Hey, photogs. Pick your best pix and print them, pronto

Before the advent of cellphones and their cameras, taking pictures was an entirely different experience. Today, everyone over the age of eight has a professional quality camera (disguised as a cellphone) in their pocket. But there was a time when there would often be just one person with a camera at a family gathering or…

Read ‘Ten Lost Years’ (if you can find it) and stop your belly-aching

It’s safe to say that these are not the best of times. For two years, we have been stalked by an invisible, shape-shifting enemy who has sickened and killed millions, bringing everyday life to a standstill. In Europe, a peaceful, fragile democracy has come under attack by a nuclear superpower ruled by a ruthless dictator,…

Wanna bet? It’s gone from underground to mainstream

When I was just a wee lad, I remember my dad occasionally buying a ticket for something called the Irish Sweepstakes. The ‘Sweeps’, as it was popularly called, was a fundraising effort for Irish hospitals, first established in the 1930s. The top prize was an otherworldly (for the time) $140,000. For some reason, tickets were…

How many shirts do you really need?

While leafing through a Costco flyer recently, I spotted a great deal on t-shirts: four Bench men’s v-necks for $15.99. Such a deal! Can’t have too many shirts, right? Turns out, maybe you can. When not reading the Costco flyer (which is a little thin on plot) I was reading a book called These Precious…

Maybe Kenney should let the lunatics take over the asylum

If I may borrow from an oft-repeated phrase from TV news, I’m going to begin this column with this: WARNING: some content may be disturbing. OK, here goes … I’m feeling kind of sorry for Jason Kenney.  If you’re shocked by that sentence, you may want to avert your gaze. There is more heresy to…

The Slap II: Attack of the Opinions

So, did you hear about the Oscars this year? Yep, absolutely unbelievable  … Mac Ruth won the Oscar for best sound! About time, right? But Mac Ruth’s golden moment has been entirely upstaged – along with the best picture winner (CODA, which I highly recommend) and the first deaf man to win an acting Oscar…

And the winners won’t be … the audience

Not too many years ago, a great swath of North America would have been tuned in to the Academy Awards. But not last year. And certainly not this year. The 2021 Academy Awards telecast was the lowest-rated in history, attracting just 10 million U.S. viewers, down 20 percent from the previous year. I have a…

Lessons from two years of COVID-19

We – and by we, I mean the entire world – have just marked two full years since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic. Time flies when you’re living in fear of the outdoors or your fellow humans.  What a long, strange, depressing trip it has been. And it’s not over yet, not officially anyway. The…

Why are the oil companies raising the price of gas? Because. They. Can.

Despite many half-hearted attempts to diversify the economy, we in Alberta just keep falling back into the brawny, oily arms of Big Oil.  We owe much of our wealth to the great good fortune of being located on a bed of liquid money. Without oil, we’re just Saskatchewan with mountains. Our love affair with oil…

Can some good come from a very bad situation? Let’s hope so.

So, all you Freedom Convoy supporters, how do you feel now? Seeing an independent, democratic country under savage attack by a monstrous enemy intent on destroying its independence should make your complaints about the ‘tyranny’ of mask mandates seem kind of pathetic now, right? I know your answer is probably no. But the occupation of…