February 13 2020 Attn: The Honourable Bill Blair, PC, COM, MP Re: Railroad blockades As you are aware, over the past weeks there have been a number of large scale blockades conducted by various groups, often nominally in solidarity with Wet’suwet’en hereditary chiefs. These blockades have impacted roads, rail, port…

Why I haven’t been on social media From Bret Easton Ellis’ ‘White’: “There was a romance to that analog era, an ardency, an otherness that is missing in the post-Empire digital age where everything has ultimately come to feel disposable.” Reading this made it click for me. I had a…

How do we put Calgary ‘on the map’? With the Peace Bridge? With the new Library? With a new arena? With the Olympics? With public art? With Amazon HQ2? These are all ideas that our city has put into action or considered, all with an element of raising the profile…

You hear a lot about ‘The Simulation’ these days. Whether it’s coming from Elon Musk, Scott Adams, or any other of a long list of tech or cultural luminaries, or on the screens of our multiplexes and netflixed tv’s. The idea is that our whole universe is actually a simulation…

No peak, no viewpoint, no trail, no guidebook, no distance, no expected time of arrival. Usually I like to hike with an objective. Sometimes I do the opposite and just explore, look, listen.

When I was speed skating, I viewed the task of sharpening the blades as a particularly monotonous chore. The blades are placed in a special jig, then given one hundred strokes one way with the coarse stone, even pressure throughout, turn the jig 180 degrees, then one hundred strokes, still…

There was one subject I was never any good at. Art. Even in kindergarten, the kid who cut all crooked, had the unrecognizable play dough dinosaur, and impossible hand writing… That was me. This never changed. My Opa used to joke that a van der Lee’s idea of a finishing…

And why I think that’s not a good thing Photo credit: Tawni Bannister, The Hollywood Reporter There is a trend in recent years towards putting politicians of a certain stripe (read progressive democrats) on a pedestal, and treating them like saints. Think of ‘Southside with you’ the fawning hagiography of…

The last piece of the puzzle to date is right here! Thank you for coming with me on this journey through decades of reading and living. 2005 — A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This book capped off a touchstone Russian literature course in University, where…