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.

But is it news?

2013-06-01 2013-06-01 Canadian Politics / Media Issues / Municipal Politics / Social Order & DisorderOne Comment

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford seems to get more than his fair share of headlines these days, most of them negative. The stories that follow are full of allegation, innuendo and “unnamed sources.” Gripping tabloid stuff. Real time soap opera. But is it news? Most of these stories seem based on a simplistic media prejudgment of the man. Ford: bad. Stories that belittle, humiliate, denigrate and ultimately crucify Ford: good. And in this heated, increasingly toxic environment, allegations, gossip and rumour get given the same status as fact and build on themselves. Everything is sensationalized to such an extreme that it ……… click below for more ↓

Pets and Policies: Why Dog Parks Matter

2013-05-26 2013-05-26 Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Pets & Animal Behaviour3 Comments

Back in April, 2011, I wrote a post about municipal policies towards pets, now in the blog archives. I noted then that… A recent survey done by Colin Siren of Ipsos Reid estimated there are 7.9 million cats and 5.9 million dogs in Canada. The survey also shows that 35% of Canadian households have a dog, while 38% have a cat, which is consistent with other surveys conducted in the developed nations. Based on a figure of 9,500 households* we should have around 3,040 households with dogs and 3,610 with cats. Well, the numbers have grown. We have (according to ……… click below for more ↓

When did I become my parents?

2013-05-26 2013-05-26 Arts / Culture / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

I was driving down to Toronto, Saturday, listening to a CD with Tony Bennett, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and several other singers of my parents’ generation, singing along, and I wondered aloud, “When did I become my parents?” When did I start buying and playing their music? When did I start choosing an Ella Fitzgerald or Louis Armstrong CD for a road trip instead of Bruce Springsteen or Blue Cheer? When did I get so old? Who’s the old guy staring back at me from the mirror? In the 1950s and 60s, when I was growing up, I would not ……… click below for more ↓

Religion, Logic, and Tornadoes

2013-05-24 2013-05-24 Atheism & Spirituality / Religion / Social Order & Disorder / US PoliticsOne Comment

What has a tornado in common with prayer in schools and US President Barack Obama? Rhonda Crosswhite. Yes, the Oklahoma teacher praised as a hero for saving several children when a massive tornado ripped through her town of Moore, earlier this week. And no doubt she was. But there were many other teachers who were heroes that day, none of whom have become a rallying point for the religious right, as far as I can tell. Crosswhite was, from all accounts I’ve read, the only one to mention praying during the tornado. That comment made her a different sort of hero ……… click below for more ↓

Midway in our Life’s Journey…

2013-05-23 2013-05-23 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / My Writing / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

So begins The Inferno, the first of the three books that comprise Dante’s magnificent and complex work, The Divine Comedy.* It’s a rich, complex and challenging read. I have to admit I have not read it all – all three books that is – but I have made a mighty effort to complete Inferno in several editions. My problem is not comprehension, but rather distraction. Were this a desert isle, it would make it much easier to finish. I read like a jackdaw. But back to Dante. The first lines (Canto I, trans. by John Ciardi, Norton edn.), continue: Midway in ……… click below for more ↓

Musing on Melville’s Poetry

2013-05-22 2013-05-22 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Literary pretensions / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I came across a poem last night that I had not read in the past (always a pleasant thing to discover something new in one of your books)*. It is by Herman Melville, an author I associate with novels and short stories rather than poetry. Yet he was surprisingly prolific as a poet, mostly in his later life. Poem Hunter lists 93 of his poems on its site (on PDF here). He wrote many more, it seems – many of them naval or related to the sea, others about the Civil War – and the collected works can be found ……… click below for more ↓

Appreciating B-Movies

2013-05-18 2013-05-19 Arts / Culture / Film & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

It drives Susan to distraction that I love B-flicks. She squirms and fidgets if I put one into the DVD player and can seldom sit through an entire movie. They get cut off mid-film, and saved for me some time in the vague future when I might have an evening alone to finish watching it and the others in the category. Overacted, melodramatic, clumsily scripted, wooden dialogue, transparent effects, low budgets… what’s not to like? Okay, not all of them, but some fit that description. The range in B-flicks is great: from the truly abysmal to brilliancy (albeit usually unrecognized, ……… click below for more ↓

Little Dorrit: BBC Drama

2013-05-18 2013-05-18 Arts / Books & Reviews / Music & Reviews / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

We just finished watching the 14-part BBC series of Little Dorrit. As usual with most BBC series, it was superbly cast, acted, paced and filmed. Each episode was a mere 30 minutes, and almost every one of them ended in a cliffhanger fashion that made you want to watch just one more. You might not think of Charles Dickens that way, but much of what he wrote was for serial publication: in weekly or monthly magazines. To keep his audience hooked – and buying the magazines – he wrote cliffhangers. Not perhaps as gripping as, say, episodes of TV’s show ……… click below for more ↓

10,000 or 20,000 hours?

2013-05-16 2013-05-16 Arts / Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

Malcolm Gladwell introduced the concept of the “10,000-hour rule” in his 2008 book, Outliers. As Wikipedia describes it, “…the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.”* Gladwell does not specifically say that 10,000 hours of practice or apprenticeship will make you an expert. Like most things on the internet, it has been altered in the transmission; dumbed down for the simplistic misquotes we love to pair with pictures of kittens or puppies on Facebook. Rather what he said was that it will ……… click below for more ↓

Quackery and Big Bucks Infect Health Canada

2013-05-14 2013-05-14 Balderdash & Hoaxes / Canadian Politics / Critical Thinking / Pseudoscience & Quackery / Science & TechnologyLeave a comment

Health Canada has allowed an increasing number of useless “alternative” healthcare (alternative TO healthcare in most cases) products to be sold in Canada over the last decade, despite the lack of proper (or in some cases, any) research data to prove their claims, effectiveness or safety. Most recently, however, Health Canada went further into pseudoscience and licensed homeopathic vaccines, proving that the agency has bowed to corporate pressure and given up trying to protect Canadian health. According to the BC Medical Journal, “…Health Canada has licensed 10 products with a homeopathic preparation called “influenzinum.”[8] According to providers, influenzinum is for ……… click below for more ↓

Mastery: Self Help or Just Opinion?

2013-05-06 2013-05-06 Books & Reviews / Critical Thinking / Culture / Social Order & Disorder / What I'm Reading Now2 Comments

Robert Greene’s new book has me somewhat flummoxed. It’s not at all like his previous books. The other books of his I have were all ‘meta’ books – books about what others thought on various subjects: power, leadership, war, seduction, politics.* Mastery combines biography with exhortations to raise one’s self up to the level of mastery. We are all potential geniuses. It strikes me as an overly-intellectualized self-help book. So far, anyway. I’m still only mid-book. But the little editorial conceit of capitalizing “Life’s Task” throughout the book already annoys me. That and it’s preachy, moralizing and somewhat condescending tone. ……… click below for more ↓

Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship

2013-05-05 2013-05-05 Arts / Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

I was 8, maybe 9 years old, when my parents gave me a hardcover copy of Tom Swift and His Rocket Ship by Victor Appleton II. Probably a birthday or Xmas present. I can’t recall which. I just recall how excited I was when I read this book – my earliest experience of science fiction. I soon had a couple of dozen of the Tom Swift books in my collection. My memory of Tom Swift (Jr) and that book came back today when I wandered into a garage sale on Cedar Street and found a copy of the same original ……… click below for more ↓

Snow White and the Huntsman reviewed

2013-05-05 2026-05-25 Arts / Books & Reviews / Culture / Music & ReviewsOne Comment

Take one part Brothers Grimm and one part Malory’s Morte d’Artur, add a dash of Tolkein, a pinch of Joan of Arc, a sprinkling of Robin Hood and a sprig of English folklore; mix it in a bowl with copious CGI, great natural settings, remarkably good stage sets, and what do you have? The 2012 film, Snow White and the Huntsman. The epic film (at least in the two-hour-eleven-minute extended version we watched last night) was an action-packed adventure that never made us feel it was dragging excessively. Seems, however, we and the critics disagree. I was impressed by the ……… click below for more ↓

Understanding the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act

2013-05-04 2013-05-04 Canadian Politics / Collingwood / Municipal Politics / Social Order & DisorderLeave a comment

Another of the Acts that direct municipal governance is the Municipal Conflict of Interest Act. While considerably shorter than the previously-discussed Municipal Act – eight pages, 15 sections and less than 3,500 words – it is of perhaps equal importance. While it may seem vague to outsiders, it was written to clearly identify the nature of a conflict in black and white. The Act allows no grey areas: there are no “perceived” conflicts in law, only clearly defined legal ones. This is obviously intended by the stringent wording that lays out what construes a conflict of interest. This clarity absolves everyone ……… click below for more ↓