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 …
Margaret Atwood: nice essay, shame you screwed up the ending
Lots of people (just today, for some reason) are pointing me to Margaret Atwood’s essay in the Globe & Mail last week attacking Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s comment on arts funding. Naturally the people pointing it out see as a masterful bit of skewering of the Prime Minister. I think she hurt her cause among …
Car faces
Every once in a while my seven-year-old daughter will watch a car go by as we’re driving and comment, “That car looks angry,” or “That car looks sad.” It’s something we’ve all thought at some point or other (or at least I have) regardless of age: the fronts of cars look just enough like faces …
What I Just Read: Starclimber
I loved Kenneth Oppel’s previous books in this series, Airborn and Skybreaker. And I enjoyed this one–but not as much. Don’t get me wrong, it was great to catch up with Matt and Kate. But I just couldn’t quite suspend my disbelief at the notion of the successful launch of a space elevator cable using …
I’m still in the middle!
I haven’t taken one of these politica compass tests for a while, so I thought I’d take a stab at this one and see if I’m still right in the middle of the political spectrum. You are a Social Moderate(55% permissive)and an… Economic Moderate(50% permissive)You are best described as a: Centrist Link: The Politics Test …
Things I Found in my Mother-in-Law’s House: Music
Notes for this week’s CBC radio segment of Things I Found in My Mother-in-Law’s House: ****Regina has a long history as a musical city, with musical clubs, choirs, bands and, of course, the Regina Symphony Orchestra getting started within a few years of the city’s founding. Ed Willett’s grandparents-in-law, Nancy and Sam Goodfellow, were an …
A taste for cooked meat
It’s not very often you come across new science related to the history of cooking meat, possibly because it’s such a widespread human activity–especially in the summer–that everyone takes it for granted. Also, we’ve been doing it a very long time. As I wrote in a column four years ago: “Evidence…suggests our hominid ancestors were …

