Mr. McLuhan, I think I finally know what you were doing!
It’s Sunday, and when I sat down to write, I was ready to declare it my odds and ends blog day. In Ye Olde Presse Daze (when I was getting paid to columnize the known world), the common practice was to...
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"One a penny, two a penny....hot cross buns"
My wife was not happy.“I was looking forward to a hot cross bun!” she sighed Thursday night as we left Sobeys. “They had all kinds at the Superstore earlier this week.”Then she sighed again.I don’t...
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A canoe passes
I'm trying to avoid metaphors. It isn't easy.Drying the breakfast dishes, I stand in front of a kitchen window wild with the birds, buds, and promise of an April marsh morning. This should bring, as...
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Will Humans Stand Alone On Starship Earth?
Do you remember that chilling scene in the movie The Day After Tomorrow when wave upon wave of frenzied seabirds fled inland? It was the surest sign something was wrong, an omen that a tidal wave of...
View ArticleThat damn UFO and me
Once, when I was a young journalist working nights for The Halifax Chronicle-Herald, I wrote a story. It was a mere paragraph about a search going on in southern Nova Scotia for what everyone thought...
View ArticleThat damn UFO and me, Part 2
Last Thursday, when Bruce Wark’s column “Otherwordly Media Coverage” came out in The Coast, one of my former high school journalism students quickly shot me a Facebook message. A number of others soon...
View ArticleEcology: The Parent of Economy
I once heard it said that humans are a species of magnificent dreams but horrifying realities. The more time I spend in this world, the more I am forced to agree.Our greed, pride, jealousy, laziness,...
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Wildlife Notebook #1
Stories and pictures from The Hope For Wildlife Society and my thoughts on outdoor issuesThis Season of Newborns BeginsSpring is a big, remarkable time of year at Hope for Wildlife. Once the floodgates...
View ArticleWill Handling Swine Flu And Government Agencies Prove Too Much For GPs?
Family doctors, get ready. When the blame for the Canadian Swine Flu fiasco stops rolling around, looking for a comfortable place to call home, I think it’s going to land smack in your laps. Please,...
View ArticleGoing Down With The Ship
I was buying some jugs of drinking water at a supermarket, just in case. So were quite a few other people. Hurricane Danielle had just missed us, but hurricane Earl wasn’t going to, and right on its...
View ArticleWhen History Lies
“History doesn’t lie!” a friend said to me the other day in a futile attempt to win an argument. He was wrong, of course. History is a very strange thing that is frequently mistaken for the truth. Even...
View ArticleDefamation Primer
Recently I've been taking journalism classes at The University of Kings College. Lovely and quaint old place, it is, but this week I received a bit of a shock. Students in my online class were given...
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The Best Journalism Movies
There is a great deal of difference between movies about journalism and ones with journalism in them. Sometimes the purpose of a motion picture is to show us our culture and therefore ourselves through...
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The Jervis Bay Goes Down
This poem isn't really well written but it was very popular in Atlantic Canada during and immediately after the Second World War. The Jervis Bay was an old steamer fitted with some light deck guns...
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