Sure, Bouncing Off Clouds is also the name of a great Tori Amos song, but when is the last time you took an hour, or even a few minutes, to gaze into the clouds yourself? Children do it and poets do it (or they should) and before the Internet or television humans had been doing [...]
At this very moment, the Pittsburgh Penguins are in town, battling the Ottawa Senators in the NHL playoffs. Soon, I’ll log into Twitter and will no doubt find out who is winning or if the game is already over. I’m in no rush to find out. The Ottawa Senators are no more my home team [...]
If you’re looking for ideas – new ideas, fresh ideas, great ideas – they all have one thing in common. They are not usually hiding very far. But like new breeds of fish spawning beneath the subconscious of your mind, they are seldom going to jump out at you. You have to find them, lure [...]
Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield returned to earth this week after nearly five months in orbit. It’s been an exciting and enjoyable journey for all of us. Commander Hadfield has done more while in orbit than anyone I can recall in recent memory to bring space flight home to children and to the public at large, [...]
About an hour ago, I finally untangled the cables behind TV and removed the cable box. Like most people I know, I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with TV, but when it came to cable there’s rarely been any love. I tried. I really tried. Years ago, we started off with the basic package and, [...]
In the 15th century when the printing press was still new, dealers often kept books in loose sheets rather than binding them. If someone in the 15th century wanted two copies of the same printed book, it was not uncommon to take a copy from a printing press and hand it to a scribe for [...]
Some of the most extraordinary people I know don’t use social media*. And that’s a shame because it makes it unlikely that you will ever get to know most of them. As an experiment I took most of a year off from social media in 2012, including this blog. I visited Twitter once a week [...]
Despair is a short and easy path. It seduces us with a place to rest and an end to our struggles. Once there, however, rest is never to be found. Hope is far more demanding and requires much more effort. It is an uphill climb to find purpose in tragedy and failure. If you can’t [...]
When I was ten years old, I fell into a small windfall of sorts. I had won a contest at school and was about to walk into a long summer with more cash than I ever had in my life. A whopping twenty dollars. Imagine that. I don’t recall what the contest was for, but [...]
When I was 18 I moved to Toronto from a small town and lived on Spadina Avenue where the rent was atrocious and traffic seldom slowed down. There is no such thing as silence in the core of a large city. Unable to sleep, I had learned a trick to cope with the revving engines, [...]
