I remembered her birthday again this year. I always do. I did not wish my Aunt Madge well on her special day because she is dead. In fact, if she were alive, she would have been around 120 years old so condolences or Facebook comments like “so sorry for

The first time I really encountered The Ode was in covering Rotary Club meetings for radio back in the 1970s. The meeting concluded each week with the members standing and singing the last verse. That’s the verse that starts with: “As loved our fathers so we love. Where once

The above headine is a wonderful and poetic phrase my sainted mother used to use when I was younger and in a foul mood. “You are as crooked as sin you are.”

It was a type of moral judgement, as if bad mood was an improper

What has happened this spring over the crab fishery is enough to bring tears to this old set of eyes. However, they are expected tears.

We talk about the Newfoundland and Labrador fishery as though it were a single thing instead of many complicated things all

This thought makes everyone I know angry. It is as if we, in this province, are somehow linked economically to the impractical.

As long as I have been following news, and that is a long time, we have been attracted to a romantic view of how

I will never understand the 1999 Columbine school shootings. At the time I was just in raw shock. On April 20,1999 two teenagers, aged 17 and 18, who were armed to the teeth, began a systematic massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. We all remember it because it was the first school shooting really in our time. It was “ground zero” in

The Luddites are helpful to me here today by way of explanation.

The Luddites were odd bands of English textile workers in the early 19th century. They thought it was a clever idea to destroy their own machinery in the wool and cotton mills of England.

It is the most unlikely of  places to awaken an emotion, in particular sadness. 

I was flipping through The Telegram the other evening, but it might as well have been any evening paper in North America. 

What caught my attention wasn’t the wars and conflicts