Thursday morning very early I’m taking the train to Toronto for several very good reasons. 1. I’m giving a presentation on Making Waves: The Continuing Portoguese Adventure at 5:30 pm.…
All right, boys and girls of the print media: next Tuesday the Electronic Rights Defence Committee will holds its annual general meeting to elect officers and to review progress in…
Snow drops again! They’re out in front, which is in contrast to the date the ones in the photo appeared. The pix was taken April 22, 2008, and the snow…
The weather is exceptional, spookily so. Ian McEwean’s novel Solar is excellent reading for such a time. The hero (and I use the term advisedly) is a physicist Michael Beard…
Manon Corneiller in today’s Le Devoir is excellent on Ed Broadbent and Tom Mulcair. The NDP’s grand old man was one of those (along with Brian Topp) who wanted to…
This is a weekend of demonstrations and parades. Not only is it St. Patrick’s weekend--and Montreal is the home to the second oldest St. Pat’s parade in North America and…
A mini-controversy is brewing in Quebec over the fact that a number of chicken processing plants are now killing poultry in a way that conforms with Muslim strictures of halal…
Sadly, we seem to be seeing more and more religion in public life these days. I don’t mean references to a moral code such as “do under to others as…
No, they’re not open yet, but the shoots are definitely above ground. Makes me feel good to see them.
I’m still on a bit of a high from the great discussion we had last night at the Pierrefons Libraray about Kate Pullinger’s Mistress of Nothing. The novel won the…
A week ago in the run up to International Women’s Day, I mentioned Lea Roback as a great example. Today I’d like to mark the passing of her great friend…
Aluminum is made from electricity and bauxite. The former ingredient is by far the most important, aud since bauxite is more easily transported than electricity, big aluminum foundries are built…
One of my heros has always been Lea Roback, a Quebec feminist and union militant, who died at 97 in 2000. A film was made about her life which is…
For those of you in Toronto Thursday March 22, please come to a presentation of Making Waves: The Continuing Portuguese Adventure at the Centro de Lingua Portuguesa Camões at 5:30…
This is one of my favourites songs, one I always turn to this time of year. It was written for the Brazilian March, which is the season of rain that…
We’ve had a nice snowfalls in the last week, and it actually looks invitingly winterish outside. But we’re scheduled to have some quite warm weather over the last next few…
This would be hilarious, if it weren’t so sad. The poster’s by Matthew Cope: good work!
One of the things that struck me when I was in Shanghai five years ago was the number of adolescent boys on school outings. I knew, of course, that there…
