( Read more... )

The last little bit I've been rather busy with moving out of my old apartment in the Annapolis Valley. It was really hot the day we moved, over 30*C which is a welcome change, because every other day I've moved, it's been a torrential downpour. So anyway, I'm at my parents house for the very short term while looking for work ( Read more... )

A response to this post about the inevitability of historical outcomes ( Read more... )

It is with more than a little schadenfreude that I look upon today’s arrest of a local bishop on charges of child pornography. More striking is the completely surreal feeling because this bishop oversaw the release last month of a $15 million settlement for victims of sexual abuse by clergy in the Diocese of Antigonish, with cases dating back ( Read more... )

Anticipation ( Read more... )

I've recently been reading The Vertigo Years, a book I got for my birthday from karenjeane at my request. It's a cultural history of the Western world in the first fourteen years of the last century, a time the book argues, is very much like our own. It was a time of globalization, multi polar international affairs, rapid technological development, mass ( Read more... )

I just polished off the second collection of Jason Lutes' ongoing comic series Berlin. In short, the series follows a diverse cast of characters in late Wiemar Republic Berlin. Rich, poor, artists, intellectuals, workers, Communists, Nazis, Jews and even a black American jazz band make an appearance. Even Horst Wessel appears briefly to get shot in ( Read more... )

While it has been unseasonably warm, even hot, these past few weeks, I was not able to have my solitary garden party for Victoria Day, as it poured rain all day. Instead I drank my fruit cordials inside and painted the sitting room. And I think we are the only country in the world that celebrates what an awesome queen Victoria really was. I also ( Read more... )

The article Mars Attacked (thanks baron_waste) about the astounding world of 1963 got me thinking, particularly since the first response to the setting was "Huh? 1963? Well, yes, the year is 1963, but this is 1963 as imagined in the science fiction of, say, 1936."So I created an alternate history scenario, which I will later expand into a story, to look at ( Read more... )

Thomas Malthus has really come back into style, although an argument could be made that he never really was unfashionable given our collective fascination with doomsday scenarios. The public prominence of issues like climate change and oil supplies are probably responsible for this, although unrelated issues like economic recession and swine flu ( Read more... )