TORONTO, CANADA. AUGUST 27, 2019. I read this past Sunday about the “author, podcast host and former ‘Jeopardy!’ champion” Ken Jennings, from the US Pacific North West. Perhaps after watching FOX News, he foolishly criticized the “20,000 surprisingly awful Canadians” who “drive down to watch a Blue Jays game” in Seattle during the northern summers. […]

Everything that has happened in American politics since the fateful day of November 6, 2016 tells we progressives of one sort or another (especially in Canada) to suppress any big expectations about the good news that “Robert Mueller To Testify In Open Hearings On July 17 Before House Committees.” The former special counsel Mr. Mueller […]

When relief is needed from Canada’s intermittent bouts of feeling that, to stay relevant in the global village, we must do a bad job of imitating political craziness elsewhere, the editors on this site turn to me. Or so it all too often seems, waiting for the eccentric winter of 2019 to end. Lately I […]

On the third-last Monday of 2018, here are four short notes on the world as it looks up close in We the North of the North American Great Lakes : 1. Is Trump getting ready to jump (what would Machiavelli think?) This past Saturday morning Maggie at “Hear Me Roar” – who specializes in “The […]

MONDAY, OCTOBER 8, 2018. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. We came back from coffee Saturday just as our local TV news station was tweeting : “BREAKING: US Senate votes to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court.” Sometimes, C. Wright Mills from Waco, Texas is alleged to have said, just describing what’s happening can be a radical […]

Nowadays not even anglophone Canadian political junkies follow the domestic politics of the United Kingdom with anything like the interest that was common enough 100 years ago (judging from early 20th century newspapers). And the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)’s old role as a distributor of British TV programming to North American audiences, going back only […]

[UPDATED JUNE 21 (& happy summer solstice) & JUNE 22]. Something Donald Trump tweeted this past Monday morning illustrates one of the many things wrong with his view of the real world I live in. In Mr. Trump’s own words : “The people of Germany are turning against their leadership as migration is rocking the […]

The thing to remember about the United States of America when it intermittently seems on the verge of civil war (metaphorically at least?) is that it is in the end a very complex place, full of many different real-world human beings. For every “Ugly American” there are at least a few and often enough many […]

[UPDATED OCTOBER 13, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21]. Just when I start to conclude that the younger generation running things these days has lost all interest in the literary graces that disciplined my own heyday, I come across a headline like : “Fall features fail to fully unfurl” – in the free metro news tabloid […]

TORONTO. AUGUST 22, 2017. It has been a strange-weather summer in the city this year. Right now we’re waiting for yet more rain. (I spoke too soon. It has just come. And now the question is : when will it come again? Can we go for coffee later, across from the park?) Meanwhile, it is […]