Category Family
The Parable of the Two Daughters – I
I came across a modern parable in my newspaper and thought you might be interested in it also. You know what a parable is, right? In the Bible you know that when he was teaching his disciples Jesus often spoke in parables, telling a story that makes a moral point. Here is a paraphrase of […]
The Good Lie
When I first heard of The Good Lie, at its Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) premiere last September, I knew it was a film I wanted to see. That was reinforced after viewing the trailer and seeing an interview with the stars that took place at TIFF. Brilliant move to make a film about […]
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 […]
random thoughts from lorne 
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