After our divorce, my first wife, whom I’m calling “Val” in this blog, married the minister who got me into the ministry back in the late ’70s. He and I had been extremely close since my late teens. A mentor, for sure. He was also popular with my friends, and Ian and I would hitch […]
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 25, 2013
It’s Christmas time so I’m reposting something I wrote a few years ago (and then borrowed for a Christmas editorial for the newspaper last year.) Merry Christmas everyone. “I remember standing in the old church in Windsor…” These were the words with which I intended to begin this post. They refer to a specific moment […]
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.
October 20, 2013
Okay. I think I can finally talk about this thing. When last I wrote we had just committed to a drastic and frightening life change. (Geeze. Isn’t “life change” a bloodless phrase?) Samantha, her 85-year-old father and I were moving halfway across the country where I would take on a steady and significant position on […]
October 1, 2012
We chased our first fire engine a few days ago. This turns out to be one of my responsibilities as managing editor of a small town newspaper in the Canadian Prairies. Chasing fire engines. As hard-hitting journalists out for the latest scoop we’re supposed to make sure we’re first on the scene so that we […]
August 3, 2012
[This is the account of my third “smoking gun.” It is as accurate as I can make it, a process that has included repeated interviews with the principles involved, always following Gibbs Rule Number One: Never question suspects together. Conversations are left out except when the exact words can be confirmed, or the comment was […]
April 13, 2012
The second of the Smoking Guns series. While everything else may be explained by stretching the meaning of "coincidence," those damned boxes undermine any conventional explanation.
April 12, 2012
This is the best I've got in the way of an explanation for the events described in "Smoking Guns: #1 - Night Fog." It ain't much, but it's the best I can do.
April 11, 2012
This is the first "Smoking Gun" incident. It describes an event so unusual, yet so well attested, that it can only stand as evidence that life is not entirely material in its essence.
March 2, 2014
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