Like many others in the true north, strong and free, I was saddened to hear that Stompin’ Tom Connors passed away, at the age of 77, on Wednesday, March 6,  2013. I can’t pretend to be any great fan of Stompin’ Tom’s, or any kind of expert on his life and times. All I can [...]

A few nights ago I caught up with the second latest episode of “Downton Abbey” (ie season 3, episode 4), as received here in the wilds of North America (and stored on the “Recordings” section of our current Bell Fibe cable TV service, here in the particular deep wilderness of Southern Ontario, Canada!). I was [...]

GANATSEKWYAGON, ONTARIO. FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2012. In my advancing age, it takes longer to catch up with the latest trends, racing by your brain at what sometimes seems close to the speed of light, etc.  So my apologies for starting with a post on the Think Progress website from last Friday (September 14, 2012). It’s [...]

Ernest Hemingway was one subsidiary subject that crossed my mind during the Spanish sections of our recent counterweights Western Europe conference circuit. That no doubt had something to do with the editors’ message of this past May 9 : “We go to Europe for inside story (back for Hemingway and Gellhorn on May 28).”  [And [...]

[UPDATED WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 11,  AUGUST 22, 2012 : scroll to bottom of page]. Tuesday, November 29, 2011 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Natalie Wood, aka Natalia Zakharenko, aka Natasha Gurdin, aka Natalie Wood Wagner — “a movie star, from probably the last period when stars were still icons and not like other [...]

I discovered Ernest Hemingway’s lean and evocative writing as a teenager in high school. For a few years he was the hero of my adolescence. Then he blew his head off with a shotgun in 1961. By 1964, when his memoir of his triumphant young adulthood in Paris was published posthumously, I had left Hemingway [...]

TORONTO. TUESDAY, JANUARY 20, 2009 (and kudos to whoever waved the Canadian flag last night, in front of the MSNBC booth, on the National Mall in Washington). [UPDATED : MONDAY, AUGUST 16, 2010 ; SUNDAY, MAY 15, 2011 : see below].  “Who cares about local media personalities in Toronto, Canada?” is a good question. And [...]

Almost everyone I ask still says they aren’t watching Matthew Weiner’s stunning new TV series, Mad Men – about a mid-level New York advertising agency in the early 1960s. Or they haven’t even heard about it yet. So it makes sense when John Sturgeon, who writes for a student newspaper in Philadelphia, describes the show [...]

I ended with Helen Mirren on TV. But I told my wife I was going out to look for Jennifer Aniston. The one thing I did learn from her at the 2008 Toronto International Film Festival, however, is that “grand romantic gestures … only happen in movies.” So I guess I was bound to be [...]

Especially if you are older, you may remember that August 16, 2007 marks the 30th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley – the king of rock n’ roll, in America and around the world. And this is important enough to prompt a special tribute from Vision TV, “Canada’s multi-faith and multicultural broadcaster, dedicated to [...]