The Thousand and One Nights
Humans have always been storytellers. From the time when humans first developed language around 100,000 years ago, we have been telling one another stories. Long before we could write, we…
Musings
The Age of Doubt
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of scientific advancement; it was the age of flat-earthers and chemtrail fanatics. It was…
Back on the Open (World) Range
This week, after 300 hours of play, I came to the end of the Ubisoft game Assassin’s Creed Valhalla game. During those hours, I spent my time as a Viking,…
Tubes to Transistors to Today’s Chip Crisis
When I was a young lad, in the latter part of the 1950s (not long after the Stone Age ended…), one of my self-taught technical skills was to be able…
Thomas More’s Words Are Still Appropriate Today
I can always find something in Shakespeare’s works to console, inform, delight, or move me, and more often than not, something that is remarkably relevant to current issues and events.…
The Moreness of Everything
The title of this post comes from a subhead in Thomas De Zengotita’s book, Mediated: How the Media Shape the World Around You (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005) in which the author…
Conspiracy theories: the future of elections
“Conspiracy theory” is a phrase allegedly authored by the CIA sixty-odd years ago, to describe some of the bizarre beliefs about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The expression…
Canadian Conservatives think they’re smarter than Canadians. They aren’t.
With everything else that is going on in the world – Iran reportedly slaughtering 30,000 of its own citizens, the names of dozens of Trump administration figures showing up in…
What next for Iran? The Amit Segal interview
Amit Segal is one of the most influential journalists in Israel and the Middle East. He has sources at the highest level of governments and intelligence agencies. He writes a…
Facebook says this photo has been altered
… So says Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta organization, which is unabashedly pro-MAGA. I say they’re lying. If anyone knows how this image, which has been published by dozens of reputable news…
Who is the deranged one, now?
Having grown up in Alberta as a card-carrying Liberal, I knew how to make friends with Conservatives. If I didn’t, I would’ve had no friends. When you are a progressive-type…
Musings on Colour vs B&W
I grew up in the technological end of the black-and-white era. In the 1950s and early ’60s, our TV was black and white (technically called monochrome). So was everyone else’s,…
Mark Carney’s choice
Might makes right, goes the cliché, and the cliché is certainly true, circa 2026. With a straight face, Prime Minister Mark Carney this week trumpeted his assorted trade deals with…
Seeing your book for the first time…
…always feels pretty cool. Coming soon, around the world, from Random House.