Personal Reminiscences – Page 16

The Travelling Life

2016-02-24 2016-02-24 Culture / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The thing I don’t like about travelling is, well, travelling. Being somewhere else is fine. A wonderful, expansive experience. I love waking up to the sounds of the ocean, wandering the streets of a foreign town, eating foods in their restaurants, shopping in their markets, listening to their music and moving to the rhythms of their city. Getting there is, however, overrated. More than that: it’s dreary. Stressful. Boring. The antithesis of the romantic. Most of the time travel isn’t anything of the sort. It’s waiting. Hurry up and wait. You rush from one location to another, one platform, one ……… click below for more ↓

The Swimmer

2016-01-25 2016-01-25 Humour & Satire / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

The swimmer stood on the dock, contemplating the lazy current in the river. The warm spring, followed by the sunny days of early summer, had warmed the water enough to make the crossing less a challenge than a few weeks back, when he had first done it. It was still early enough in the day that the boaters weren’t on the water yet. The morning was calm and quiet, the sky clear and bright. The perfect time for a swim. He dropped his robe on the dock beside his towel, and prepared to dive. “Just a moment!” a voice from the shore interrupted ……… click below for more ↓

Kanile’a Islander GL6

2016-01-17 2021-05-15 Culture / Music & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Ukulele: instruments & music2 Comments

What a difference two strings make. Late last week, I traded my Jupiter Creek steel-stringed baritone, solid-body uke for one of these Kanile’a nylon-stringed GL6 “guitar-leles” which the company calls a “guilele.” It’s really a short-scale guitar tuned like a ukulele: a fourth higher. More like a requinto than a uke. Kanile’a says of the GL6 line: Our GL6 is a hybrid instrument that we developed bringing the convenience of the ‘ukuleles’ size with the playability that guitar players love. This instrument has our unique Super Tenor body in combination with our 20 inch scale, joined at the body on the ……… click below for more ↓

Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me…

2016-01-02 2021-05-15 Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Turning 64, as in the 1967 Beatles’ song, once seemed so distant that it it was as remote as flying cars and jet packs. By the time I reached that age, I thought, we’d have a moon base colony, orbiting hotels as in 2001, A Space Odyssey, and were reaching out to the planets. Maybe even a base on Mars by then None of which had happened, of course, by the time I reached the magical age in the song, and even today it looks remote. But back then, in the late Sixties, the years ahead seemed so full of potential ……… click below for more ↓

Thank You and Happy New Year

2015-12-31 2021-05-15 Blog & Blogging / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

To all my readers: Thank you, and Happy New Year for 2016. You made 2015 special for me. In this year, my readership more than doubled. I have had more visitors in 2015 than my previous two years combined. Each year, my stats have doubled over the previous year. Clearly I must be saying something someone likes, because the numbers keep growing. This year marks a decade blogging for me. I welcome all of you and hope my humble scribblings can continue to amuse, bemuse, inform and entertain you. I may be opinionated, but I try my best to be ……… click below for more ↓

The Tribulations of an Evil Mastermind

2015-12-31 2021-05-15 Humour & Satire / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Some days it doesn’t pay to be an evil mastermind plotting to destroy the very fabric of our community. Seriously. It’s just too damned hard keeping all the bits and pieces together. Take today, for example. Here I was, out with my co-conspirator minions at a local restaurant this morning, trying to come up with some new, despicable act to commit and what do they want to talk about? Grand kids. The weather. Snow plow blades. Pickup trucks. The Republican candidates. Movies. Christmas dinners. New Year’s Eve plans. Monty Python skits. Monty Python skits! How can you seriously concoct a ……… click below for more ↓

Why I Still Watch MAS*H

2015-12-18 2015-12-18 Culture / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture / TVOne Comment

The news of Harry Morgan’s death at 96, back in 2011, saddened me. I’m at the age when it seems far too many icons of my youth are dying off. Not from some misspent life or accident; from old age. And the process accelerates as I age. I now understand why my grandparents and then parents read the newspaper obituaries. I haven’t quite succumbed to that, but I’m sure the day will come. No, I’m not being morbid. Or maudlin. I have, I believe, a healthy attitude towards death. Death moves me, sometimes fascinates me (as our collective attitude towards it fascinates me), ……… click below for more ↓

Is This Your Bar of Soap?

2015-12-15 2015-12-15 Culture / Humour & Satire / Personal Reminiscences / Pop Culture2 Comments

This is side five. Follow in your book and repeat after me as we learn three new words in Turkish: Towel. Bath. Border. So begins Waiting for the Electrician or Someone Like Him, from the first album released by the Firesign Theater, in 1968 (on later albums spelled as Theatre). Everything in it is a misdirection, a sidestep, a pun, an unexpected segue, a joke-within-a-joke, an opening to another place you hadn’t expected to be led to. May I see your passport please? Yes, I have it right here. (sounds of busy airport terminal in background) Uhum. Uhum. Uhum. Look at ……… click below for more ↓

The Secret to Good Writing

2015-12-13 2016-06-06 Grammar / Language & Grammar / My Writing / Style & usage / Writing & FictionLeave a comment

Spoiler alert: the secret to writing well is…. (insert drum roll)… writing. Writing a lot. Every day. Every possible minute you can spare. Writing and writing more and then writing even more. But doing so within a pre-specified limit. Oops… Now we all know that, aside from some local bloggers and EB columnists, most of us get better the more we practice a thing. Writing – aside from the aforementioned inept exceptions – included. It means not vegging in front of the TV all night, or trolling the Net for images of the Kardashian’s oversized ass, or scrolling through Facebook ……… click below for more ↓

1914: My Grandfathers’ Year

2015-12-08 2015-12-08 Books & Reviews / Family history / History & Biography / Personal Reminiscences / War & Military / What I'm Reading NowLeave a comment

As I read further into Max Hastings’ book, Catastrophe: Europe Goes to War 1914, I wondered, as I have done in the past when reading similar books about that time, what my grandfathers must have felt when that war broke out. What it meant to them and their worldview, and to their imagined futures, both at the start of the war, and then at the end, after four years of struggle, of deprivation, of fighting. What was it like to finally come home? What did they think, then, of the world? Of their leaders? Of their own nationalism? Of the ……… click below for more ↓

Read, Re-read, Repeat

2015-12-04 2015-12-04 Books & Reviews / Personal Reminiscences / Scifi and fantasy / What I'm Reading NowOne Comment

I’m currently re-reading Mikhail Bulgakov’s fantasy novel of Soviet life under Stalin, The Master and Margarita. Since this is actually a newer translation than the original one I read many years ago, I’m not sure it properly qualifies as “re-reading.” However, for me, re-reading a novel is uncommon. I seldom have the time to re-read, because my current reading list never dwindles (in fact it grows as I continue to add books to my library). Plus my interests and not static: I constantly seek to learn new things.* I always have a dozen books on the go, piled beside my bed ……… click below for more ↓

In Praise of Audio Books

2015-10-30 2015-10-30 Books & Reviews / Family history / Literature / Personal ReminiscencesLeave a comment

Although I had listened to them in the past, I really discovered the joys of audio books several years ago, when my 92-year-old father entered hospital for his final months. As I travelled to and from the city frequently that summer, audio books kept me entertained and my mind from dwelling on the more serious questions of his health and mortality. Travelling to Toronto to visit my mother in her nursing home, for several years after he passed away, often became a trip with audio books, too. Although I have always been an avid and voracious reader, CD recordings soon found a ……… click below for more ↓

Digging and dying

2015-10-05 2015-10-05 Computers & Programming / Games & Gaming / Personal Reminiscences2 Comments

About an hour after I started playing Minecraft for the very first time, I died. As game experiences goes, that sucked. Not exactly a “thanks for your purchase” ingame welcoming message from Mojang Not that I’m unaccustomed to dying. In most computer games I’ve died: Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, World of Tanks, World of Warcraft, Ghost Recon, Diablo, Borderlands, Left 4 Dead, even in Civilization. Dying is part of gaming.* But most of the time, I know why. Sure, I may not have seen the sniper who nailed me from a distance, or the elite dragon that snuck up on ……… click below for more ↓

The Missing Frankenstein Movies

2015-09-10 2015-09-10 Culture / Film & Reviews / Personal ReminiscencesOne Comment

I was worried when I saw a new package for the Frankenstein films in WalMart recently. Labelled the “Complete Legacy Collection,” it offered eight original films on the Frankenstein theme, from 1931 to 1948. I snapped it up and read the back. I had to have it. (I always check the films they bring in pre-Halloween, in case they have any classics I don’t yet have….) Oh oh, I said to myself as I read the cover. I had purchased all of the Legacy monster movie collections a few years back (they were first released in 2004) and my set ……… click below for more ↓