Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
Dyson, the vacuum cleaner purveyors that will sell you a cyclonic bag-less thing of beauty as long as you can qualify for a mortgage to pay for one, is now flogging a cyclonic hair dryer for only $500. Now that Mr. Dyson has solved the problem of picking up pet hair he has chosen to …
When you search the word ‘declutter’ Google you get 1,130,000 hits on Google. Or at least that’s today’s result. Tomorrow it will probably be 1,140,000, because apparently Google likes round numbers and because apparently we think more is more. One of the most popular books of late is The Life-changing Magic Of Tidying Up: The …
I know almost as much about Gordie Howe as I do about Muhammad Ali. Which is to say, not very much about either of them. Or maybe what I really mean is I care about as little about Gordie Howe as I do about Muhammad Ali except that Gordie Howe was more of a presence …
Let me first say, in my own defense, I actually do lots of reading on the internet. I probably read the same kinds of things that you do (or maybe I don’t read quite as much of the random content links on Facebook – someone must be clicking on them or there wouldn’t be so …
The least well known thing about Phil Kives was his name. Not a bad thing really, since back in the day it was only proper to have your name in the paper twice: once when you’re born and once when you die. This week it was Phil’s turn to punch his second ticket. Before establishing …
Blogs didn’t exist when Elvis and John Lennon died. There was no Instagram to fill up with selfies of chance encounters with newly dead music celebrities. And there was no Facebook on which to repost eulogies and elegies and bootleg YouTube clips of long lost performances of dubious provenance. Despite the handicap of no internet …
I’m sure I’m not the only person who thinks that New Year’s Eve is a very strange construct. In fact I know I’m not because there was an article about this very thing in the paper today and there is probably a similar one published every December 31st. With apologies for bandwagoning, here are my …
Apparently George Boole has a crater on the moon named after him. But that is not his key claim to fame. Without Mr. Boole, Google would not exist nor would the internet itself because computers wouldn’t exist, which is perhaps why they recently honoured his 200th birthday with a doodle. Despite my dubious relationship with …
The third most quoted collection of written works, behind the Bible and Shakespeare’s oeuvre, turns 150 this year. Although all of these contenders feature stories that stretch the boundary of credulity (Walking on water? Fairies doing matchmaking?) , Alice in Wonderland (and her further adventures on the wrong side of the looking glass) surely wins …
So now we begin our forced march towards winter. There is no choice but to put one foot in front of the other and soldier on into certain peril. November’s gloom looms on the horizon and March won’t enter the frame until six months from now. It’s almost time to pack up the cans and …