Don’t get me wrong– spellcheck and predictive texting are wonderful inventions and save us all a ton of work. But just as fire can be your best friend, fire and spellcheck can destroy you if you don’t keep them under control. There are, I think, at least three reasons why “language tech” is treacherous. First,…
We are universally horrified by the atrocity of war in Ukraine. As we should be. But we should be neither surprised nor complacent. War and its attendant atrocities are as old as our species, in fact, older. Savagery by one group of primates against another is well documented. Birds, and even insects, carry out massive…
My dear old Dad made it to just past 102. His mind stayed sharp until the last year or two, and even then he could still carry on an interesting conversation. But because he slept so much and his dreams were so vivid, the boundary between reality and imagination became blurred. Really blurred. One evening…
In Canada, as in most northern countries, spring means potholes. In French they’re aptly described as nids de poule, “hen’s nests”. Whatever you call them, potholes result when a tiny bit of water makes its way into a crack in the pavement, where it freezes and expands. The expansion in the brittle, frozen asphalt creates…
A friend and former client, and faithful reader of these missives, challenged me to write about fairness, of which there seems a paucity these days. Fairness is a funny thing. When little kids say, “Not fair!!!”, they really mean, “I’m not being treated the way I would like.” As we grow older, we begin to…
The likely reversal of Roe v Wade by the Supreme Court of the United States tells us many things about the legal and political world south of our border. In fact, it tells us much about us, too. It tells us that the Common Law is always amenable to change, even reversal, with the tides…
It seems that Vlad’s “special operation” isn’t going so well. To be sure, he probably didn’t count on the formidable response of the West, and he certainly got it entirely wrong about the resolve of Ukrainians. But his version of Anschluss is crumbling mostly because of factors decades in the making, for which he has…
We live in a northern climate, and that means it gets bitterly cold in the winter. So cold that water pipes will freeze and crack and a cup of coffee would freeze solid if left on the counter overnight. In Canada, as in most northern countries, heating our homes is not just a matter of…
In my mind, Carl Docksteader was always larger than life. Oddly enough, or maybe because that’s the way great men are, he was always modest about himself and his accomplishments. Carl never went to university, and except for his last two years, he never lived outside the little rural township where he was born. Yet…
I knew that title would get your attention. We’re all suckers for sensational stories, and I’m just as guilty as the next guy. Is a Dirty Thirties replay in the cards? Not likely, but possible. So are nuclear war, the Big Asteroid, and the Next Big Pandemic. There are lots of horrifying “what ifs” out…