It’s common in the trades to say to quibbling customers, “You can have it fast, you can have it cheap, or you can have it good. Pick two.” In other words, says the plumber or the electrician, I can do this well and at a cheaper price, but you’re going to have to wait. Or,…
“I’m getting a new car!” Wow! Shiny, “new car smell”, all the latest bells and whistles. In reality, I’m not. A new car is not what I need. What I really need is a new alternator, or a set of snow tires, or even just a good wax job. There’s really not much wrong with…
There’s nothing magical, spiritual or even technical about a “new year”. Our ancestors got along just fine without calendars and paid attention to the truly important things such as spring planting, fall harvest, and the various solstices which helped determine these. Although our Western calendar may be dominant, it’s far from the only one. While…
I was once asked to provide an opinion about the name of a Canadian national who had died domiciled in Portugal. My colleague was unsure how to proceed with the estate because the various legal documents of the deceased showed many variations of his name, none of which coincided exactly with the name he used…
Contrary to popular TV shows, courtroom battles are not about competing facts. There are no facts in a trial until the end, when the judge decides what the facts are. Lawyers don’t introduce facts, they introduce evidence, typically in the form of documents, or drawn from the mouths of witnesses. We call this latter form…
As I write this, Australia is burning. Smoke from the bushfires has now encircled the globe. An area larger than Scotland has been burned with incalculable cost to nature, and the damage to Australia’s economy has not even begun to be assessed. Yet there is a silver lining. Of course, sitting nearly sixteen thousand kilometers…
Some wags joke that while you may be one in a million, if you live in China, there are another 1439 people just like you. Good for a wry chuckle, perhaps, but misleading. It’s misleading because you are not one in a million. The fact is that as at January 1, 2020, you were one…
I’m old enough to remember the annual summer polio scares, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and practicing for nuclear attacks (as if crouching under your school desk was going to do much good). I’ve survived the Y2K “crisis”, a half-dozen economic downturns and a handful of personal existential threats, mostly self-induced. So I’m pretty sure that…
On Monday, February 24, we lost our Mum, Gram and Great-grandma. She was just over a hundred, and for all but the last month or two, always in good health and independent in spirit. All four foot eleven inches of her. The daughter of a prosperous Liverpool merchant, her childhood was a privileged one, with…
The clock on my office wall was demon possessed, of that I am certain. At first it was kind of subtle– a few minutes ahead one day, three minutes slow the next. Close enough for a punctuality scofflaw like me. But when one minute it was close and five minutes later it was off by…