Random grumblings for a Sunday afternoon
Why can’t I buy Yorkshire Gold tea in town? I can buy Barry’s tea, from Ireland, and Morse’s tea packaged in Nova Scotia locally. As well as other brands. Surely…
Why can’t I buy Yorkshire Gold tea in town? I can buy Barry’s tea, from Ireland, and Morse’s tea packaged in Nova Scotia locally. As well as other brands. Surely…
I write about reading a lot, because I read a lot of books. There are other kinds of reading – other languages, too – that I don’t write much about.…
On the Inside Higher Ed website, Joshua Kim recently asked the question, When do you find the time and energy to read books? That surprised me. What energy does reading…
I Live Tweeted the Vision Vancouver-sponsored event “Protecting Vancouver’s Cultural Spaces: How we can preserve culture in a growing city”- You can search the hashtag #VanCulturalSpaces for related tweets on…
Author, musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin says all music can be classified into a mere six types of song. That’s part of the premise in his 2009 book, The World…
This is news, right from the CBC, not April Fool or The Onion: The Massachusetts House of Representatives has finally granted initial approval to a Bill naming the Fluffernutter the…
Emperor Stephen Harper and his double double. Interesting times indeed. 8 Conservative senators have decided that Emperor Stephen Harper has no clothes. The Emperor has whipped and intimidated his backbench,…
I was in a local grocery store not long ago, standing mid-aisle and peering at shelves of canned products, trying to find the ones I wanted for my cart. As…
Synecdoche. Metonymy. Not exactly words that trip lightly off the tongue. Unless, I suppose, you’re Harold Bloom. Those are two of the four fundamental tropes in literature, Bloom tells us.…
…they do the work because they want to re-produce the type of city they want to live- the type of city that is worth living in. … …not all entertainment…
Religious texts are full of admonitions about avoiding temptation. The Lord’s Prayer tells God to “lead us not into temptation.” Fat lot of good that does. Not only do we…
We need to think about two things for this Friday’s Occupy Movement reboot in the Worldwide #WaveOfAction: When thinking about pursuing social, political and economic equality, what is the list…
I got up this morning to a fog rolling into the city. It’s not from rain, or from temperature change or any other natural reason for a hazy day. It’s…
The map above might show the making of a serious tragedy for Western and especially Canadian culture. It indicates in colour which nations read the most. Yellow is the second…
Food and ecosystem knowledge which has been passed down for centuries is constantly threatened by the modern mechanical market. To stymie this change in food (and knowledge) consumption there is…
If the 1% has Russell Brand killed, we will see it in the corporate media as a drug OD relapse, or a freak accident. Why? He is dangerous because he…
Gosh, the corporate media sure can be sloppy. The heart-wrenching photo of a four-year-old Syrian refugee pictured alone crossing a desert into Jordan spread far and wide this weekend, but…
Vari-Colored Songs: A Tribute to Langston Hughes dropped earlier this month. My esteem for Langston Hughes, his insight and vision, and the too-often ignored human/cultural catalyst that was the Harlem…
At the risk of getting a whole lot of Feminist hateration on this- I’m just going to say this: People who are loving this video are people who already get…
Watched the 2013 film of The Great Gatsby last night. The first half was spectacular, grandiose and captivating, if somewhat over the top. Like Busby Berkeley meets The Fifth Element.…