Author: Ian Chadwick

Retired writer, editor, reviewer, media relations & communications consultant, municipal politician. Ukulele player. Aficionado of Shakespeare, Horace, Machiavelli, Chaucer, Cicero, Homer, socialism, science, Godzilla, ERB, & tequila. Curmudgeon, skeptic & cynic. Lay historian. Community volunteer. PC gamer. Avid reader. Woke socialist. Loving husband. Companion to one dog & three cats. Passionate about my small town. Perennially curious about everything. My writing is copyright © protected.

Burning Books, Burning Bibles

Pastor Marc Grizzard, of Amazing Grace Baptist Church in Canton, NC is back in the news this week, but I’m not really sure if it’s because of something he did or something that was dredged up online from a few years back and has just been regurgitated. This week, a story in The Telegraph about Grizzard resurfaced on Facebook. But it’s from 2009, not dated 2013. I’m unable to find a contemporary reference that doesn’t refer back to the 2009 story. Mayhap it’s a hoax. But it’s fun and informative to revisit, anyway. Back then, the Telegraph reported that Grizzard intended to ……… click below for more ↓

The Circuitous Path from Bulge to Budget

2013-10-28 2013-10-28 Arts / Books & Reviews / Language & Grammar / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQO7e_a-gvU] If tinkers may have leave to live, And bear the sow-skin budget, Then my account I well may, give, And in the stocks avouch it. Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Sc. III, Shakespeare These lines got me thinking about the town’s finances. Sow-skin budget? What does that mean? And how does that relate to the financial plan for the coming year staff is preparing for council’s review? I did some reading (of course…). In Shakespeare’s time, the online etymological dictionary tells us the word budget meant something quite different:* “leather pouch,” from Middle French bougette, diminutive of Old French ……… click below for more ↓

Anti-Intellectualism: The New Elitism

2013-10-27 2013-10-27 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Books & Reviews / Conspiracy Theories / Critical Thinking / Internet & Social Media / Science & Technology11 Comments

There’s a growing – and disturbing – trend in modern culture: anti-intellectual elitism. The dismissal of art, science, culture, philosophy, of rhetoric and debate, of literature and poetry, and their replacement by entertainment, spectacle, self-righteous self ignorance, and deliberate gullibility. These are usually followed by vituperative ridicule and angry caterwauling when anyone challenges the populist ideals or ideologies. As if having a brain, as if having any aspirations to culture, to art, to learning – or worse, to science – was an evil, malicious thing that must be stomped upon. As if the literati were plotting world domination by quoting ……… click below for more ↓

The New Art of the Old: Baking Artisan Bread

2013-10-26 2013-11-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

So far, my re-entry into the world of baking bread has gone fairly well. I started rather hesitantly, unsure of the results, but I have been pleasantly surprised by the flavour, texture and quality so far. Yesterday I baked my latest loaf, as well as started a larger batch for baking in a few days. I have not ventured into any of the challenging or regional breads, but will do so once I am confident in making this simple artisan-style bread. I began with a simple recipe and technique from the Bread Experience blog. I had scoured the web for ……… click below for more ↓

How to Break Your Election Promises

2013-10-25 2013-10-25 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

[youtube=www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZqK97av7I3s] Taxman: I was thinking of this Beatles’ song, recently, after council received the pre-budget report from the treasurer at last Monday’s council meeting. It’s dated, the song that is, but still eerily appropriate (I will have to learn to play it on my ukulele). Last election, all of us who got elected ran on a platform of keeping costs and taxes low. Okay, that’s a fairly blithe promise; few candidates run on a platform of raising taxes and expenses, and fewer actually ever win a seat in any level of government. It doesn’t matter if everyone knows taxes will ……… click below for more ↓

Words, words, words

2013-10-24 2013-10-24 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Internet & Social Media / Language & Grammar / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Writing before the arrival of the internet*, Bob Blackburn commented on the nature of exchange on then-prevalent BBS (Bulletin Board Systems), words that could as easily be written today about the internet: “…the BBS medium reveals not only a widespread inability to use English as a means of communication but also a widespread ignorance of that inability, and, in consequence, a lack of interest in doing anything about it.” Words that were prescient. As if he could foresee Facebook. Blackburn also wrote that most people thought they spoke and wrote well… “The majority of English-speaking people I’ve come across…think they ……… click below for more ↓

Survival of the Fittest

2013-10-23 2013-10-23 Books & Reviews / Evolution & Paleontology / Quotes & Mis-quotes / Science & Technology / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

Charles Darwin has long been associated with the phrase, “survival of the fittest.” For a century and a half people have used it to refer to their understanding of his explanation of how species evolved. But it wasn’t his. And it has obscured the understanding of Darwin’s own theory. It came from a contemporary, Herbert Spencer. Spencer was a contemporary of Darwin – an English polymath: philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, sociologist, economist liberal political theorist, utilitarian – and, by some accounts, an early libertarian. His ideas came from people like Malthus and Adam Smith (read more about his philosophy here). Wikipedia tells us: For ……… click below for more ↓

Infestations, Microbes & Parasites

2013-10-20 2013-10-21 Science & TechnologyOne Comment

Staphylococci, Corynebacteria, Actinobacteria, Clostridiales, and Bacilli. They’re the most common, but they’re not the only ones. Bacteria. Microbes. Yes, even parasites. Living in your belly button. And on your skin. Your hair. But the belly button flora and fauna fascinate me the most.* We’ve known ever since the microscope was invented that we had a population of hitchhikers living on our skin, scalp – and even inside us. The great Antony van Leeuwenhoek is known as the “father of microbiology” for his explorations through his fledgling, primitive microscope in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. But we are still learning about ……… click below for more ↓

From 7 to 29. Should I be worried? Or just keep monitoring?

2013-10-16 2013-10-16 Collingwood / Environment / Personal Reminiscences / Science & Technology2 Comments

Seven cents per hour. That’s what the energy monitor was showing me a moment before I plugged in the kettle. Then it jumped to 29 cents. Wow! And this is mid-peak time, too, my new energy monitor warns. Should I be worried? Better cut back on the tea if I want to conserve energy. It did the same last night when we turned on the microwave at dinner time, but that was off-peak. Still, that’s pretty high, compared to seven cents. Those two devices seem to be the biggest energy hogs we have. I need to do some calculating, however, ……… click below for more ↓

We are Stardust… and Viral Genes

2013-10-15 2013-10-15 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Science & Technology / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

In her classic song, Woodstock, Joni Mitchell ended with the chorus: We are stardust Billion-year-old carbon We are golden Caught in the devil’s bargain And we’ve got to get ourselves Back to the garden Which most people assume is merely poetic licence. Well, Joni wasn’t wrong: we – and every living thing on our planet – are made of stardust. As we learn at Physics Central: If we know how many hydrogen atoms are in our body, then we can say that the rest is stardust. Our body is composed of roughly 7×1027 atoms. That is a lot of atoms! ……… click below for more ↓

1927: Ads, Layout and Typography

2013-10-15 2014-04-18 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Fonts & Layout / Typography / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

As promised, here are the first 20 scans of the ads from the 1927 North American Almanac I recently mentioned. If there is interest, I’ll do another set later this week. There are probably another 40 or 50 pages of ads in the book. I think these ads give us a wonderful window into the daily, household life of the time, into cultural views and medical thinking. As well, they show the state of advertising, layout and typography. It’s fascinating to look at the mix of typefaces and their placement. Click on the image to load a larger version and ……… click below for more ↓

Why Creationists Don’t Win the Nobel Prize

2013-10-14 2013-10-14 Atheism & Spirituality / Critical Thinking / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

Looking at the list of Nobel prizes awarded in 2013 for science, we see three prestigious entries: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2013 François Englert and Peter W. Higgs “For the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2013 Martin Karplus, Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel “For the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems.” The Nobel Prize in ……… click below for more ↓

Hijack the Starship

2013-10-13 2013-11-11 Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Science & Technology / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsLeave a comment

Nineteen seventy. A great year for music, and a sad year, too. The death of Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin.* Many of the great acts were kicked off their record labels and would struggle to find new publishers.** The great psychedelic band, Jefferson Airplane was breaking up, but before it did, Paul Kantner and Grace Slick put together a new band, named Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship (which would change its lineup before finalizing as the Jefferson Starship a few years later). They released a science fiction-counterculture concept album called Blows Against the Empire in 1970. It would go on ……… click below for more ↓

The Smallest Helper

2013-10-12 2013-11-11 Bread & Baking / Food & Drink / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

While I was pondering the nature of flour in my cogitations about bread machines (I’m still debating which model, by the way – suggestions welcome, but local stores have few options), I turned my grey matter to the business of yeast. Yeast is, of course, important in bread making because it makes bread rise. Why? You ask. Well, dear reader, the answer is simple but not pretty: farts. Yep. Yeast flatulence makes bread rise. Yeast out-gases carbon dioxide after it eats. The gas gets trapped in the gooey dough and, since it can’t escape, the dough expands. Food writer Linda Stradley ……… click below for more ↓