Ocean Ranger 30
Thirty years ago the Ocean Ranger drill rig sank off the coast of Newfoundland. The entire crew, 84 men, drowned. During the early hours of February 15th, in a bad…
Francis Family Books
If you had the sad job of picking the topic of the last novel you would write, I don’t think you could choose better than Dick Francis did. Crossfire, co-written…
Drifting into Doom: Book
It was a dark and stormy night when I began reading Earl Pilgrim’s Drifting into Doom: Tragedy at Sea. Winter rain blew at the windows and tree branches hit the…
Tourist Board TV
Last night I watched the first episode of Arctic Air, CBC’s new series set in Yellowknife and surrounding lands. Tonight Republic of Doyle, set in St. John’s, returns for its…
Musée Acadien PEI
If you have a drop of Acadian blood in your veins or if you just enjoy the distinctive sound of an Acadian fiddle, a place for you to go is…
Attawapiskat ‘Solution’
In a Sun Media op-ed column this week, Jerry Agar suggests a solution for the people of Attawapiskat, the embattled Northern Ontario reserve: leave it. He points out that doing…
Notre Dame du Mont Carmel, Ile St-Jean
The church and graveyard at Mont Carmel on the west coast of PEI. Here, the island feels like it should be called by its old name, Ile St-Jean, when it…
Attawapiskat
Look at Google News today: “Send troops to help Attawapiskat.” For a month, we’ve read about the Band Chief declaring a state of emergency over the lack of housing and…
Me & Louis L’Amour
I stayed with my brother for a couple weeks once. I never thought of him as a reader, I was the “bookworm” in the family. But in his living room…
Prime Time
Last month, the new prime time tv programmes were rolled out. Many are good. They threw my life into chaos because I actually wanted to watch them. Person of Interest,…
Recorded Campaigning
This election I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. When the electioneering machine started cranking up, so did the recorded messages. You know, the taped messages that lazy…
St. Thomas Ford Plant
In Grade 11, at St. Thomas’ Arthur Voaden Secondary School, I was the only girl, and only Art student, in an English class with Shop boys. I had read most…
The Public Library
When I was a kid, I spent a lot of time in the library. It was in an old house on Main Street in Belmont, right near our house. I…
Finding a new Dick Francis
In need of a book for bedtime reading, looking through bookshelves – and finding a Dick Francis mystery you haven’t read. That is true happiness. I thought sadly that I’d…
Rwanda
Seventeen years ago, one hundred days of genocide ended in Rwanda. It was part of a long-standing conflict between Hutu and Tutsi, two groups who uneasily co-exist in the small…
United Empire Rebels
A couple weeks ago, I posted the family tree of the Mabees, my paternal grandmother’s people. It’s the family I knew least about, other than there are a lot of…
Oprah’s Last Show
Today is the final Oprah Winfrey Show on regular network tv. I’m very sorry to see her go. I can watch her on her own network, but I probably won’t.…
Go Paperless!
Utility companies, governments, banks – every agency that sends us bills or statements keeps telling us to make it easier for ourselves, save trees, go green, go paperless. Make it…
The Death of Soaps
In April, ABC announced the cancellation of the long-running soaps All My Children and One Life to Live. They will be replaced by a cooking show and a health and…
Hats off (or on) to the past few days!
It’s been quite a four days – perhaps best summarized with The Hat. Everybody’s had a go at this new game. So hats off to creativity. The Hat - the…
The Royal Wedding
I stayed up all night and watched the Royal wedding pre-pre-coverage, pre-coverage, main event, balcony scene and after coverage. I switched between CBC and CBC NewsNet, CNN, an entertainment news…
The Waitress Club
My very first job was waitressing. It was a street corner restaurant with booths and tables, bigger than a diner but not fancy. I had just arrived in a city…
Tilting at Windmills
Thinking about why so many oppose windmills for power generation, my mother and garbage disposal came into my head. Specifically, her reaction when the town brought in a recycling programme.…
The Oscars 2011
The dresses, that’s the Oscars for me. The beautiful gowns and the ones that make you wonder ‘what possessed her?’ So anything that provides both oohs and aahs of admiration…
The King and Us
Wallis Simpson makes me think that there may well be a God, and that He is on “our” side. I cannot imagine what the world would look like had King…
Losing Sgt. Ryan
Tuesday morning, I turned on the tv to watch my tape of Coronation Street. But on CBC, I saw the funeral procession for Sgt. Ryan Russell of the Toronto Police…
Sarah Palin and Targets
The first time I saw Sarah Palin on television, I was impressed. It was soon after she was announced as John McCain’s running mate for the 2008 US presidential election.…
Days of our Lives and Chex Mix
Having fallen off on my American soap viewing, I didn’t know about the new product placement on soaps until I saw the spoof of it on the Colbert Report. I…
Lifeboys: Reality tv before “Reality TV”
In the spring of 1992, I heard an interview with Pat O’Rourke, of Liverpool, on CBC Radio’s As it Happens. It was about Lifeboys, a television show that he was…
Pipelines through Paradise
This past October, there was a documentary by Karin Wells on CBC Radio’s Sunday Edition about a RAVE (Rapid Assessment Visual Expedition) to document and showcase the coastal British Columbia…
People without sense to come in out of the rain
Last week in our community paper, the St. Thomas/Elgin Weekly News, there was an article about a good and caring citizen and chiropractor Dr. Denise Colledge. For the second year,…
Remembering
Every Remembrance Day, I am remembering my father. George Anger was a WWII veteran. In December of 1942 he went overseas and he returned home in October 1945. He was…
Click Fatigue
Every day I gave .6 bowl of kibble to shelter animals and 10 pieces of kibble to other shelter dogs and 10 pieces to cats. I had 2 foster dogs…
Secretariat: The Movie (2010)
The thing that annoyed me most about the movie Secretariat was that the horses playing him were not in the credits. In particular, the one who played him in close-ups…
Panhandling: Community or transaction?
This summer, I was driving and listening to, I think, Tapestry on CBC Radio. A man affiliated with a Cathedral somewhere was talking about panhandling near the church. His thesis…