December 30, 1948 Yesterday I was supposed to go to Mrs. O’Reilly’s house to pick up a pie plate for my mother. Before I could leave, however, my father left the back door open and the dog got out. My father then got into a panic and went running out after him. We kept expecting he’d […]
January 14, 2014
I know I often come across as a grumbling curmudgeon with little sentimentality — the kind of person who misdirects the blind and refuses to clap for Tinkerbell. But I do have a softer side, and one thing that is guaranteed to bring it out is the sight of a little kid offering to help […]
December 7, 2013
Sadly, one of the best comic strips is disappearing. I’ve been enjoying Cow and Boy for some years now, but apparently its fans are a small and disparate group. Admittedly, it’s not your usual comic strip. It’s about a boy and his cow and mostly they sit around pondering life’s imponderables while dodging cat-copters, hate-bots […]
December 3, 2013
Oh sure, we laughed at Lou Costello, Tommy Smothers and Jerry Lewis in their heyday, but we know they wouldn’t have been half so funny without their other halves: Bud Abbott, Dick Smothers and Dean Martin. And Gracie Allen without George Burns? Forget it. But of course, the famous straight men and women of the […]
November 18, 2013
This is a piece I wrote while working on that paper that shall remain nameless out west in that province that shall remain equally nameless. It happened last winter and is reported here without embellishment. I guess what I'm saying is: Yes, I'm that stupid.
March 9, 2012
In 1994, during a crisis in Canadian unity, one food manufacturing company quietly stepped in to help ward off an imminent invasion from the United States. In this post we salute V8 Juice for helping to keep Canada a sovereign nation.
March 5, 2012
At the end of “When Pookas attack,” I intended to link to an article I did back in 1997 called “Chicken art and Canadian unity” — a review on Rob Thompson’s art performance piece in which he protested treatment of commercially-bred chickens by putting two people in a cage for a week. But then I […]
December 3, 2010
While going to Mac’s Milk for a couple of gallons of Mac’s Eggnog (which used to be Becker’s Eggnog before Mac’s bought out Becker’s), I realised that I know all the words to the theme for The Big Bang Theory. The whole universe was in a hot dense state, Then 14 billion years ago expansion […]
June 30, 2010
In leaving a comment on my post CSI: Midwest, Jon in France mentioned the phrase “tarred with the same brush.” This gives me the right to reprint a piece I wrote some time ago for an editor’s site I used to run. We’ve all heard the expression. You criticise a particular group of people — […]
June 27, 2010
At one time or another, every blogger has had fun looking over the more unusual search terms through which visitors find our sites. I Don’t Give a Damn draws in people looking for “Jack Sparrow” (or “джек воробей” in Russian), “getting rid of mold” (and “mould“), “virtual birth” (which can apparently also be spelled “verchual birth”), […]
June 25, 2010
I know when referring to people charged with criminal activity, the media must be careful not to use terms prejudicial to the assumption of innocence. This is why news reports always refer to them as “suspects” until a court of law determines their guilt or innocence. To do otherwise not only risks pissing off the government, […]
June 17, 2010
I loved Aesop’s fables as a kid — both the classic version I found in the school library, and the more modern version that appeared on the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. But their morals bugged me. Not the morals themselves, but the rather glaring lack of logic connecting them to the stories. Take that whole […]
April 13, 2014
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