Frank Cauley was an Ottawa boy who served with the RCAF in WWII. One day he and his Sunderland Flying Boat crew were sent out to find and destroy a U-Boat. This they did, but not before the enemy nearly returned the favour, raking the bottom of the Sunderland with machine gun fire. Limping away…
Go into an otherwise silent room full of guitars and pluck the A string on one of them. You will soon hear all the other guitars sounding back at you! Their respective A strings will have picked up and responded to the sound wave you created. They just couldn’t help themselves. We call this effect…
“Cross my heart and hope to die, stick a needle in my eye.” So say children when making promises to one another, the most solemn of all oaths. Closely related to this is the “pinky promise” (also known as the “pinky swear”) made from one young person to another, with their pinky fingers linked in…
Babies normally get their own way and very young children struggle to keep it that way. Most kids, though, gradually learn to consider the needs and feelings of others in order to function within society. We call this “growing up” and collectively, “civilization”. A few, however, never grow up, and like infants, spend their entire…
Any digital photographer knows that the quickest and easiest way to transform a so-so picture into a work of art is to crop out all the distracting and irrelevant stuff around the edges, and get the subject into a more pleasing position within the frame. Once you crop out the dirty teacups, mangled leftovers, and…
If you’ve done any amount of public speaking, you’ve had at least one bad experience. For some people, it can be so traumatizing that they never again pick up a mike. Mine was like a near-death experience, except without the lights and heavenly music. It happened in Toronto about twenty years ago. At that time…
There are two ways to look at your calling in life: as what you do, or what you are. And therein is the secret to success and happiness. Some people get behind the wheel of their trucks and grudgingly drive them down the road, getting a paycheque and waiting for the weekend. They hate the…
A real estate agent near my home has a huge highway billboard upon which he holds himself out to be a “City and Country Specialist”. When I first saw that, I snickered. What kind of specialist claims to do it all? But then I realized that maybe he was on to something. He’s actually associated…
Justice Kenneth Charles Binks, Queen’s Counsel, passed away September 14, 2018 at the age of 93. His funeral is tomorrow. He was a giant who lived life well, gave back much more than he took out, and the world is a better place because of him. Although he acted for the great and the powerful,…
The Blue Jay is one of Canada’s best known birds. At our house we can have a dozen at our feeders. Rowdy, curious, clever and aggressive, Cyanocitta cristata is one of our prettiest birds, and it knows it. But it’s not blue. Come on, you say– why, even the Latin name hints at blueness! Well,…