Wonderful! Just wondering… “How I wonder what you are.” “She’s such a wonder!” I love the word “wonder”, first of all because it isn’t spelled the way it sounds, but mostly because it is such a big, unboundaried, elastic word. And where I love it most is when it’s at its most playful. Like wondering…
It was 1939, just before war broke out in Europe. New York was hosting the World’s Fair, and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin wanted to impress. What better than a non-stop flight from Moscow to New York? Nothing of the sort had ever happened. So it was on April 28, 1939 pilot Vladimir Kokkinaki and…
There’s no moral to this story, except that life isn’t always random, and that there’s much to be said for following your intuition. The story is about a table, a very big, a very gorgeous table with a history, and with a destiny. We don’t know much about this table except that it can seat…
(I first posted this five years ago to the day. If anything has changed, it’s not for the better.) When I was a little boy, there was a “Gentle Jesus, Meek and Mild”. I would pray to him every night and ask him to look after my Mum and my Dad, the dogs and the…
Now, I know you think this is going to be a Paul Bunyan story, or maybe something out of Big Joe Muffaraw of Ottawa Valley fame. But rather than Bunyan’s “big blue ox” or Muffaraw’s famous bullfrog, the blue snow of Lanark County is real, verifiable, and widespread. You’re welcome to come to my river…
Ottawa, July 1, 2027 We’re delighted to welcome the former United States of America (or what’s left of it) as Canada’s eleventh province. Welcome! Welcome! Welcome! After the Proud Boy Uprisings and the Great Impoverishment, we know that many of you are traumatized and frightened. We want to make you feel welcomed and comforted. Except…
For this you should be grateful. I plan to outlive everybody who watched Cheers in the 1980s, only because I want to be able to walk into a room without every witty soul present calling out, “Hey, Norm!” as if I’ve never heard it before. If I had a nickel for every time that’s happened,…
One cannot practice law in the Ottawa Valley for nearly four decades without taking the Irish into account. They fill, disproportionately, the ranks of lawyers in Ottawa and the Valley towns, but they also punch well above their weight in the police forces, business, and the arts. In my day, I would guess, easily a…
Although there’s not much I can do about it, I’m grateful for my personal heritage, tough East London scrappers on my father’s side, proud and fierce Welsh, the indigenous people of Britain, on my mother’s side. But then I married, had children, and they married and had children. I married into a typical Canadian family,…
Just yesterday, March 29, Donald Trump made a highly important and encouraging announcement: America is going to buy up to forty icebreakers from Finland. That’s twenty times as many as Canada agreed to buy, but that’s for another piece. One should never underestimate Alexander Stubb, President of Finland. Fluent in five languages, with an earned…