And the villages search . . .

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OK, we just manage to get comfortable with getting our tongues around the name Osama bin Laden, and suddenly to be able to talk intelligently about world affairs, we have to learn to say “Mahmoud Ahmadinejad” (or various other spellings, like “Amadinejhad”). The always opinionated, sometimes dangerously scarey Ahmadinejad, President of Iran, just finished his hurried, but highly unappreciated visit to the United States, culminating with a protested appearance at Columbia University.

The university committee that invited him to speak felt that everyone has a right to be heard and debated, no matter how far off the mark his or her view of the world seems to be– certainly a noble aim for a university, but they didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet when Columbia President Lee Bollinger introduced the guest speaker by calling him every name in the book, including “astonishingly uneducated” and a “petty, cruel dictator”.

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Two to Miss

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My tastes in music have always been varied— “eclectic” is a good word— I took up guitar at the time of the folk music popularity of the early 60’s, and transferred with the trend into the Beatles and the pop music of the rest of the 60’s and into the 70’s. At the same time, through the years I didn’t mind a bit of country, blues, and even jazz. The line was drawn, however, at heavy metal in its day, and now rap, and, although I don’t mind a number or two, I never was fascinated by classical music… no doubt evidence to some of my poor taste. In recent years, I found I was not in tune with the pop music of today, so I leaned more toward contemporary country and even classics of years gone by like those of Sinatra. Was it a maturing, or a degenerating?

When I look back over the last fifty or so, I’m mindful of a few we have dropped along the way. No doubt there are older fans who feel that the deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimmy Hendrix, or Jim Morrison were early losses that changed the direction of popular music, but I never particularly mourned those losses, probably because they had a lot of responsibility for their own demises due to drugs.

However, two other names stand out with me as losses that make you wonder the “what if?” question. In the complementary fields of “singer – songwriter”, here is one of each. Continue reading →

Our Innocent Man

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It seems that all my life I was aware of Steven Truscott. He was 14 when convicted in 1959 of the rape and murder of 12 year old Lynne Harper, and I was 13 at that time.

It was a case that would never die for the Canadian public. Initially, spurred on by the headlines of the time that Truscott was the perpetrator, I think like many others, far away from the Clinton Ontario area where the crime took place, I thought him guilty and really didn’t pay him much attention following the conviction. But the case kept rearing its head over the years. I can recall numerous television programs taking yet another look at the case, and stirring the pot over and over again. Truscott kept stating his innocence, though it seemed that few seriously listened. Continue reading →

Fool at the Wheel

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modelt.jpgI don’t know what it is in the nature of men that makes them like to drive fast. Now I don’t mean just over the speed limit, because without cruise control to exert a little influence, my wife will come home bristling with speeding tickets, while I tend to stick to just a little above—the calculated area of “they won’t bother to ticket me here”. I mean the “let’s see what it can do” style of driving that men seem drawn to, certainly more often when they are a little younger and a lot more foolhardy.

Lately, young men of average means have an interest in cars that just look serious…. Honda Civics and even Chevy Cavaliers dressed up with wings and body fairings, fancy paint jobs, mufflers that sound like you have more under the hood than a four-cylinder designed primarily for economy, and the ubiquitous booming of a thousand watt stereo system with trunk-filling subwoofer. One went by with a lot of noise the other day and I asked, “What was that?” My wife identified it correctly as, “A Cavalier trying to pretend it’s a sports car.” Continue reading →

My Mother died last week . . .

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My mother passed away last Friday evening. She had been in hospital for the last eight months, a place she never wanted to be, though I think she had little realization of that most of the time she was there. She had taken a seizure of some kind in early December, at the seniors’ home that she never wanted to be in either. Fiercely independent, she tried in vain to avoid these places, knowing that when you enter near her age (91 last week), you seldom leave. Her avoidance of hospitals extended for years to hiding any illness or injury she had– not an ideal practice, since it jeopardized her health and sometimes concealed illness that her children needed to watch for in their own lives. Continue reading →

A Good Idea at the Time

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This article is rated PG! Not for the usual reasons— just keep it away from easily influenced minors in case they get any notions of duplicating the stupidity!

 

A few weeks ago we met with friends and at one point I mentioned some of the things I turned to as entertainment in the slow days of a teenage summer.  The focus was always the “practical joke”, which to a teenager is an excuse for almost anything, under a mistaken belief that adults will forgive almost anything if we excuse it by saying, “It was a joke!”   Now an adult, and a homeowner, I can see that it would be quite a leap for the victims of some of our pranks to see it in that light.  “It seemed like a good idea at the time!” remains our only poor excuse.

 

As a youth I once read a book called The Real Diary of a Real Boy, and although now I question whether it was a real diary or of a real boy, the antics in that book were a measure to me of what was “normal”, and as long as I fell short of that boy, I felt I was moving in an acceptable realm.

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