So it’s been a pretty tough week for Team Orange… The Saskatchewan NDP got a shellacking in the provincial election last Monday, a loss which many are blaming at least partly on still lingering divisions between the 50.3% of the party that supported Cam Broten and the 49.7% of the party that supported Ryan Meili in the last […]
Former Toronto Mayor, Rob Ford, died of cancer today at age 46. Whether you loved him or hated him, you’ll remember him. Of course, that’s mostly because he was a wild-eyed addict who regularly made racist and offensive comments topped by his surreal admission that he used crack while in office. It’s not a perfect parallel […]
It feels somewhat wrong and somehow right to post this list on International Women’s Day. But as she does with so many other things, Hillary Clinton has made her gender an integral part of her campaign (which, in turn, has polarized female voters around the issue of gender) so is there a better time? For that reason, here’s my […]
When we lived in Ontario in 2006, Shea and I tried to get away to visit different nearby areas as often as we could. There’s been a lot of attention lately on French’s decision to start making ketchup in Canada using tomatoes from the Leamington, ON area after Heinz left the community high and dry in 2014. […]
Below are a couple photos I took in Havana during our 2011 trip to Cuba. This was a street vendor stall selling books (which is good!) but most here (and in our hotel’s gift shop or anywhere else we found books) were heavily propagandistic (bad!). Cuba isn’t commercialized with billboards selling blue jeans and soda but in its […]
Take your pick. Here’s #1 on the list which was pretty controversial (by design) at the time back in 1989 but seems relatively tame now…
It’s the most wonderful time of the (fucking) year! 😉 Yes, it’s Freedom to Read Week again, a holiday celebrated by librarians, writers, book lovers, artists, filmmakers and anyone else interested in the issue of censorship and free expression. As usual, I’m planning to do a week of posts on different topics to do with […]
It’s weird the things you remember from your childhood. I’ve already written about a grade two teacher I had who was the nicest teacher I ever had (which makes it even more surprising and sad that she committed suicide later in life after she’d retired.) I have no idea if teachers in other communities did […]
The Canadian Library Association recently voted to wind down their operations so they can be re-born as a new “federation of associations” from across Canada and also to re-focus on what they do best (national voice for libraries = yes; conferences = not as much, especially when OLA is widely regarded as “the” Canadian library […]
Following up on yesterday’s post, John Scott capped an amazing run that, if it was a movie script, would be rejected as too unbelievable – starting as a joke write-in candidate for the NHL all-star game, getting traded and demoted, his all-star berth in doubt, fighting back against the powers that be, both directly and with […]
