Month: October 2024

Gender-bending for Halloween

Gender-bending for Halloween “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls It’s a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world…” – Lola, The Kinks Born in 1952, I grew up in what was then a small southern Ontario municipality called Georgetown, an epicenter, I decided later, of what has been dubbed the Southern Ontario..

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The Library saved my life

The Library saved my life: the chronicles of a brand-new denizen of the Ottawa public library scene Did you know that October is Canadian Library Month? Here’s a little story in honour of Library Month… “A room without books is like a body without a soul” -Marcus Tullius Cicero Growing up in Georgetown, Ontario in..

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Reminding me of why I fear the tomb: Fall 2024 Lac Saint-Joseph Quebec

Reminding me of why I fear the tomb: Fall 2024 Lac Saint-Joseph Quebec Photo Lac Saint-Joseph Quebec Taken by Lorne Coughlin Nothing Gold Can Stay Robert Frost 1874 –1963 Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So..

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Armageddon revisited …The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962

Armageddon revisited …The Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962 “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” – Hindu Scripture My parents began hoarding industrial quantities of tinned food  and cumbersome sacks of powdered milk in October 1962. They spoke in hushed tones about our imminent demise. Nuclear war was all but inevitable. At 10..

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Turning into a pumpkin: Canadian Thanksgiving 2024

Turning into a pumpkin: Canadian Thanksgiving 2024   Awakening from a turbulent dream within a dream, So dreaming still, I found myself for a brief shining moment In a glowing paradise of pumpkins. A disembodied voice whispered portentously, “ Weary pilgrim, you are about to turn into a pumpkin… Eternally.”   Meaning and origin of..

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Ode to the Zamboni: in honour of the new hockey season

Ode to the Zamboni: in honour of the new hockey season For my friend, the writer and Zamboni expert Mark Oshinskie By the time our first son was a pre-school tot, he was a rabid hockey fan. Growing up in Quebec City, he lived in a hotbed of hockey frenzy where the local media blared..

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Let me tell you about the birds and the bees

Let me tell you about the birds and the bees (photo of my mom circa 1950) I was born in 1952, the year that Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected president of the United States. Growing up absurd in a small southern Ontario town in the 1950s and 1960s meant being fed a steady diet of..

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Triangulum Galaxy: A Tanka Poem

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known- Carl Sagan   Triangulum Galaxy: A Tanka Poem   Magnified, a flash, Blue cosmic reproduction, Long consummated. Our end also resides in The creative overture.   The astrophotographer Terry Maurice has kindly given his permission to share the brilliant photo that accompanies this posting. For more images..

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