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…
Mary Soderstrom
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,…
Back from Holiday, Tired but Pleased with It All
The photo was taken at one of the high points of our three weeks in Paris and Portugal–the countryside around Conínbriga in the center of that country. I’ll have more…
Walla Walla and Wallah-wallah: The Way That Languages Change
Attention particularly to my friends in South-Eastern Washington state: wallah-wallah has entered French in Montreal! I’m the third generation of my family to be born in the small city of…
Notice of Motion: The ERDC Plods Slowly Forward
The Electronic Rights Defence Committee has been fighting since 1996 to get recompense for free lance writers whose work was stolen and published electronically by The Gazette, Montreal’s English language…
Sex, Marketing, and Boys’ Business
The Stephen Harper government has just brought out its new bill on prostitution which is getting criticsm from many quarters. A compromise between all-out legalisation and complete outlawing, the Conservative…