Tag: web column

Food on the Web

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 22, 2008
7 mins to read
Leave comment

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 …

The past through the Web

By Edward Willett in Blog
February 8, 2008
7 mins to read
Leave comment

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 …

Theatre on the Web

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 28, 2008
5 mins to read
Leave comment

Last week’s CBC Web column… *** The gala opening of the new Persephone Theatre in Saskatoon last week had Saskatchewan people thinking about live theatre. Of course, I think about live theatre all the time, since I’m often involved in one production or another as an actor or director, so this week I compiled a …

Blogging!

By Edward Willett in Blog
January 11, 2008
7 mins to read
1 comments

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 …

Book sites

By Edward Willett in Blog
December 7, 2007
6 mins to read
Leave comment

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 …

Witches and vampires and ghosts, oh, my!

By Edward Willett in Blog
October 27, 2007
8 mins to read
Leave comment

This week’s CBC Web column… Download the audio version. ***** Orange leaf bags with grinning jack-o’-lantern faces cover the lawns. The drugstore shelves are groaning under the weight of grinning skulls, leering witches, and dancing robot mummies, and you can hardly buy groceries without getting a dangling plastic bat caught in your hair. That must …

Gadget blogs

By Edward Willett in Blog
October 11, 2007
6 mins to read
Leave comment

Today’s CBC web column… I love gadgets. I wrote my last novel on a gadget, my Pocket PC cell phone, using a fold-out wireless keyboard. The only thing that keeps me from drowning in gadgets is that I can’t afford them all. But I can do the next best thing, and read about them on …

Weather on the Web

By Edward Willett in Blog
September 28, 2007
6 mins to read
Leave comment

Here’s this week’s CBC Web column… Audio version here. ***** The weather is perennially fascinating. We check the forecast first thing in the morning. We check the weather in cities we might be visiting on business or vacation. And northerners heading south for a bit of sun pay particular attention to the hurricane forecasts. Once …

Surfer, know thyself

By Edward Willett in Blog
September 14, 2007
6 mins to read
Leave comment

This week’s CBC web column… Download an audio version. **** The forecourt of the ancient Greek temple of Apollo at Delphi bore the inscription “Know thyself.” These days, we find out about ourselves the same way we find out about everything else: we go on the Internet. For example, in recent weeks I’ve learned where …

Maps on the Web

By Edward Willett in Blog
August 3, 2007
8 mins to read
2 comments

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 …

World-wide wikis

By Edward Willett in Blog
July 19, 2007
7 mins to read
Leave comment

Today’s CBC Web column… ******* Once upon a time, a computer programmer named Ward Cunningham visited Honolulu, where a Honolulu International Airport counter employee told him to take the a particular shuttle bus line between terminals, nicknamed the “WikiWiki” line: wiki is a Hawaiian-language word for “fast.” I don’t know whether Cunningham took the WikiWiki …

Dragons and turkeys and midgets, oh my!

By Edward Willett in Blog
July 5, 2007
9 mins to read
2 comments

This week’s CBC Web column… ******* Did you hear about the 42 members of the Cambodian Midget Fighting League mauled in a match against an African lion? How about the mummified fairy discovered in Derbyshire? Or, closer to home, did you know the world’s last surviving scientist specializing in the study of dragons lives in …