I’ll admit to shedding a few tears when, at the end of Brian Mulroney’s funeral they played a clip of himself singing We’ll Meet Again in his lovely Irish baritone, or earlier a few lines from Danny Boy. I’ll also admit that although I’m not a Tory, I voted consistently for him, and regard him…
A few years before I retired from practicing law, one of my colleagues got mugged by the Law Society. Beaten up and left for dead. My friend survived, but not without countless sleepless nights and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on legal defense fees. And what was his transgression? Well, in one of his…
There are probably a couple of things you didn’t know about Canada and Denmark. One is that until recently, each bordered only one other country by land (the US and Germany, respectively). The other is that now Denmark and Canada share a land border with each other. And this is all the result of the…
The 16th century nun Saint Teresa of Avila is purported to have said: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” How profound. What a commentary on our human condition, and no reflection on God’s answering of prayers. If we are careless in our wishes, we can’t blame God or fate for the…
Grumpy old men the world over insist that women get back into their proper place. Whether the Taliban, the mullahs, or MAGA, these misogynistic medieaval leftovers pine for a world where women know their place as providers of pleasure, domestic care, and offspring, and stop worrying their pretty little heads about more complicated stuff that…
This missive was written in two parts. The following was written before the Presidential Debate: Most of us are beginning to agree with Tim Walz’s description of his Republican counterpart as “a bit weird”. The man who is potentially just one heart attack or one psychiatric intervention away from being the next “leader of the…
Donald Trump keeps bragging that he “aced” the cognitive test. I don’t believe him, and here’s why. The world’s Gold Standard test is the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, and as someone who lives not far from Montreal, I know that I would ace the test, but Trump wouldn’t have a clue. Here are the questions, see…
In the first of my three careers I was a teacher, and for the last eight years of that I taught middle school in a rural community. My classes always had a fair number of farm boys who, to put it kindly, were not committed academics. Lovable, boisterous, sweaty, and rowdy, but never much concerned…
In use since at least the Dirty Thirties, the expression “a day late and a dollar short” is weightier than some of its relatives such as “that ship has sailed” or “closing the door after the horse has left the barn”. “A day late and a dollar short” tells us that not only did we…
Funniest thing about language is that we all know what a word means even if its derivation makes no sense. Take the lovely canary, for instance. Canaries are so named because they were first found on the islands of the same name, and most of us have always assumed that the Canary Islands were so…