A few years ago in Weyburn I had a role in a play called “Duet for Two Hands.” It was a grim little gothic tale of a drunken Scottish surgeon (that would be me) who had sewed the hands of a convicted murderer onto the wrists of a concert pianist who had lost his own …
Category: Blog
Autumn
Wednesday marks the beginning of autumn, and the official beginning of that time of year when the air turns nippy, you have to scrape frost off your car in the morning, the leaves change color and drop from the trees, and the moon seems bigger and brighter than usual. Wednesday is considered the beginning of …
Digging for the Spanish Flu
In late 1917 or 1918, a new strain of influenza appeared in what is now Ft. Riley, Kansas. There’s nothing unusual about that: new strains of influenza appear all the time. At first, this one seemed no worse than any other. But something changed. As this flu spread to the east, it became seven …
Art restoration
A few years ago I had the immense pleasure of visiting the Louvre, tempered only by the immense annoyance that the choir I was touring with had to be somewhere else that afternoon, leaving us with a grand total of 45 minutes to spend in the world’s most famous art museum. Among the few paintings …
Aquarius
We’ve heard a lot recently about the Russian space station Mir and the new International Space Station. But most people don’t know about a third station designed to allow humans to live and work in a hostile environment–not space, but the sea. It’s called Aquarius, and recently a team of six “aquanauts” completed an eight-day …
Casting bronze
Recently, the MacKenzie Art Gallery has been offering “Twilight Tours” conducted by local artists. We visited Vic Cicansky’s studio, Joe Fafard’s foundry in Pense, and even toured back lanes with Wilf Perrault. Of all the tours, I found the one to Fafard’s foundry most fascinating, because it shed some light on one of the oldest …
The science of the midway
I realized early on that I was never going to have as much fun at the midway as some people do. I was seven years old, and the county fair had come to Tulia, Texas. The tiny midway only had a half-dozen rides, but I rode them all. Then, on the way home, I threw …
Fruit
just came back from a vacation that included a brief stay in the Okanagan. Among the treasures from that visit were two containers of delicious fresh apricots and cherries, courtesy of a friend who owns an orchard near Oliver. The amount of fruit produced by the trees of the Okanagan Valley alone is staggering: everywhere …
Con-Version XV
I just returned from a conference where the topics discussed ranged from the discovery of feathered dinosaurs to the Mars Sojourner mission to artificial intelligence. Presenters included Dr. Philip Currie of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, Bridget Landry of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a micropaleontologist from the University of Saskatchewan, a medical doctor, a linguist and …
Forest fires
As a kid, I read lots of stories in the “Bambi” genre, tales of young creatures growing up in the forest. All those books seemed to feature a forest fire at some point, which terrified both their animal heroes and me. With people living in and exploiting forests more and more, forest fires have begun …
The science of summer
Ah, the lazy, hazy days of summer. Time to kick back, relax, and ponder the big questions, the ones humans have asked themselves from time immemorial. Questions such as… What causes sunburn and tanning? Red skin is inflamed skin, and inflammation is the body’s effort to speed the healing of damaged tissue by rushing …
My latest live walk and vlog
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