We’ve lately had a (nother) sudden rush of new visits to a piece first posted more than a year ago – in the middle of March 2011. The title in this case is “A pretty girl is like a melody .. has Canadian election of 2011 finally arrived on back of first ever contempt of […]
Australia’s June employment numbers were released today, and they caused some domestic concern: “Australia’s employers cut 27,000 jobs last month, sending the jobless rate higher.” The national unemployment rate actually increased to 5.2%, up from 5.1% in May 2012. But hey, wait a minute. Our Canada-wide unemployment rate in June was 7.2%. As some like […]
On Canada Day 2012 a recent welcome comment from the unsung great historian of French and Indian Toronto’s great granddaughter has drawn our attention back to an earlier posting on “Canada Day 2009 : Percy Robinson and the reluctant Canadian republic.” Three years ago we urged that Percy James Robinson (1873—1953 and, among many other […]
Current Argentine president Cristina Kirchner, widow of former Argentine president Nestor Kirchner, is viewed by many observers of such things as one of the “Hottest Female World Leaders” extant. So you might think that when she and UK Prime Minister David Cameron bumped into each other at the G20 summit in Los Cabos, Mexico, earlier […]
A week or so after our Toronto head office re-opened, almost all the individual notes on our two-weeks-plus  Western Europe conference circuit, in a poignant time of change, have been handed in. We now ought to be able to synthesize some broad overview of our collective findings. For better or worse, “random impressions” is almost […]
The American journalist John Gunther “grew up in Chicago and attended the University of Chicago” and then served from 1924 to 1936 with the London bureau of the Chicago Daily News. In the 1930s he published Inside Europe – the first of the “‘Inside’ series of continental surveys” that made him famous. Some sources on […]
This past Friday Canada’s self-confessed national newspaper revealed that “Britain’s Prince William and his wife Catherine will be celebrating their first wedding anniversary on Sunday … Intolerable media intrusion was cited by many sources as the reason the couple broke up in 2007, but they soon got back together and married in a global ceremony […]
Watching Ronald Reagan’s former budget director David Stockman on Bill Maher’s excellent US TV show last night reminded some of us that Clyde Prestowitz, another former Reagan Administration apparatchik (counselor to the Secretary of Commerce), has also been saying some remarkably sensible and even “progressive” things about economic policy lately. The latest Prestowitz literary soundbite […]
For those who reside in the vicinity of what is still (for the moment) Canada’s largest metropolis, we’re pleased to note that a morning vigil will be held in downtown Toronto this coming Thursday, April 12, 2012, in commemoration of the public hangings of Samuel Lount and Peter Matthews 174 years ago, on the morning […]
We at least think we understand what federal NDP MP Charlie Angus means when he says: “The Twitterati, I mean, I don’t even know who these people are. I don’t think it’s a positive move in the political realm that we’re dealing with because of the dumbed-down nature of the conversation.” But … (1) We […]
