The Beatles: Songs and Lives
This week I finished re-reading The Beatles: The Biography by Bob Spitz, the best biography I’ve read of the group that defined music, culture, and style in the Sixties: the…
Culture
Fighting Racism in Kenney’s Alberta
Sometimes it pays to sit through a 53 minute 42 second Kenney press conference because something unexpected will happen at the very end. In this case it happened at the…
Jason Kenney’s Thoughts on Residential Schools
The only reason I’m going to mention the Sky Palace scandal in the same post as the deaths of 215 Indigenous children at a former residential school in Kamloops BC…
Musings on Art and Taste
Many years ago, I had a lengthy correspondence with a friend in another part of Canada about what constitutes art. His basic argument was that art was not neutral or…
It Must Be Nice, Alberta
It must be nice to live in a bubble where Covid-19 is a hoax created by those who want to infringe your Charter right to swill beer in a pub…
Why Master Sun Matters Today
Master Sun was a wise man. So wise that his famous treatise, The Art of War (aka The Art of Warfare), has been read, written about, critiqued, and discussed for…
The Bigfoot Blog
“Here’s a Hollywood production that depicts an oil company … as wanting to murder children to oppose environmental progress…The NDP, that’s who they’re defending…They’ve always been against our largest industry.”…
The Godzilla Soundtracks
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDeU42u2s2Y Akira Ifukube. If you’re not an aficionado of Japanese film or a follower of Japanese symphonic music, his name won’t be familiar. But for millions of kaiju fans around…
Medieval Society – Then and Now
“You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.”- John Lennon Great short video, linked below, but the view of medieval peasant life is too one-sided – as is…
Musings of a B-Film Junkie
I put a DVD of the 1939 film, The Gorilla, into the player and sat back to watch. Bela Lugosi (above, centre) starred beside the Ritz Brothers (trio above), a…
Still Watching the Three Stooges
There’s a bittersweet pleasure in watching the Three Stooges these days, knowing about them, their careers, their lives. What seems like zany comedy on screen was, like so many celebrity…
Chris Champion and the Curriculum Review
Mr Kenney handpicked Mr Champion, a historian, as a subject area expert to provide recommendations for the Kenney government’s revamp of the social studies curriculum for kindergarten to grade 4…
Bring Back the Salons
Today if someone mentions a “salon” you probably think about a haircut or manicure. But in the 18th century, prior to the French Revolution, salons were the focus of civil…
It’s *NOT* Junk Mail
I recognize that we all like to apply labels to categorize things, as shorthand in communication and in conversation, and to identify common views and beliefs. I do it myself;…
Manners? Civility? What happened to them?
In his book, Walden, in fact in the very first chapter, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.” I would offer that today — at least…
Art Can Help us Understand the Climate Crisis
The world of art may one way to help people understand issues around the climate crisis. The impacts of climate change are diverse and interconnected, which makes it difficult to…
On Rescuing Our Language and Communication Skills From the Dustbin of History – And Our Standards of Basic Courtesy and Civility Along With Them
Texting, instant messaging, online chat, the mainstream media, and the general direction of our modern society and “culture”, are destroying the people’s capacity to communicate, to think, to feel, and…
Latin America, Te Amo – and – The Expat Exodus Continues
Being at home – et, bien etre I reflect now, again, as I have for 30 years, since my first trip to Mexico and Latin America, that I feel far…
Moving To Mexico
Let`s deal with the biggest prejudice or stereotype right away. Most people in the US and Canada will say, “Why would anyone want to move to Mexico?! Isn’t it dangerous?”…