Edward Willett

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Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law’s House: Kid Stuff

Notes for this week's CBC column...***If you have children, you know how child-related stuff tends to pile up. And since kids grow up so fast, some of it is barely used before they’re too big for it and it gets put away somewhere, never to see the light of day again......unless your son-in-law decides to turn the stuff he found in his mother-in-law’s house into a series on the radio, like Ed Willett.This week Ed has dug into some of the children’s stuff he’s found in his old house, and I joined him there this morning to take a look.Ed, does your mother-in-law, Dr. Alice Goodfellow, come from a big family?...

Posted by Edward Willett at 19:47, September 30th, 2008 under Blog | 1 Comment »

Hear one of my "Things I Found in My Mother-in-Law’s House" interviews online

It's the one about souvenirs, and I just discovered The Afternoon Edition has put it online here.Enjoy!

Posted by Edward Willett at 6:03, September 25th, 2008 under Blog | Comment now »

Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law’s House: Souvenirs

Notes for this week's CBC radio segment of Things I Found in My Mother-in-Law's House.UPDATE: Listen to the actual interview!****Souvenirs seem to have some strange mesmeric power over travelers. You visit a place with beautiful scenery, a long and fascinating history, great restaurants and a vibrant night life, and somehow you decide the best way to remember it is to buy a dish towel.But hang on to those souvenirs long enough, and they become interesting in their own right.So, Ed, that’s a very odd collection of objects you’ve spread out on the table here. Is that really a cream pitcher in the shape of Winston Churchill’s head?...

Posted by Edward Willett at 21:39, September 16th, 2008 under Blog | Comment now »

Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law’s House: The Kitchen

Here are this week's notes for the "Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law's House" segment that will be on between 4:30 and 5 p.m. today on CBC Saskatchewan's Afternoon Edition. In the radio version, the segment about the aluminum coffee pot got left out, so that's your special blog bonus for the week! (And again, I hope to add photos soon.)***Ed Willett has been exploring the recesses of his mother-in-law’s house, which has been in the same family for almost 70 years, in a kind of archaeological expedition into every-day life of the early to mid-20th century. Last week Ed took me down into the basement, but this week we’re staying on the main floor ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 18:39, September 10th, 2008 under Blog | 1 Comment »

"Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law’s House…"

...which I've long talked about turning into a book (and maybe a CD, and a stage show, and...) finally became a reality in one form today: I've started a new limited column series for CBC Saskatchewan's Afternoon Edition, hosted by Colin Grewar, with that as its title.So here's today's entry, more or less (these scripts are guidelines, not read, so what we actually say on the air differs; in other words, this is NOT a transcript). I'd still like to turn this into a book. (Any publishers reading this, that's your cue to give me a call...)***Two years ago, Ed Willett moved into a house in Regina’s Crescents that belonged to his wife’s parents, ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 4:26, September 4th, 2008 under Blog | Comment now »

Food on the Web

This week's CBC Web column (the last of the series)...***“What’s for dinner?” is a question whose answer can inspire joy, dread, or simply ennui. We all have our favorite recipes, and a few that are far from our favorites. But we get tired of even our favorite things if we get them night after night. And we get tired of our least-favorite things even faster.What to do? Why, turn to the Internet, of course.Back when home computers were first being talked about, it was always said you could keep your recipes on them. Now we’ve come full circle with recipes on the World Wide Web...and then some. After all, with a ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 17:30, February 22nd, 2008 under Blog | Comment now »

The past through the Web

This week's (and the second-last--it's wrapping up at the end of this month) CBC Web column...***"The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there,” author L.P. Hartley famously wrote to begin his 1953 novel The Go-Between. And like most foreign countries, while we might not want to live there, we often enjoy visiting it.And where better to visit it than on the World Wide Web, which, I've decided for the sake of a metaphor, is rapidly becoming the world’s attic. It’s the place where you put old things you don’t quite know what to do with but aren’t willing to get rid of, with the big difference that, unlike your attic, the ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 20:14, February 8th, 2008 under Blog | Comment now »

Blogging!

Today's Web column for CBC's Afternoon Edition...***Over the past few years the growing use of computers and the Internet has contributed a lot of weird new words to our language. People talk about ROM and RAM and “megs of memory,” Googling and websurfing and more. But one of the weirdest words of all is blog, which sounds more like something you have to clean up—“Dear, the dog left a big blog on the sidewalk, can you take care of it?”—than anything to do with computers.But, in fact, blogging is big—and you can try it yourself for free.A blog is simply a series of posts that are displayed on a web page ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 5:49, January 11th, 2008 under Blog | 1 Comment »

Book sites

Here's this week's CBC Web column...***Books make great Christmas presents...at least, the right book does. But with so many books out there, how do you find the good ones?Well, the World Wide Web is a good place to start. There are hundreds of good book sites on the Web. In fact, there are scads of them. Mountains of them. Cascades of them...(to paraphrase Cogsworth from Beauty and the Beast talking about the Beast’s library).A good place to start is BookSpot, which is, in its own words, “a free resource center that simplifies the search for the best book-related content on the Web. Featured sites are hand-selected by BookSpot.com editors and organized ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 3:06, December 7th, 2007 under Blog | Comment now »

Maps on the Web

This week's CBC Web column...Download an audio version.***Jokes about how hard it is to fold a highway map use to be a staple of slice-of-life comedians. Well, highway maps are probably just as hard to fold as they ever were—but you don’t have to fold them, or even use them, if you don’t want to.These days, more and more people are finding their maps on the World Wide Web. Whether you’re planning a trip or just want to find out where something you’ve heard about on the news occurred, the many map sites on the Web can provide directions, sometimes accompanied by aerial photographs.Now, I’m a guy, and aside ...

Posted by Edward Willett at 16:50, August 3rd, 2007 under Blog | 2 Comments »