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 me "So…
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 the Ukrainian…
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 they had…
The University of California was paying Elsevier $10-million per year [https://www.chronicle.com/article/U-of-California-System/245798] 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,…
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 in solitude, not…
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 being cold.…
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 Geographic about…
From Gary Abernathy [https://twitter.com/abernathygary?lang=en], as published by The Washington Post [https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/01/21/buzzfeeds-travails-highlight-self-destructive-habits-modern-journalism/?utm_term=.12991ef5ed8f] : > Thomas Jefferson famously wrote [https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v2/url?u=https-3A__founders.archives.gov_documents_Jefferson_01-2D11-2D02-2D0047&d=DwMFaQ&c=RAhzPLrCAq19eJdrcQiUVEwFYoMRqGDAXQ_puw5tYjg&…