SPECIAL FROM DOMINIC BERRY, MAN ABOUT MAIN STREET, GRAND BEND, ON. JUNE 29, 2021. It’s been hot enough here lately. But not quite like : “Extreme heat warnings remain in place over much of Western Canada as a historic heat wave that has shattered 103 all-time heat records across BC, Alberta, Yukon and NWT moves […]
It is not easy to be humourous about COVID-19. But that is my assignment here and I will try, more or less. (While still being half-serious between the lines … maybe?) My point of departure is a May 13, 2020 article in the venerable UK publication NewStatesman, by Jerome Roos who “teaches political economy at […]
A man’s gruesome rape and kidnapping of his ex-girlfriend, just after his murder of her parents, should make a gripping old-school crime drama in any context. At the same time, I have been told that I haven’t personally contributed a crime story to this site for more than a decade (“Depression economics and crime : […]
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 2018. GANATSEKWYAGON,ON. Both Donald Trump in the neighbouring USA today, and his wily colleague Doug Ford right here in the new Old Ontario, have become so appalling lately that I have sought refuge in thoughts about the 2018 Grey Cup – annual championship of the Canadian Football League, held for the 106th […]
I agreed with a lot in Masha Gessen’s Friday, June 22 column for The New Yorker : “Trump’s Opponents Aren’t Arguing for ‘Open Borders’–But Maybe They Should.” It fits with the “global village” that the Edmonton-born Marshall McLuhan began to talk about in the 1960s. And this has come to echo loudly in the now […]
[UPDATED JANUARY 10]. What are some options for dropping by the Rex Jazz & Blues bar in Toronto in the first month of this perhaps fateful year 2018? Which of the scheduled groups would you most like to hear? Those asking these poignant questions also promised that if we did go to any of these […]
Football means one thing in North America, and another in the rest of the world. (And even just North America north of the Rio Bravo/Rio Grande. There’s also Australian Rules Football, I guess, but that’s … well … something completely different.) In the late fall of 2017, as it happens, Toronto, ON, Canada has won […]
Like others, no doubt, I haven’t looked at a copy of Playboy magazine for a great many years. And I never subscribed or otherwise read the articles (or looked at the photos) regularly. But for a time in the late 1950s and 1960s, it was something young men my age were expected to know about […]
At last we have summer in the city 2017 up here on the northwest shore of the most easterly great lake (well, sort of …). Back from a short communion with early July mosquitoes further north, I somehow bumped into a YouTube clip called “Paul Desmond & Gerry Mulligan – Stardust.” As happens in the […]
GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2 AM. The phone rang. It was the doctor. “You’re supposed to be the humour guy,” he said. “Do something humourous about this US election. It’s killing us.” He went on : “I watched Bill Maher Friday night. President Obama – just on tape but of course impressive. Then a […]
