Financing Schools: Cut Private School Grants More
Like the song says, “The rich get rich and the poor get children.” Le Devoir has a story this morning about how the current austerity wave is requiring that Quebec…
Mary Soderstrom
The Wisdom of Plants? Caffeine’s Advantages and Disadvantages
Had your caffeine fix yet this morning? I look forward to my cup of coffee after breakfast mightily. The taste is not that great (as I tell my grandkids who…
Saturday Photo: When the Uncovered Past Does Not Linger
As I’ve mentioned here before, one of the summer’s highlights was our trip to the Roman town of Coninbriga, not far from Coimbra in Portugal. The site was a going…
The Real Intergenerational Inequity Is Not Public Debt But Lack of Public Support
Are the guys in power in Canada and the US listening to voice of economic reason? The answer is “No!” of course. As Paul Krugman charges again today, austerity measures…
Saturday Photo (Day Early): 50 Years Déjà!
It was a Saturday, all right, 50 years ago today when Lee and I got married. Seems hardly possible that so much time has passed, particularly since he’s the same…
Scandalous Double-Double: the Tim Hortons/Burger King Deal
Has Canada become a flag of convenience? That’s certainly what it looks like as two fast food giants get ready to merge and take advantage of the tax benefits that…
Saturday Photo: Olives and Chicory in Portugal
Drought in Spain and blight in Italy may increase the price of olive oil this winter, various business insiders report. That’s not a pleasing prospect, as I find myself using…
More on the War against Children: Quebec’s Education Minister Says Not Buying Books Won’t Kill Kids
My jaw dropped yesterday when Le Devoir quoted Yves Bolduc, Quebec’s education minister, as saying that not buying books for school libraries wasn’t a problem because it wouldn’t kill kids.…
You’d Think Nobody Cared about the Kids: Why the Working Poor’s Kids Are Short-Changed
The New York Times recently had a story about a young single mother working at Starbucks who is having a terrible time coordinating her very changeable work schedule and child…
Saturday Photo: Inca Path
Work on Road through Time progresses: the chapter about “Warriors’ Roads” is just about done. One of the things that I’ve learned is that most road improvements in early times…
Saturday Photo: All Roads Lead to Rome
Back to working on the next non-fiction book, Road through Time. One of the pleasures of our trip earlier this summer was a day in Conímbriga, a Roman town in…
No Pears Bis: It’s Not the End of the Bees, It Seems
This morning I checked out two other pear trees in the neighborhood to see how they had fared this spring. As I recounted in the last post, we don’t have…
Saturday Photos: There Are No Pears
This is the weekend that I’m usually thinking about harvesting our pears before the squirrels do. The two trees in our backyard have born fruit for more than 25 years.…
Horror Disconnect: A Prize for the Chainsaw Massacre Guy While Death Tolls Mount
Tobe Hooper who made The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 40 years ago is getting a lifetime achievement award today at Montreal’s FanTasia Film Festival. The festival, started 18 years ago and…
Saturday Photo: The Longest Day of the Year in the Bois de Vincennes Bis
Looks like a very bucolic setting but this was taken five minutes walk from the Porte d’Or and the Péripherique highway in Paris. As I noted last Saturday, we had…
What the World Needs Now Is Love: If Only It Were This Simple
This showed up on my Facebook feed this morning. It’s a lyrical video compilation (I think I recognize clips from Apocalypse Now, Shingler’s List and perhaps more) put together to…
More on Language Changing: Would That Things Be As Easy As Kids Make It Seem
A few weeks ago I posted about the inclusion of words from Arabic in Montreal French. Wallah Wallah has become non-perjorative term for someone of Arabic descent among Grench speaking…
Saturday Photo: Hanging out Paris-style
This picture was taken four weeks ago, Saturday June 21, the longest day in the year at Lac Dumesnil in le Parc du Bois de Vincennes. Situated just outside the…
Show Down: The Latest in Millenia of Conflict
While the world watches the debris of the Malaysia Airlines 737 smolder in the Eastern Urkrainian, I’m reminded of my recent reading. Item: Tolstoy–and I’m three-quarters of the way through…
Drought: How Can We Live without Water in the Golden State
Growing up in Southern California, the spector of not enough water seemed frequently present. Not enough rain falls to support a population a tenth as big as it was then,…