[Edit: I am a prophet! Kim Jong Il died two days after I posted this entry!] With the announcement of “The Protester” as Time’s 2011 Person of the Year, it made me realise that its been a bad year for dictators. Osama Bin Laden is gone. Ghadaffi is gone. Mubarak is gone. Vladimir Putin is […]
I don’t know how long it’s been around but Bagism.com is one of the first sites I visited regularly on the Internet back in the mid to late 1990’s. I haven’t thought of that site for years until thinking about a good way to capture today’s sad anniversary. I’m sure it’s not what John meant […]
An article about the decline of mail-order record clubs claims that it was the “12 for a $0.01” record clubs that conditioned consumers to pay little to nothing for music (and though they don’t phrase it this way, the related joy of having a large “download” of music provide (relatively) instant gratification too.) There’s probably […]
No Friday Fun Link today. Instead, as I do every Remembrance Day, I will spend time thinking of my Grandpa Wally who drove a tank in Holland in WWII. But I’ll also take a broad definition of the term “Remembrance” and choose to spend time remembering my Grandpa Armour who was rejected for service because […]
No one in the convention hall at the Queensbury Convention Centre was more surprised than Ryan Meili. It was June 6, 2009 and the Saskatchewan NDP were choosing their new leader from among four candidates. After Deb Higgins had been dropped off after the first ballot and Yens Pedersen had conceded, Meili knew there was […]
An annual tradition on this blog is the posting of this Hawksley Workman song which perfectly captures the joy that comes with the first snowfall of the year. I also realised this also makes an informal weather history – and not sure if I’m always consistent on this but I think I tend to record […]
…was quite possibly a fiction book! I think I’ve mentioned before that I read mostly non-fiction – probably 80-90% NF to 10-20% Fiction. But a recent Reddit thread on “eye-opening books that have improved the quality of your life” led me to a great fiction find. In the thread, somebody recommended Bill Bryson’s “A Short […]
Probably one of the best (and worst) things my dad ever did for me was when he didn’t push me to follow in his footsteps by becoming a farmer. My great-great-grandfather homesteaded in 1883, taking advantage of the famous Dominion Lands Act that offered 160 acres for $10 which drew so many settlers to the […]
Depending on where you live (and where you get your news), the Occupy Wall Street movement, may or may not be on your radar. These protests, which started in New York but have since spread to other cities around the world, are “mainly protesting against social and economic inequality, corporate greed, and the influence of […]
My mom’s taking a genealogy class so we spent quite a bit of time this weekend looking through her class notes, different web sites and reviewing the information she’d already gathered about her family. I’d taken a genealogy class in library school and had done quite a bit of research as well but mostly on […]
