Urbanism
The last thing I expected to find in a suburb of Vancouver is affordable gentle density but that’s why they say you should travel. It truly does expand your mind. As my patient reader knows too well, I was in that city recently to attend the ultimate national championships
Urbanism
I spent most of the week in Vancouver and Surrey. If anyone I personally spawned asks you why I was there, please tell them it was to support my eldest (number 23 above) who was playing for the Saskatchewan team (Go Wheaties!) at the national ultimate championships. But really, I
Politics
Now that Facebook has started blocking access to news stories for Canadian users, I’ve decided to write a weekly summary of articles and topics I think my readers will value. Since it arrives directly in your inbox, it gets around the whole idiotic Meta ban. It doesn’t cost
Politics
Stephen Lecce, who is inexplicably Ontario’s minister of education, is currently fronting another one of those asinine “common sense” education reforms aimed at getting back to basics, because this government doesn’t want to be explicit about its desire to crush those pesky teachers’ unions that think they know
Travel
You travel enough along the 401 in Ontario and you start to see patterns. For instance, you notice the clothes worn by people who patronize the OnRoute rest stops along the way all appear to come from the same bins of faux athletic garments from Costco. Except for the truckers
Culture
Beloved and I were randomly walking around the Detroit Institute of Arts the other day and hitting a lot of religious stuff until, bam, my attention got grabbed, hard, by this painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, which is apparently super well-known especially by middle-school boys everywhere. Not being a
Travel
Not to boast, but on Tuesday I drove all day in order barely to move on the map. I left Ottawa, fresh McD coffee in the cup holder, at 3:43 am and arrived at the spectacular July 4 lineup on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit just after
Travel
It’s five in the morning and I haven’t had a coffee yet. That’s why I’m here, at this 24-hour venue where I know the bathrooms are clean and the coffee is OK. Ish. “GOOD MORNING MA’AM” she yelled as the automatic doors opened to let
Parenting
People often ask how they could become a ninja like me. That’s easy, I say. You could train like a maniac for 20 years. Or you could carry a cooler up the hill to your island cottage and walk nose-first into a spider web. Nothing sharpens your reflexes like
Culture
Si vous avez déjà dépassé un autobus scolaire vous serez familier avec la façon dont les enfants s’expriment devant des adultes qu’ils ne connaissent pas. Ce n’est pas toujours poli. C’est bien normal et sain pour les enfants de tester les limites de leur monde. Leurs
Urbanism
John Bauters is the mayor of Emeryville, California (pop. 12,870 as per the 2021 census). (And other interesting parenthesis: in California mayors are not directly elected but chosen by council.) Emeryville is not far from San Francisco. I’ve never been to it, but I sure want to. I
Urbanism
When the City of Ottawa sent a press release, both in French and English, to inform us that the mayor and a few councillors had gathered merrily together to mark the beginning of Construction Season I could not help myself. I guffawed. “This is satire begging to be written,” I