I try to listen carefully to what is written or said. I try to pause and think about what wasn’t written or spoken. During the past NHL play-off rounds, I was caught up in the excitement of critical games and specific shifts on the ice. I heard the announcer call the play that led to…

I was listening to a radio program that started with a mystery and travelled down a fascinating Sherlockian rabbit hole. Come on in, and let’s journey together. I couldn’t retain the details sufficiently, so I Googled the keywords and found the original eight-page scientific abstract. Off we go. Some researchers in the USA were banding…

I watched a YouTube video the other day about a draft dodger I knew. It is a story worth telling and reading about. I’ll call him Claude. This young fellow was struggling to make a living. He had been conscripted into the military and sent to a foreign land to fight for the cause. His…

I was reading an article about cars, or rather automobiles, in the very early days in Canada. What a hoot. The rhetoric I hear today is still the same. Let’s take a walk or, rather, a ride down memory lane. Alberta had its first automobile in 1901. The province joined Confederation just four years later….

I don’t want to get my hopes up too much as I realize hope is not certain. But it is hope, and I can use some of that. After less than a year of the pandemic, I thought it would last a long time, measured in the year(s) looking through a global lens. I wanted…

I committed myself to be engaged in life, not just busy. That is one of my bumper stickers for my retirement. I try to find a balance that works for me. One way I can tell the difference is by what I share with others. Usually, when I’m engaged, I want to talk with others…

I was helping out a neighbour get to his medical appointment recently. While sitting in the car at the clinic, I caught some of the words of a song on the radio. It was about a love affair and a breakup. The phrase that caught my interest was the young gentleman wanting to delete his…

I have been procrastinating. I had time on my hands, so I dug out four framed prints of a Montreal artist that belonged to my parents, who have been gone but not forgotten for a few years now. They were sketches of well-known landmarks in my hometown of Montreal. I didn’t have much of an…

I was at the front desk of my local recreation centre chatting with the staff person encircling my wrist with the appropriate coloured band of the day. She asked me how my day was going. “Excellent,” I replied. I told her that I had no bombs falling on my head as was happening to many…

I came across a familiar quote but didn’t know to whom it was attributed. I searched further and learned that Milton Friedman said, “the only social responsibility of business is to maximize shareholder profit.” Mr. Friedman was an American economist and statistician who received the 1976 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. I long accepted…