Category: Think About It
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My (Belated) Favourite 15 Tweets of 2015 and 16 Tweets of 2016
Hello again everyone, Once upon a time I made a regular habit of picking out my favourite tweets of the previous year and posting them on this site. Here are the posts for 2010, 2011, and 2012. I did 2013 & 2014 as a combined post, as I am now doing 2015 and 2016 together. I…
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The rules to what I lovingly call “Old Man Poker”
Hello again everyone! I thought I’d start off my return to regular blogging talking about something near and dear to my heart: Hanging out with my father and his cronies during the annual fishing weekend. It began more than thirty years ago when a group of young men would help each other open a cottage…
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In a Mass Knife Fight to the Death Between Every American President, Who Would Win and Why?
Hello everyone! One of my most-visited sites on the web is Reddit.com, and one of my favourite subreddits is HistoricalWhatIf, an online community that debates historical hypotheticals. Earlier today someone asked the question, In a mass knife fight to the death between every American President, who would win and why? Someone beat me to the…
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A Lament For A Lost BlackBerry
Today I did a foolish thing. I was walking home in the rain, and I jammed my BlackBerry down into a coat pocket full of mittens for safe-keeping, and it fell out of that crowded shelter unnoticed onto the sidewalk. Precious minutes passed before I noticed its absence, and retracing my steps –just a few…
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November 17: A Day of Amnesty to Remove People from the Facebook Friends List
Hello everyone, I’ve just posted the following on Facebook, and it occurred to me it’s worth putting up on this blog as well. Last year Jimmy Kimmel declared November 17th to be National Unfriend Day, and I thought that was a great idea: There should be one day a year where we can just clean…
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A Few Thoughts on the Life and Legacy of Jack Layton
As a rule, I don’t blog about daily events. Things that seem important in the heat of the moment so often fade and blur with the healing balms of time and distance, and I want these posts to have longevity and relevance beyond the moments of creation. I doubt I’m violating that principle now: The…
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A Random Thought: There Were Perks to Being an Infant
This morning I awoke with a stomach ache. Normally I have the constitution of an ox, but everyone has an off-day. Something I ate the night before must have disagreed with me, or perhaps a particular bacterium in the labyrinth of my intestines found a way to be fruitful and multiply to the detriment of…
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Pyrrhus and Hannibal: What Great Enemies Taught Rome
I’ve had a lot of fun reworking two of my old university essays so far on this blog, one on the South African War and one on the foreign policy of John Diefenbaker. I’m pleased to say they are among my most popular posts so far, and so I’d like to continue posting content like…
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Remembrance Day, 2010
Tomorrow is Remembrance Day. It’s the first Remembrance Day of my life that I will not be celebrating with my grandfather, Murray Anderson, a veteran of the Second World War who passed away last winter. In December, 2009, I scanned a number of pictures he took during his time in the Royal Canadian Navy with…