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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
April in Paris, Chestnuts in blossom: right? Well, no, it’s June and the chestnuts are in blossom in Montreal. That’s about par for the course–or a little later this year,…
Living in Montreal is great fun this year: when your team washes out of the Stanley Cup finals, there’s the World Cup to follow. Not that I’m so big on…
Apparently the door is still open for Canada to annex the Turks and Caicos Islands, but it doesn’t look all that likely. The idea is just as intriguing as it…
Rain is falling right now, but the more spectacular thing falling to earth around here right now are the tiny flowers of various street trees. The regular flowering trees are…
