Nature calls
I heard this week about a cottager who spends 90 minutes every day commuting to downtown Toronto from Markham. And another 90 minutes getting home. Wow. We have traffic. Sometimes a moose takes its time crossing the road. Ok, I admit it makes me feel smug. And very grateful. You see, I was once a [...]
Maybe the recently departed Margaret Thatcher was right after all when she said there was no such thing as society. Looking at the water that still covers Anson Street in Minden, two weeks after the Gull flooded, one has to wonder. I wondered it myself when I was there shortly after it happened. Where were [...]
With the riparian calamities about us and so many in the community coming to the assistance of friends and neighbours, our local commemoration of National Volunteer Week has been understandably muted; everyone’s been too busy volunteering. In some places that might have meant short shrift for volunteers, but here we’re pretty good at recognizing generosity [...]
Not being a subscriber to the subsidy fest of toxic reality shows that passes for satellite television, it was only last week that I first heard the new leader of the federal Liberals, Justin Trudeau, speak. I watched his closing address of the campaign, and I have to say the pundits are absolutely right on [...]
You couldn’t have missed the storm of protest this week over the Royal Bank’s outsourcing fiasco. The bank is planning to replace about four dozen IT employees with foreign workers who are now here being trained by their soon-to-be-unemployed Canadian counterparts. More precisely, the Bank is contracting out services to a foreign company which will [...]
Who would have thought a box of crackers could be a pack of lies? That’s what I was thinking as I read the nutritional information on a recently-purchased supermarket item. Like many people, I look for products that compensate (at least psychologically) for the meat and cheese and ice cream without which life would not [...]
Since the earliest societies, political leaders have tried to control public discourse. The Romans were constantly on the lookout for signs of rebellion and would demand the renunciation of other faiths on penalty of death; the Inquisition (or inquisitions — there were several) tried, unsuccessfully, to maintain obedience by restricting public knowledge and punishing those [...]
That beautiful sound outside — the one you can hear clearly in the evenings if you stick your head outside and listen carefully — is silence. In just a few weeks, theHighlandswill again buzz with activity. Air, land and water will come back to life with creatures from the smallest insect to the largest SUV. [...]
My colleagues at The Highlander have been harassing me for some time to get a new computer. Mine is so old that I’m sure it’s worth more as a museum piece than a vital work tool. The S-key broke a long time ago, so when I don’t have my plug-in keyboard I have to go [...]
If you’re not careful, the first week of March can feel like the halfway point of an intercontinental flight: cramped, monotonous, with still eight hours to go before you can get out. It really doesn’t help that this is also the time of year we must contemplate the inevitable – the annual tribute, otherwise known [...]
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