Tell me, everyone, where are the people in the streets protesting the Canadian government’s slip into conflict in Iraq? Remember the massive protests in 2003, including 200,000 in Montreal on…
Actually this photo was taken some time ago, but I couldn’t resist since it was so cold this weekend. Risk of frost in the suburbs they say, definitely a time…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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.…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
