23rd
February
2008
At what point does a simple book get to be “too long”? We offer up War And Peace as the sort of thing one shouldn’t plan on reading tomorrow afternoon before supper (with good reason) and then promptly put it aside and choose something easier, like Readers Digest or the Sun (from any city). I’m part of the way through another one.
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posted in history |
17th
February
2008
It’s not who you know but rather what you know. In a nutshell, the story of my life and relative success. Give me a round of trivia and I’ll forego a social occasion any time, hands down. Testing is now believed to increase retention, so I will continue to rise every day to a quick round of online trivia. And I am not alone.
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posted in history, media |
15th
February
2008
Perhaps if the lost pilot had been found, the story wouldn’t have even made much more than the back pages of the local newspaper. Instead, when Steve Fossett and his airplane didn’t arrive at the destination, the story “took wings”. After all, here was an experienced navigator with boats and planes; if there’d been a locomotive handy, he’d have driven it too. He’d gone around the world non-stop. This time, the plane didn’t arrive at the airstrip.
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posted in history |
14th
February
2008
While listening to sons #1 and #2 explaining how they had tricked a naive classmate with a fake Valentine note (the usual drill; pretending it was from a secret admirer and then busily snickering over the unreasonable hope level they’d created), I remembered how it was in “the good old days”. Best days of my youth, etc.
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posted in history |
1st
January
2008
A new year, where I will be a captive audience for a year-long festival of navel-gazing. The city is four hundred years old; renovations are welcome. Seriously though, we’re off on a spending spree that will be one for the history books. Unlike the rest of the known world, where people have managed to keep house for thousands of years, the New World has an abbreviated memory. Only those who sailed in with canvas sails can claim to have done anything memorable, and this city holds the record for constant settlement by people from a neighbouring continent (deliberate poke at the revisionists of a place near Jamesville, or James City or James Town, or something similar… Wiki left me confused as to the real story).
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posted in history |
31st
December
2007
Too bad I don’t have an x-sided die from a game box, where I could arbitrarily assign digits to concepts and thus decide how to handle this end of year posting. Should I be reflective, or episodic, or jocular, or “what”?
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posted in history |
5th
December
2007
Well produced television programs take on a life of their own. The syndicated world transcends the boundaries of politics and language, and if you were to suddenly find yourself in a different city, a world away, the set in your hotel room just might offer up a slice of your earlier life. After all, not being renewed isn’t the end of the road for certain programs. There’s a whole world out there, and they just might be watching.
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posted in history |
13th
October
2007
In spite of my birth in the city, in spite of my education at the university, I didn’t get called to supper. There, now you know that I’m feeling snubbed. No apology is necessary; I couldn’t accept one after the fact. You see, they served pork and apple pies. For a menu like that, I would have tolerated the uppity guest list.
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posted in history |
2nd
October
2007
Ite, missa est. Procedamus in pace. Two rites, two dismissals. I’m going to add a third here. The War is ended. Go in peace. Of course, we don’t, and we didn’t, but Ken Burns has given us another introspective view into our collective history. Fifteen hours of documentary that has been paraphrased by one of the principals. “We went out as kids and we came back changed.”
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posted in history, media |
4th
September
2007
I’m not well travelled. As I tell my kids, it’s a big world out there, and I haven’t seen much of it. Unless, of course, we count knowledge gained from a lifetime of reading maps. It started early; the timetables that CNR provided for passengers had maps. Big dots for each town that had a station, and for someone that had only seen what lay along the road to Charlottetown, they were all about the same size. Seen one, seen them all.
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posted in history, technology |
