Category Entertainment

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Just a reminder before we start today’s post, I’m doing a reader survey. It’s short and no personal information is required – it’s not a marketing gimmick. If you haven’t taken it yet click here. I’m collecting responses until September 10. I’m sure it works better on stage. And probably most of the millions of […]

Bluesfest 2016 IV – The Monkees

What do you do when the singer on half your hit records dies? When your guitarist apparently would rather be dead than join you on stage? Or maybe not. After all, the show must go on. The pre-fab four are now the pre-fab two but, still calling themselves The Monkees‎, Micky Dolenz and Peter Tork […]

Bluesfest 2016 III – John Fogarty

I am not a wine expert, so what I am going to say next may not be true. But I have been told that some wines don’t age as well as others. I don’t remember if it is due to the deterioration of the cork, or sheer age, but sometimes a fine wine will become […]

Bluesfest 2016 II – The Lumineers

It was one of those songs, an ear worm that gets into your head and won’t leave. A huge hit, the sort of thing every new band dreams of and prays for. There is more to The Lumineers than “Ho‎ Hey,” from their 2012 debut album, as they proved during a very damp set this […]

Bluesfest 2016 – I

Music can strike to the heart of my being, stirring up an emotional reaction unlike anything else. Especially live music. This summer, for the first time in more than a decade, I didn’t purchase a full festival pass for the RBC Ottawa Bluesfest that started last week and runs until the 17th. I looked at […]

Best Laid Plans

The Ottawa Jazz Festival ended last night. If you were planning on attending and hadn’t noted the dates you probably aren’t all that thrilled with me for bringing that up. My apologies…but really, it is up to you to keep on track of these things. I am neither your mother nor your secretary. I mention […]

Sex, Death and Bowling

I was seduced by the title. Not the sex and death aspects but the bowling. I’d never heard of the film before I discovered it while browsing through Netflix. The premise seemed reasonable enough: a family dealing with an impending, premature, death with a bowling tournament as the backdrop. Life goes on after all. My […]

Christian Mingle

They make movies with the flimsiest of premises these days. There are films based on books, on comics (excuse me, I mean graphic novels), on true stories, on news events, and on video games. So I guess a film based on a dating website was inevitable. If I had seen Christian Mingle in the theatre […]

The Debate

It must be a week since I last wrote about Donald Trump, who is so close to sewing up the Republican Party nomination for the US presidency that he can almost taste it. Rather than write something new, I thought it fitting to re-post this piece from last August, the first time “The Donald” graced […]

Look Who’s Back

For our family, Friday nights are frequently a time to de-stress at the end of the work week. We eat dinner together then curl up in front of the television to watch a movie together. That can sometimes add to the stress as we try to decide what to watch (usually on Netflix). Three people […]