Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
This just in: you make more money if you decide to be a doctor, engineer, or if recent information about the distribution of wealth on aboriginal reservations is true, Indian chief, than if you choose to complete a B.A. I am extremely thankful for this ground breaking discovery. It was also partly funded by me …
Apparently hand writing is on its last legs (or more correctly, its last arms). Specifically, cursive writing is currently in the academic cross hairs, although block printing is probably not too far behind. Much like we no longer teach long division or the dreaded times tables because their efficacy has been eclipsed by calculators and …
The second time I voluntarily went to school in the summer was to attend a 6 week French immersion course. With all of the logic the Federal government (who funded the course) could muster, the location chosen to transform us to French fluency was the Scarborough outpost of the University of Toronto. I had only …
When you are a kid, there is nothing better than the day you are let out of school for the summer with two whole months to do pretty much nothing. And there is nothing worse than being sentenced to go to summer school as penance for lack of judgement during the school year. The worst …
When you graduate from post secondary school it is natural to have a sense of a new beginning. Who knows what adventures await? Who knows where you will end up working? Who knows when you will pay off your student loan? Who knows when you will pull those unfortunate pictures off your Facebook timeline? Luckily …
Although it is certainly not the easiest time to enter the workforce, work will probably be the biggest single influence on your life. My first piece of advice is to take the job. You know the job I am talking about. The one that is far from perfect. The one that doesn’t come close to …
You may not know this, but St. Patrick’s Day is an official holiday in Newfoundland. No, honestly it is. I only know this because of the time well wasted I spent with a motley assortment of Newfoundlanders when I attended Dalhousie University in Halifax. I guess in Newfoundland culture, going to Nova Scotia to get …
For some strange reason I saved my meal tickets from my resident days at Waterloo. Maybe that’s because I can always say I have a ‘meal ticket’, but who knows what I was thinking. Clearly not me. Anyhow, the meal ticket was kind of like a transit pass, except the photo was put inside a …
Matchbooks are definitely on the endangered list. It used to be that every restaurant had a bowl of matches on their front counter. Now, paper matchbook marketing has all but disappeared, although you can sometimes score wooden matchboxes at expensive steakhouses (I guess so you will have something to light your cigar with). Otherwise you …