Gifted Typist

… and at 63, Neil Young ain’t old. This was one of those concerts where you hardly knew where to direct your awe. Was it the fact that this 63-year old was bent over an electric guitar, face pinched in concentration, ripping out chords and tunes that went straight into your bones? Or was it [...]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Now we finally have a glimpse of the hateful, spiteful, hidden agenda so many of us feared. After cleverly hiding his NeoCon ideology from centrist Canadians, Stephen Harper finally blew the lid of the thing this week. And it’s ugly. He plunged the ideological dagger [...]

See my Herald column over here. One car, four people. One has volleyball ending at 5:30. Another has yoga, also starting at 5:30. Ending at 6:30. Three have karate at 6. Ending at 7. Four have grandmother’s 104th birthday at 7. A half hour away. There’s a snowstorm brewing outside. And the appointment to have [...]

Can you believe that? Almonds are not nuts. They are seeds or fruits or drupes. But not nuts. According to Wikipedia: Botanically, the almond seed or fruit is not a true nut, but a drupe. This factoid is yet another thing in the great pantheon of things that I did not know. So if someone [...]

It was a fascinating study in the laws of physics. It involved an unexpected forward momentum on ice, a collision, the entangling of the two skate blades, a loss of balance and the fall onto the cold hard surface. As you might expect, gravity played a starring role in this episode. My feet went out [...]

See my column over here This is the threat I resort to now that all the other typists in my house are karate brown or green belts. I’m a white-belt drop out. Sadly. And they never miss and opportunity to remind me. I was happy doing the karate air punches and air kicks in training, [...]

Did you know that the word “racecar” is spelled the same backwards? Go head. Get your pencil out and spell it backwards. See? They call these things Palindromes. (Say, that’s also a description for Sarah who looks the same going forwards as she does going backwards. Does that make Tina Fey a “Palin”drome.) Other examples [...]

..We have an important message about things falling from the sky – right now. It’s white stuff, Mr. Little. Big wet flakes of cold white stuff. And it’s mixed in with fat drops of cold rain. It’s not accumulating on the ground to form a pristine white blanket like the snow you see in the [...]

(This one’s doing the rounds. It’s cute.) Please join me in remembering a great icon of the entertainment community. The Pillsbury Doughboy died yesterday of a yeast infection and trauma complications from repeated pokes in the belly. He was 71. Doughboy was buried in a lightly greased coffin. Dozens of celebrities turned out to pay [...]

Go over here to read my Herald column Maybe it was irrational exuberance. Maybe I was just pushing my luck. Maybe I was being lazy. Whatever the case, the chickens came home to roost the other day when I ran out of leaf-storage room under my back step. For the last few years, this “solution” [...]

The show is over. The roguish, dysfunctional, foul-mouthed boyz of Sunnyvale Trailer Park will be no more. And it doesn’t seem right, somehow. For anyone unfamiliar with Trailer Park Boys, the show is a collision of concepts: Think the Spinal Tap mockumentary, the US show My Name is Earl and the Burt Reynolds slapstick flick [...]

I managed to swim 40 metres on held breath during “lung-buster drills” in swim training this morning. (That’s 4/5ths of an Olympic-sized pool.) It took me 37 stokes. Freestyle. I repeated that count three times in three separate drills. Never more than 37.  Never less. It’s a record for me. My previous record was 34 [...]

You don’t really celebrate Remembrance Day. You observe it. Here, we do that by shutting everything down: offices, stores, mail delivery. We have 11 am-ceremonies in public parks with aging, medal-bedecked veterans, flags and bagpipes. These are nice community gatherings. I like this holiday because there’s nothing commercial about it, no gift pressure, no requirement [...]

I’m rent a car bulgariadying over here, rolling on the floor, laughing so hard it hurts. This is an advertising slogan for a spray deodorant launched in Britain in the early 50s. I heard it on a BBC radio documentary about copy writing through the ages. I don’t know who authored the line or what [...]

See my Herald column over here. Watching Homes and Gardens TV used to be a guilty pleasure. Now watching these house hunting shows makes me feel like a vulture circling over the real estate boom just before it is slayed by the subprime dragon. A few days ago I watched one of these couples searching [...]