Category Society

Santa Claus is Not Coming

When I was looking for something Advent themed for Sunday’s post,  I came across this piece written by my son in 2016. I thought it would be nice to share it with you and give another perspective on Sunday’s post. You can find his original here.   Santa Claus won’t be visiting our house this […]

The Santa Effect

I have posted this before, the first time more than five years ago. I wasn’t planning on revisiting it this year, but yesterday I was reminded that my son wrote a sequel. I thought it would be nice to share that, and will do so tomorrow, but it helps if you read the  original post […]

The Christmas Market

For the first time ever, Ottawa has an outdoor Christmas market, modeled after the ones in Europe, which are a huge tourist attraction. I was excited when the market was announced. Then I realized that this is a modest first year for the market. There are only about 20 vendors. I guess that makes sense […]

Emergency Preparedness

The boy cried wolf. Everyone got excited. Then there was no wolf. Many people know that fable and the message it brings. And you can immediately see how it applies to the present-day climate change debate. But there’s more to it than that. I saw a news headline a couple of weeks back that 11,000 […]

Only In Canada

The Calgary Flames hockey team fired their coach last week. Well, he resigned before they could fire him over an alleged racial slur made a decade ago. Bill Peters might have been fired anyway, given the team’s poor performance of late, but the situation has cast the spotlight once again on the Canadian double standard. […]

The Countdown Begins

Across the world today Christians are observing the first Sunday of Advent. It is a time of celebration leading to the biggest birthday party of the year. When I was a child we didn’t really observe Advent, it wasn’t part of our church tradition. The exception was the advent calendar we children received on December […]

Safety and Privacy

I got an email from my credit card company telling me the lettuce I purchased may be affected with E. coli and I can return it for a full refund. I’m thankful not to have become sick. I am concerned that these sort of warnings seem to be increasing and what that says about our […]

Welcome To Black Friday

I seem to have been inundated by Black Friday ads for the entire month. Now that the day is upon us, I have no urge to spend. Oh, I did see an eight-terrabyte portable hard drive advertised online at a very nice price. I don’t have 8T of data though that I want to save, […]

Upon Reflection…

  Sometimes, rather than jumping into the fray, I like to let things percolate. Which makes me late with my thoughts on the firing of TV commentator Don Cherry, two weeks ago today.. To Canadians Cherry is an icon, or a buffoon, someone who has always stirred passions. A former National Hockey League player and […]

The Never-Ending War

I was looking back through the archives for a “Flashback Friday” post yesterday, and came across this one from September 2014 that I though was worth sharing again. A century later, it haunts them still. The last Canadian veteran of the First World War died in 2010, and I would imagine that is pretty much […]