Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
In case the news escaped you, as of October 10 the Canadian Broadcasting Company is not longer airing the National Research Council’s official time signal every day at 1:00 p.m. Eastern time. In case you have no idea what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. For the past 80 years, at precisely one hour past noon, …
In May, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) said it will introduce 942 as Toronto’s new overlay area code on April 26, 2025. The new digits will come a year before all existing 416, 647, and 437 phone numbers are expected to be exhausted. As you may know, the reason we now run out …
More and more, I’m noticing that the online version of something steals the thunder of the hardcopy version. Or even worse, online content manages to give the story away in the headline, making it completely unnecessary to read it. Herewith, some particularly egregious examples. As I have previously admitted, I subscribe to a healthy number …
Julie Powell, who wrote the book Julie and Julia about her project to cook her way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which eventually became a movie of the same name (Julie Powell’s book, not Julia’s, but actually that’s not quite true since the Julia Child portion of the movie is based another of …
In the early 1970s, Toronto’s Yonge Street was a place to see and be seen. The sidewalks from Bloor to Queen were filled with people shopping for Indian cotton gauze shirts from stores that smelled like pachouli, buying head shop roach clips fashioned from hardware intended to look innocuous to feckless cops, and scoring the …
ICYMI, the audio format of Nowhere like This Place: Tales from a Nuclear Childhood was released earlier this year. In case you are really out of the loop, this is what the book is about: Marilyn Carr’s family arrived in Deep River, Ontario in 1960 because her dad got a job at a mysterious place …
I am not a huge online shopper, no matter what colour Friday happens to be. This is probably because I am not much of a shopper and not much of a girly girl, with all the lack of penchant for shoes, bags, perfumes, and magic potions that implies. But I do admit the Interweb does …
“Looks like this laptop was dropped,” the geek at Best Buy said. “This whole edge has gone all wonky.” I feigned ignorance. “Possibly. I wouldn’t know. But can you fix it?” “Maybe. The power supply port is out of alignment. That’s why you can’t plug it in. For $100 I can send it to the …
It has been a long time since I was part of the back-to-school cohort, at least when it involved education that was not of my choosing. As I recall, there was the requisite B2S prep and shopping, with one of the most important tasks being deciding what to wear for the first day. It was …
Sometimes when I’m out and about on the bus or subway or simply just walking around, I amuse myself by reading signs or even reading articles of clothing. Inevitably, I come across crimes against the English language. Committing these crimes can occasionally be forgiven if they occur within the privacy of your own home, but …