Looking at life through a funhouse mirror
It’s been twenty-five years since Alanis Morissette released Jagged Little Pill. For each and every one of the years between then and now, she has had to suffer the scorn of English 101 students everywhere, because they are experts in recognizing and using irony as a device that can be verbal, dramatic, or situational, but …
Why is it that when I wake up in the middle of the night (which usually corresponds with when Dennis decides he wants to go out), all of my hundred bug bites start itching simultaneously? Furthermore, why is it that I have so many bug bites, and why do they swell up to the size …
The kitchen light at the cottage has burned out. Just the kitchen light bulb, actually, since no light fixture has graced it yet. This required a fourteen-foot ladder to be brought into the kitchen complete with various vestiges of circular sawing detritus. At least we have a fourteen-foot ladder. And now we have a new …
The Woodbine Racetrack used to be sort of on the outskirts of the city but is now warmly embraced by suburban sprawl to the north and east. On the west, it snuggles up against YYZ, with a fine view of the undercarriage of at least 50% of the planes landing on any given day between …
Okay, maybe Walter Becker wasn’t really my friend but I’m guessing you didn’t spend a week with him. Okay, maybe I didn’t really spend a week with him per se, but I did spend a week at the same place he was at, had dinner with him several times and hiked the same morning hike …
You know you are getting old when you start hearing some of the music of your youth that was considered edgy at the time wafting gently out of the speakers while you are at the grocery store. I swear I heard ‘White Rabbit’, ‘Let’s Spend the Night Together’, and ‘Dead Babies’ all in the course …
Courtesy of my friends at CBC radio today, I was reminded (if I ever knew in the first place) that our national anthem is a French song that didn’t have English words until 1907 and the version we learned in the 1960s is quite different than the version millennials sing today and furthermore, didn’t even …
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 …
About 60 years ago the world changed. And not because that was when Jonas Salk’s polio vaccine was brought to market, almost eradicating the danger of juvenile paralysis or because it was when the St. Lawrence Seaway opened up commercial shipping between Montreal and Lake Ontario. It’s because that’s when ‘rock and roll’ was officially …