Known best for her stone-faced denials of various Trump misstatements and misdeeds, she has recently evoked a little public sympathy following some crude jokes and a restaurant eviction. Ms. Sanders really outdid herself […]
Insert tab A into Slot A
In my “good old days”, sex education consisted of marching the senior high classes down to the auditorium to watch a movie of a child being born. No information was given prior to or during the presentation. There wasn’t a voiceover describing what was happening. There wasn’t a visual to speak of, that is to […]
October 17 looms
I just can’t get excited about the new pot legislation that extends people’s right to voluntarily downgrade their sobriety level. I accept, however, that you can’t legislate against the human condition—we’ve already gone through that with alcohol—so recognizing widespread marijuana use as a fact seems to be sensible. But I won’t be doing any cartwheels […]
Fire up them generators
As I sit here, on my side porch tapping away on my arthritic laptop, I wonder if I might be hard-of-learning when it comes to our dependence upon fossil fuels? In my mind’s eye my computer power cord is snaking its way below ground to a power grid near a crude oil field in the […]
Fighting the cucumber war
There really is nothing funny about a tariff war. Once one side starts it, the other matches, and so it goes until an economic slump results and people start losing their jobs. All the same, you’ve got to find something mildly amusing in the targets selected by our government for a retaliatory 10 per cent […]