On Friday night, at the Edmonton Eskimos game (my profound apologies to the 14 people in Canada who find the term ‘Eskimo’ offensive), the national anthem singer chose to perform the anthem in the bilingual version. Now, I’m old enough to remember when English-French tensions in western Canada were such
Continue readingAuthor: Maurice Tougas
In This Corner: Follow the bouncing ball: World Cup 2018
Every four years, people who couldn’t identify Ronaldo from Ron Howard suddenly become soccer experts. It’s the World Cup, an event so important, so famous, that it doesn’t even have to name the sport. World Cup.. ’nuff said. I’m not a huge soccer fan, but I have three sons who
Continue readingIn This Corner: With friends like these …
Donald Trump – the sexist, racist, xenophobic, dictatorial, megalomaniac leader of the free world – has finally accomplished something that no other American president has ever done. Trump has single-handedly destroyed the relationship between Canada and the United States. The two countries that share the world’s longest border have never
Continue readingIn This Corner: Barr vs. Bee: did the punishments fit the crimes?
After all these months of stories about men behaving badly, it was about time that women had a chance to behave like complete a-holes. Equality take a long time, but we’ll get there, right, ladies? As you probably know, this past week two female TV performers, both alleged comics, got
Continue readingIn This Corner: The obligatory royal rant
Well, royalty fans, have you had enough? Six, seven, eight hours of non-stop, drooling coverage of the royal wedding should be enough to slake your thirst for all things royal for a while. For the tiny number of committed anti-monarchists like myself, the last few weeks have been cause for much tooth
Continue readingIn This Corner: Go Jets go! Right?
The other day I turned on the television to find an NHL game in progress. I was shocked. I thought the hockey season ended months ago. It had for me, anyway. Stranger still, the game featured a team identified on the screen only as VGK. VGK? Could it be the
Continue readingIn This Corner: A Simpsons milestone nobody is celebrating
According to the Internet (which, as we know, is never wrong), if you were to watch all 552 episodes of The Simpsons, it would cost you 12,144 minutes of your life. Or, put another way, 202 hours and 24 minutes. Or, put a third day, eight-and-a-half days. And that statistic
Continue readingIn This Corner: The Facebook list: What would Trippie Redd want with me?
Facebook founder and boss Mark Zuckerberg is probably one of the world’s most hated men, and not just because he looks like a glass-eyed troll who hasn’t seen sunlight in years and recoils from human touch. Zuckerberg testified for two days in the U.S. senate over questions about Facebook’s casual
Continue readingIn This Corner: On the contrary: The new Roseanne is bad.
The big news on the entertainment front today is the reboot of the classic TV comedy, Roseanne. The huge new cast of Roseanne, including TV’s most annoying new character. Can you guess who that is? The new season – returning more than 10 years after it outstayed its welcome by
Continue readingIn This Corner: Revisiting ‘the Wimp Factor’. Will it return?
For most of the 1970s, Canada had the coolest leader in the room. His name was Pierre Trudeau, and he was undeniably the hippest, coolest, and dare I say “grooviest” leader in the world. Trudeau was elected 50 years ago, the summer of ’68, surfing a wave of ‘Trudeaumania’. Later
Continue readingIn This Corner: Stuff I Learned This Week no. 4: It’s Academy Awards Sunday. Prepare to be lectured.
I’ve always been a bit of an Oscar junkie. When I was a kid, and had to go to bed before the best picture winner was announced, I’d sit at the top of the stairs and listen to the announcement. Even in years when I didn’t even see most or
Continue readingIn This Corner: Stuff I Learned This Week no.3: Why our best ever Olympics feels like a loss
The Olympics are over, and we in Canada can now go back to ignoring ‘big air’ and ‘half-pipe’ and even ‘mixed-doubles curling’. The record book will show that this was Canada’s best Olympics ever. Twenty-nine medals in total (11 gold, eight silver, 10 bronze). That’s third overall. We beat the
Continue readingIn This Corner: Stuff I Learned This Week, no.2: Winter Olympics edition
Enjoying the Winter Olympics, or, to give it its due, the Games of the XXIII Winter Olympics? I’m not. Well, not much. Always happy when a Canadian snags a medal, but the happiness is fleeting. Within a day or less, I’ve already forgotten the name of the athlete and the
Continue readingIn This Corner: Stuff I Learned This Week no. 1
Over the last three years, I wrote a weekly blog on world events, cleverly titled ‘Stuff Happens’, followed by less cleverly titled sequels. This year, I decided to abandon the weekly news roundup because it was just so damn depressing. I couldn’t write another word about the insane clown president
Continue readingIn This Corner: Your Sunday Sermon: Maybe this Trump fellow isn’t so bad after all
Last year, I wrote that one of my resolutions for 2018 was to deTrump myself. No more reading about the insane clown president. No more all-Trump, all-the-time monologues from the late night guys (I’ve quit the sadly unfunny Stephen Colbert and the sanctimonious Seth Meyers, but I’m still a fan
Continue readingIn This Corner: Your Sunday Sermon: Exclusive sneak peak at Trudeau tell-all book!
For the past few months, writer C. Ellsworth Stubbins has been granted unrestricted access to the inner workings of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office. Although not as explosive as Fire and Fury, whereby a reporter had unrestricted access to the Donald Trump White House, this new book is a revealing
Continue readingIn This Corner: Your Sunday Sermon: You call THIS cold?
Edmonton, the city I have called home since birth, has a love-hate relationship with winter. One the one hand, we hate it. It’s cold, it’s dark 15 hours of the day, and it’s long. Good God, is it long. On the other hand, we sort-of love winter because it shows
Continue readingIn This Corner: The Return of Stuff Happens, week 52: RIP
As the last blog of 2017 – and the last in the Stuff Happens series of blogs – let’s look at the names we lost in 2017. January Mary Tyler Moore Milt Schmidt, 98, the former Boston Bruins great and most frequently accidentally mispronounced name in hockey history … Jimmy
Continue readingIn This Corner: The Return of Stuff Happens, week 51: The year in books (well, books I read, anyway)
OK, I’m well aware Stuff Happened this past week. Justin Trudeau had his knuckles rapped for accepting an all-expenses paid trip on a private island, courtesy the Aga Khan some sort of religious leader/zillionaire. Trudeau claimed that the Aga Khan was a “close family friend”, when in fact the last
Continue readingIn This Corner: The Return of Stuff Happens, week 50: The year in Google
In lieu of an actual look at the past week, here’s a look at last year, as tabulated by most popular searches on Google. Here in Canada, Hurricane Irma was the top search for the year, even though it never touched Canada. Surprisingly, the no. 2 overall search was Meghan
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