Here at Joel's Journal, we are constantly striving to find ways to make your browsing experience as delightful as possible. To that end, our staff has spent the last several hours tagging the most interesting entries according to their topic. We hope you will enjoy clicking on whatever topics below catch your fancy, and then scrolling down to see ( Read more... )

Last night, I studied. I took my pipe out for a stroll about the wandering, narrow streets of "North of Princess", an old working class neighbourhood of close red brick townhouses and tumbling clapboard extensions. I could have gone half a dozen blocks south and walked among the older, grander, limestone homes of Sydenham Ward, but the night was ( Read more... )

Oh the existential crisis of a mind at mid-semester. How do I reassure myself that my life matters, when it is currently consumed with pouring over the traces of the largely forgotten lives of others? Remind me why we do what we do.

Ah, but here's a line that gives me comfort:
Human beings make great efforts to leave their signatures on life ( Read more... )

For all of its intellectual pretensions, academe produces more than its share of bad grammar and unorthodox diction. I know this, but it still bothers me when academics insist on adding to their words every loose suffix or prefix to which they lay their hands.

I just came across this in a book I'm reading for class:
"The Russians were the ( Read more... )

Those of you who are interested in the French language should check out the translation exercise I posted in correct_french. See how much of a Creole song you can translate into standard French - you might surprise yourself.

A Comment On the Pending Redefinition of Marriage in the Canadian Constitution to Include Same-Sex Unions
( 'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, 'it means just what I choose it to mean.' )

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Next Sunday, my church will sit under a guest speaker described as "a self-made -- no, a GOD made -- millionaire, given favour in the business community, and walking in a prosperity anointing ( Read more... )

My professor made the following comment on an essay I wrote:

The word "Orientals" was certainly in common currency prior to the 1970s, but its use has been politicized since that time (if not earlier). (Edward Said certainly has plenty to say on this score.) Using the word without care in a historical essay now -- that is, outside of quotation ( Read more... )

"Supposing there was no intelligence behind the universe, no creative mind. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. It is merely that when the atoms inside my skull happen for physical or chemical reasons to arrange themselves in a certain way, this gives me, as a buy-product, the sensation I call thought. But if so, how ( Read more... )