(I mentioned a couple weeks ago that this eulogy had gone over very well and that I would post it when time allowed. A long weekend is ideal for catching up on all those loose ends and so here it is…)
We interrupt our regular tech/library/baby-related news for an agricultural report. Heard on the news tonight that it is the 100th Anniversary of Marquis Wheat, an early-maturing hybrid that is pretty much the entire reason that Saskatchewan is known as the bread basket of Canada. They're doing a bunch of special celebrations at the Experimental Farm […]
I posted an anecdote about Kurt Vonnegut from author Dave Margoshes a couple entries back. In the course of writing to ask permission to do this, I also took the opportunity to ask Dave, who also acts as the food critic with the local Prairie Dog weekly newspaper, if he’d be willing to give me […]
There are a number of astounding stats about The Encyclopedia of Saskatchewan which came out during Saskatchewan's Centennial in 2005. Most pages of any book ever published in Saskatchewan. Most contributors. Most illustrations. Longest gestation time. Heaviest. The print edition is an amazing book and now, the CPRC has put the whole thing online for […]
I used the following list when I did up a “mini-yearbook” for our 10 year high school reunion and came across it recently in a new Facebook group dedicated to the topic. So I thought I'd re-post it here. You Know You're From A Small Town When… 1. You can name everyone you graduated with. […]
A couple months ago, I wrote about how I attended the local NDP association's AGM with Shea's uncle who's big with the NDP (he ran in the 2000 Federal election) during a visit to Weyburn. During the meeting, one old-timer had leaned over and asked if I might be interested in running. I told him […]
One of the books I've got on the go right now is an oral history of Tommy Douglas called “Touched By Tommy: Stories of Hope and Humour About Canada's Most Loved Political Leader, T.C. Douglas”I thought this anecdote about librarians was funny:“Everyone was saying nice things about John Archer. He was leaving the Legislative Library […]
Buffalo was rare to non-existent from what we could tell in Ontario. One of the specialty meat vendors in the Covent Market Garden told us that this was because Ontario didn't have the land to raise them like we did out west. Made sense to us but if you don't eat a lot of buffalo […]
I was fortunate enough to work with Shirley Dunn when she created this award a few years ago. It began as an award for Calgary and area writers and I remember telling her “It's too bad you can't go province-wide with it – or even beyond – as you'd get a lot more submissions and […]
