God Isn't Giving You That Choice Coleman
Sunday, July 8, 2001 – Land Forces Central Area Training Centre Meaford The call is made, who among us recruits wishes to attend Church Parade. I declare that I will be attending services. We form up alphabetically, my last name happens to place me first. The Sergeant asks…
Why Did I Exclude Ice Cream From the Story?
The other day I was telling a story, one of my favourite stories. The time people thought I was gambling on the Pope. It’s April 2005, Pope John Paul II has died. I’m living in St. Andrew’s College at the University of Manitoba. It is the seminary of…
Should Office Hours Be Renamed Open Hours?
My path to university is unconventional, I’m a bit of a unicorn, not many Crown Wards of my age went onto post-secondary education, as there were not the supports needed. I went to the University of Manitoba, they gave me a good offer, and I believed that as…
UCalifornia Takes Big Step Towards Open Access: Cuts Subscription to Elsevier
The University of California was paying Elsevier $10-million per year to access academic journals filled with publicly funded research that Elsevier paid nothing towards the cost of researching. The academic journal publishing racket has had a good run blocking public access to knowledge, and charging institutions billions of…
The Crushing Feeling of Disappointing Others
Sunday evening began the latest young adults conversation & learning session at my parish, St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church in Downtown Hamilton. It is the first group activity I’ve done in the Church since RCIA when I converted so many years ago. I tend to practice my faith…
Snow Storms and Perfect Attendance
There are two tough winters that I can instantly recall the year of, 1992 and 2004. 2004 was cold, very cold, Hamilton’s modern record low temperature of -30C was recorded at Hamilton Airport on January 16, 2004. I remember day-after-day of cold, layering my uniform jackets, and still…
The Moon Missions as a Child of the 80s
The 20th anniversary of Apollo 11 occurred when I was age seven; only three years after the Challenger Disaster. I didn’t grasp the significance, only recently starting to read full non-fiction books and National Geographic magazines. Sometime shortly after the anniversary, I got my hands on a National…
Words for Journalists – like me – to Live By
From Gary Abernathy, as published by The Washington Post: Thomas Jefferson famously wrote, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” The biggest danger to Jefferson’s…
How Do I Respond to Radical "Populism" Which Exploits Social Angst
The rise of extremist is distressing. Good people, people I know have lost their way, are vacuumed into extremist. Why? It promises a relief valve to the angst of precarity which inflicts the working class and marginalized people in our society. The purity and simplicity of extreme ideologies…
Have You Not Driven in Snow Before?
I finally did it, I finally had a complete uncontrolled wipe-out on a Sobi Bike. The wipeout was entirely of my own fault and doing. It was a light steady snow today, the kind that makes roads slippery and covered in slush. There’s just enough snow on the…