Imagine There’s No Heaven…
The title above is how Imagine, the iconic 1971 song by John Lennon, begins. It is still being played and sung, more than 50 years later. Wikipedia tells us it…
Ian Chadwick
How Did Democracy Come To This Sorry State?
My wife and I are members of the Boomer generation. That means our parents, their families, and their friends, their neighbours and their communities were impacted by World War II.…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 2
Charles Darwin knew the score. In Chapter 11 of his famous and brilliant book, The Origin of Species, published in 1859, he wrote, “We can clearly understand why a species…
Jurassic Park: Some Thoughts About the Franchise Part 1
There’s one particular scene in the first Jurassic Park movie, about twenty minutes in, when Dr. Alan Grant and Dr. Ellie Sattler see the dinosaurs walking wild in the open…
Trump: America’s Mussolini
While Trump’s racist, misogynist running mate, JD “Shady” Vance, in 2016 called Donald Trump, “America’s Hitler,” (before he became a Trump sycophant) it was really a dictator too far. Trump,…
A Time for Political Optimism at Last
After many dreary months of the relentless, pounding negativity, insults, accusations, lies, deflections, racism, and rage-farming of a convicted felon, tax cheat, and serial liar Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, we…
Trump and the Trojans
Donald Trump — aging, obese convicted felon with more criminal trials pending, serial liar, serial adulterer, business fraud, con man, tax cheat, rapist who boasted about his sexual assaults, misogynist…
No Dog in That Fight, But I Still Care About the Results
As a Canadian, I can only watch US politics from afar, albeit with unease. My comments on events and issues there are those from an armchair observer who has no…
Trump, Ozymandias, and the Hubris of Ambition
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1817 poem, Ozymandias, the ancient king who called himself in the poem, the ” king of…
Council Screws Collingwood Residents. Again.
Like many other residents in council chamber yesterday, I was deeply disappointed but not surprised by our council’s decision yesterday to continue with staff’s anti-resident/anti-environment plan to deforest Sixth Street…
The Very Model of Bureaucratic Inefficiency
Here is the textbook model of bureaucratic inefficiency and council sluggishness that deserves a satirical Gilbert and Sullivan song of its own: Collingwood is conducting a “speed limit survey” through…
Review: The Design of Books
Like with so many other technologies in our lives — computers, cars, bread machines, flushing toilets, DVD players, convection ovens — most consumers don’t know or appreciate how books are…
Christofascists Make Their Move in Oklahoma
The MAGA pseudo-Christians in the USA have recently been making bold moves toward implementing their oppressive theocracy and making Gilead a reality in their states. Louisiana required one of the…
The Litter That’s Killing Everything and Everyone
Four and a half trillion. That’s how many cigarette butts are estimated to be littered every year on our streets, sidewalks, parks, downtowns, parking lots, lawns, and everywhere else smokers…
Donald Trump and the Art of Victimhood
Persecution. It’s a deeply-ingrained core component of the myth of Christian history, and well-weaponized in modern times by rightwing politicians who depend on the support from both the faithful and…
Pro-Car Planning is Destroying Collingwood’s Environment
I warned you: Council would support the anti-resident/anti-environment/pro-vehicle attitude that pervades town hall. I warned you they would deforest Sixth Street to make it a bigger, faster speedway for vehicles.…
A 30-Year-Old Warning About Rising Fascism
Convicted felon and insurrection supporter Donald Trump claimed in a media conference after his trial that, because the justice system works, Americans are “living in a fascist state.” It’s not…
May 30: The Day Justice Prevailed
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! He chortled in his joy. Thirty-four criminal charges and found guilty for every one of them. Thirty four! Of course, I don’t have to tell…
Traffic Calming: Not My Job Say Town Staff
No residents have been successful in three years in meeting all the town’s absurdly stringent requirements for investigation of the installation of even rudimentary traffic calming in their neighbourhoods. That’s…