Category Family
The Hippopotamus Song
I take requests. It’s a hangover from my days as a radio disc jockey. I always enjoyed that interaction with a listener on the telephone who wanted to suggest a song, especially when doing an overnight shift. At night there aren’t as many listeners as in the daytime; you can get to know your regular […]
My Mother’s Pet Peeve
My mother reads the obituaries in the newspaper each morning. She’s 86, and I suspect she is checking to make sure she isn’t listed. Her official reason is that as an animal lover she wants to see if anyone has left money to the Humane Society, but I know it is more just to see […]
Lost Boys
There has been a lot of media coverage in my area about John Maguire, the young Canadian killed in action in Syria fighting for the Islamic State. There has been much written about his youth, asking how someone could grow up to renounce Canadian values and embrace such an extremist form of Islam. When I […]
New Year’s Eve
The world parties tonight, and for good reason: we have survived 2014, and there is the hope things will improve for 2015. Given our track record that may not be a big hope, but we have to have something to hold on to. So tonight we party, as we try to forget missing airliners, floods […]
Education Museum I
Sometimes it is the smaller, less advertised museums that can be the most fun. In 2009, when I first visited Ypres, Belgium, I went to the In Flanders Fields Museum (and returned there this year). Included with the admission fee for that museum was admission to a couple of other smaller institutions in Ypres. I […]
Messiah
For some reason a piece of what should rightly be considered Easter music has become an annual Christmas tradition around the world. For many people the season would not seem right without taking in a performance of Handel’s Messiah. I think we have four recordings of G.F. Handel’s most famous oratorio on compact disc. We […]
The Christmas Pageant
It was the three-year-olds on stage that impressed me. Not with their cuteness, though that seemed to be what most adults were focusing on. It was their poise. I didn’t pay much attention to the song, “Away in a Manger,” I think. They weren’t singing; that was the older children’s job (further back on the […]
Mystery of the Missing Pigs
Every family has certain traditions that have developed over the years. Frequently they are small, sometimes silly, things that don’t mean much but are fun to have. In our family one of those rituals involves having your picture taken with the pigs in Lippstadt, Germany, my wife’s ancestral home. The pigs in question are public […]
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
In shopping malls across North American the excitement has almost peaked: Santa Claus is coming! Indeed, many communities celebrate with a Santa Claus parade, held now about three weeks earlier than when I was a child. With no young children in the household I think I will find something else to do that doesn’t involve […]
Let It Snow?
The snow is falling as I write this on Sunday night. I don’t think it is going to stay on the ground this time, but I know it is only a matter of days and winter white will be here to stay; or at least stay until sometime in March. Several times a year, usually […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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