Darn those Cassandra moments

 Back in the days when I used to fancy being a "pundit," after I had left gainful employment, I spent some of my idle hours writing columns for the Corner Brook Western Star as a member of the "Community Editorial Board," until several writer friends complained about my providing free content to a local newspaper. Vanity chastened, I stopped writing them and stuck to Letters to the Editor after that. Every now and then something comes up that makes me remember my "Cassandra" moments and I have had a few of them. Better I should watch World Wide Wrestling. Perhaps it will be coming to us from the former Kennedy Center in its MAGA incarnation.

An item on CBC recalled one to me this morning:
Trump's musings on 'very large faucet' in Canada part of looming water crisis, say researchers   by Joel Dryden, Calgary CBC News · Posted: Feb 18, 2025

Here is what I wrote in Honour of World Water Day in 2003 on April 15.  The image was fuzzy, so I have extracted the text, but vanity compels me to keep the byline.

Thoughts on Plumbing

Every time I shower, I am awed by the convenience, and pleasure, of standing under hot, clean water. For most people in the world, this is an unimaginable luxury.

1 remember “hard times” in New York City when strain on the water system led to ad campaigns that urged: “Save water! Shower with a friend! ” Living five years in California, I learned how precious water is, and how longingly Californians gaze northward at our abundant water. Recently, a young friend working on a project in Ethiopia told us his weekly water ration for hygiene purposes: three litres!

In March, UNESCO released a forecast about a projected decline in water quality, worldwide. UNESCO predicts that “the average supply of fresh water per person across the planet is set to plunge by a third over die next 20 years. Seven billion people across 60 countries will face water shortages within 50 years. .Population growth, climate change, environmental degradation and water wastage are likely to cause problems even for wealthy nations.”

The document, described as “the most comprehensive assessment of the state of the world’s fresh-water supplies,” ranks 122 countries based on their water quality . Finland, Canada, and New Zealand are at the top. The report blamed political inertia at almost every level and condemned governments around the world for ignoring the threat to the earth’s fresh water, despite scientific evidence of the crisis.

More than 2.2 million people die annually from diseases related to contaminated drinking water and poor sanitation. It would be interesting to compare this with the number of people killed in proven terrorist attacks, but I could not locate such figures. If they were as high as 10,000 it  would be less than 1% of the 2.2 million cited above.

The day George W. Bush launched his war on Iraq. 24.000 delegates from 182 countries gathered to consider the UNESCO report at the third World Water Forum, held - ironically - in Kyoto. That day, Olivier Bommelaer, of the Seine-Normandy River Basin Organization, told delegates “The world spends 40 times more for petroleum each year than it invests in water, sanitation infrastructure and maintenance.” There was little media coverage of this massive gathering.

The next morning, local CBC radio was preempted so we could hear inane interviews about gas masks, with journalists in Kuwait. How sad it is that such an important meeting attracted so little attention. Unfortunately, such events are simply not as “sexy” as planes flying into skyscrapers and missiles thudding into bunkers. Truly these latter tragedies are real, but when measured against the tragedy of world starvation and disease, some perspective is needed. Sewage problems don’t make exciting footage on CNN, but they will probably kill far more people in the long run. They have already done so in Iraq.

Gordon Young, the coordinàtor of the UN’s World Water Assessment Program, told the forum that “spending $50 billion or $100 billion annually on water would solve many of the world’s health problems.” By comparison, some “$30 billion is spent each year on activities, such as golf, that consume a huge amount of water.” Global military spending is in the $9(X)US billion range; about $400 billion of that is spent by the United States.

After the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. government requested $40 billion for the war against Afghanistan. President Bush has just requested $75 billion to pursue the war in Iraq for one month.

Certain Western leaders claimed the 9/11 attack to be an assault on “civilization,” but what kind of “civilization” are we, to live in comfort, while 600 million are homeless , 800 million chronically malnourished, and 1 billion have no access to clean water?  We, “the civilized”, represent perhaps 10% of the world’s population, but consume about 90% of its resources. U.S. trade and foreign policy seem founded on maintaining that 10% - 90% split.  In his fascinating book “Among the Believers”, V.S. Naipul observed that many of the “fundamentalists” he interviewed across the Muslim world resented “the West” more because of its profligate consumption  patterns and environmental degradation, than for its religious beliefs.

There are, indeed, environment disasters in the developing world, but the resources to fix them are scarcer than ours, and many have come from “civilization”. Remember Bhophal?

The Bush administration and its supporters seem determined to undermine the future of United Nations because the Security Council has refused their “big stick” approach to global security. The work of die Security Council represents only a fraction of the UN’s work - work such as this   assessment of the world’s water and planning solutions.

If we think global security is threatened now. imagine the “War for Water”.

The recent outbreak of SARS, which may have its origins in an area where agricultural sanitation may be less than desirable, should be another reminder that there are “things” out there as scary as Osama and Saddam. The diversion of so much of the world’s wealth toward “the War on Terror” and away from solving large global problems, is disproportionate, immoral; and counterproductive.

Back in the shower, I think of Tolstoy’s question, “What then must we do?” On the global level, it is daunting.  However, the somewhat ponderous paragraph on “Local Action” in the Water Forum’s Preliminary Statement offers hope:

“There is an increasing number of initiatives worldwide where society’s  goals are met to prevent pollution while the services of ecosystems are protected for example through watershed protectlion.

These actions, the majority of which are undertaken at the local-level, deserve wider-scale application.”

We can start by requiring our elected officials to protect our own watershed.

(Elinor Benjamin is a resident Corner Brook and a member of The Western Star’s Community Editorial Board.)

Up from the pyramids

Up from the pyramids - an ancient video from the pre-cellphone era.

Due to requests to view an ancient recording which I had stashed on a "private" "only with the link" on YouTube, and YouTube's insistence on keeping it secret,  I decided to put a real link to it here.I had no videos of my dance life other than this bad digitization of an old VHS home movie, converted to DVD then onward to superceding formats. This was long before the ubiquitous recording ability we have today. It is like the old Nasruddin story, "the soup of the soup of the soup." 

A former student, who shall remain nameless, arranged for me to be filmed by one of her art student  friends at a time when I was still very frail after surviving sepsis and in much pain. The first recording didn't work so I did it again. Then, not only did she never get the video to me, she "borrowed", then walked off with, a costume I had spent 80 hours beading. The callowness of pretty young things. I confess to being humphier than Kipling's camel about this.

My favourite part has always been playing the finger cymbals. I could not seem to embed the video on this page, but you should/might be able to reach it with this link. 

Selima's Dance at Julie Rank's Dance Studio Recital 1987

 Here is a still photo taken before the show. My goodness. Did I actually wear red lipstick?

A Lyrical Moment from last summer

"Song for the Mira" is a song that resonates deeply in Ron's family. His father grew up in Glace Bay, Cape Breton. They had a cottage on Mira Bay. He loved to swim and dive. When young, he and his friends dived off the railway bridge at Mira Gut where the river entered the Mira Bay. The song was written in 1973 by Alistair McGillivray. You can read how it went viral before the internet in the Canadian Encyclopedia (on line)

Our niece, Laura sang it at her grandfather's funeral in Calgary. It was the song for the bride and her father to dance at her wedding, she with braces for spina bifida, Rob, paralyzed on one side from a stroke. Last weekend, Ron and I went to Cape Breton to celebrate the life of Ron's Aunt Marguerite, who died in March at 104, the last of that generation. 

With Colin and Justin in the Bothy

We stayed the night before at the North Star Inn in Louisbourg. It is run by Colin and Justin, the celebrity decorators from Scotland who had a vision, executed it, and are employing local people in an area that once prospered from coal mining. You can see how they did in the CBC "Gem" series "Hotel from Hell."We feel it essential to go there at least once a year in support of what they have done for this community. 

Ciaran McGillvary

We arrived for dinner at the The Bothy, the cozy and welcoming restaurant converted from a quonset hut. There was already a singer on stage. We didn't know his name but he was good and had the room singing along with gusto on songs like Puff the Magic Dragon.  It takes a real pro to read a room so well. He ended his set with a well-known song "composed by his father who was sitting at the table right in front" - beside us. Our entertainer was Ciarán MacGillivray.

There was Alistair McGillivray himself, right beside us. We sang with gusto. I made Ron get up and waltz - amazing what a little wine will do - and I sang a descant. I sing alto in the church choir because the team needs altos. It is good training, but every now and then I confess that I have descant-envy. We stayed and had a grand yarn with with all of them. We had many mutual friends – Al Pitman, Andy Jones and the grand crowd St. John's. Of course, we had the song again the next day at the celebration, followed by a wonderful gathering of Marguerite's clan with freshly dug clams, as always. But that is another story.

 

What do "Green" Hydrogen and Cucumbers have in common?

 

I've been seriously skeptical about public money going into the Everwind green hydrogen project in Point Tupper ever since the appearance of the first smiling photo op of our premier with subsidy seeking friends and all the associated hype of promising to make us "world class." .A goal of being "good enough" is sufficiently ambitious. I'll cheer when we get there.  Then came our premier's recent secret meetings with a super rich investor looking for an assortment of perks including "provincial environmental approvals and a wide range of changes to regulatory and export policies."  (Halifax Examiner, Nov 12, 2024)

 

There are a number of sites* that describe the science and list the pros and cons of producing green hydrogen, and the spectrum of  “brown,” “grey,” “blue” and “green” hydrogen. It is more complicated than regular solar and wind projects which can be "smaller," more flexible and requiring less new infrastructure. And why on earth we would aim to produce it to ship to Germany is something that eludes common sense. If there is one thing I know about physics, it is that the farther you transport energy, the less efficient it becomes. I hearken back to that classic book Small Is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as If People Mattered by E. F.  Schumacher.

 

Now I see the plot thickening - with cornstarch as my mother would say:

https://www.halifaxexaminer.ca/environment/john-risley-jumps-on-the-green-hydrogen-subsidy-bandwagon/#N3

Having lived in Newfoundland through the Sprung Greenhouse fiasco, I was especially intrigued by the following commentary by Angela Antle, a reliable St. John's journalist.

"I smell cucumbers   Billionaire-owned World Energy GH2 is off green hydrogen and floating the idea of energy-hungry data centres"
https://theindependent.ca/commentary/i-smell-cucumber 

 

It ain't easy being green. How quickly our leaders seem willing to shell out tax dollars without getting into the hard questions.

 

 

* eg to list a few
What is green hydrogen, and how green is it, anyway? Buzz about green hydrogen heating up in N.S. as companies clamber to get on board  ·

          Frances Willick   CBC News · Posted: Dec 11, 2021

          https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/green-hydrogen-what-is-it-how-green-is-it-1.6587802 

Hydrogen hype: climate solution or dead-end highway? 
         David Suzuki with contributions from Senior Editor and Writer Ian Hanington   Aug 15, 1921
         https://davidsuzuki.org/story/hydrogen-hype-climate-solution-or-dead-end-highway/

We cancelled the Chronicle Herald today

Dear Editor

Today's edition was the final straw. Our local paper, founded in 1874, has been seriously compromised ever since PostMedia took over.  Like so many, it had been facing an uphill battle for real journalism for years. The Opinion Page today was Beyond Inappropriate for our local paper. Why inflict upon Nova Scotians a long commentary, replete with wild speculations and accusations, written, no less, by a genuine "foreign agitator," J.D. Tuccille, an Arizona writer, who calls himself a "political scribbler with a deep concern about personal freedom," is planning to vote for Trump and contributes libertarian rants to the National Post.

I dare to hope you included the piece by local writer Fred Honsberger in an effort to "balance" against the one foisted upon you, no doubt, by the Mother Ship, but neither belongs in a local Canadian paper today of all days. In the US, you are not supposed to campaign on election day.

We have enough concerns of our own. There is more than enough US election opinion elsewhere. Clearly the Chronicle Herald has been sold to The Devil* aka Chatham Asset Management. We do not want a single penny of our money supporting this right wing US media empire. Googling these chaps was "interesting"  J.D. Tuccille, Anthony Melchiorr,  Larry Buchalter. 

It's straight out of "Succession."  

 

If you care to read the Commentary that was our last straw, I can actually put the link in here without Meta cancelling it.
"My reluctant vote for Donald Trump"

*    About The Devil  for inquiring minds the article has the links and citations

From Wikipedia    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chatham_Asset_Management

 

 Chatham Asset Management LLC is an American hedge fund, founded by Anthony Melchiorre in 2000, with a large foothold in newspapers and tabloids, headquartered in Chatham Borough, New Jersey, United States. The company holds a controlling interest in Postmedia, A360media, McClatchy, and RR Donnelley. Chatham's key principal is Larry Buchalter.

According to a 2018 article in Fortune, Chatham is known for its close ties to the Republican Party. Chatham has a reputation for hard-edged business tactics. In 2016, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority opened a review of Seaport Global Securities that included an examination of its relationship with Chatham.

In 2023, Chatham and Melchiorre were charged by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission with 'improper trading of certain fixed income securities.', in relation to client trades of AMI stock. They agreed to pay over $19.3 million collectively in fines.

Acquisition of Postmedia Network Canada Corp

In October 2016, the New Jersey hedge fund Chatham Asset Management quietly acquired a two-thirds controlling stake in Postmedia, Canada's largest newspaper chain, by exchanging debt owed to them for the majority ownership When Chatham acquired majority shares in Postmedia Network, even some of Postmedia employees, were not aware of the change in ownership. Postmedia's financial news platform described its debt restructuring making mention of Chatham as one of the investors.  According to Postmedia Network's 2020 Financial Report, as of November 30, 2019, Chatham, an American media conglomerate which also owns American Media, Inc. owned 62,313,749, or 66%, of Postmedia's shares, which challenged the assumption that PostMedia was Canadian controlled. According to the New York Times, since acquiring Postmedia, Chatham reduced the workforce, closed newspapers across Canada, decreased salaries and benefits, and consolidated editorial operations.

Somewhat redacted  😞 A new experience.  

My first Letter to the Editor published under the New Regime 

Those who have known me a long time, know that I take my avocation as an ankle-biter seriously, too seriously, says Ron as I hunker too long over the keyboard. Once upon a time the Chronicle Herald used to publish the Baloney Meter - an in-house fact checker column. It was useful and fun. Now that our paper has been taken over by PostMedia, the Letters to the Editor section has been seriously cut back. Instead we get "Commentaries" on the Opinion page as well as commentaries passing as news elsewhere. I used to have 3 or 4 letters published a year - not all of them ankle-biters - and they were never edited. It offered me a chance to feel I was doing my bit at monitoring the emperor's clothing and offering praise where due. I had good feedback. They had published nothing I sent since the takeover.

We just had a municipal election. I often believe more things can be wrought at the municipal level than elsewhere. I am relieved our excellent district councillor, Sam Austin, has been returned to office. I'm reserving observations on our new mayor.  He defected from the sinking ship that is the Trudeau regime, not, I suspect, before making sure of a win with help from from "professional strategic advisors" - less politely known by some as spin doctors. If there is a word on the planet that I detest, it is "strategic."  Ah well, this is the way the world works.

In the thin Wed Oct 23 edition of the Herald, there was just one one letter from a reader challenging the accuracy of the family physician wait list statistics, a figure far more flexible than Major League baseball statistics - and the following commentary written by that very same  strategic advisor.

Commentary (click the image to read the whole article)

Federal and provincial government bashing is standard operating procedure, but where was this one coming from?  It was certainly a mash-up of issues and targets. I am dedicated to wondering - old librarian DNA I suppose. I googled the author at NorthStar Public Affairs and learned it is a public relations firm whose mission is:

To navigate the intricate and ever-evolving landscape of Canadian politics and government, you need knowledge, experience, a nuanced understanding of public sentiment, and a well-lit path to the policy- and decision-makers who can enact change, take action and provide the solutions and outcomes
you need to win.

The more I read about the author, the more wondering I did about the man behind our new mayor. At least the authorship was transparent enough. I discovered more than I wanted to know. Bragging about his successes for Stephen Harper and Doug Ford certainly did not earn any nuance of sentiment from this member of the public.

This commentary appeared just after Alberta's Big Oil propaganda hijacked our front page and Page 2, as well as YouTube and the MLB playoffs. We'd never seen anything like it. They tried to make it look like "News." I wrote about the flagrant placement of that "ad." My letter was was not published. That's okay. They did publish several other letters expressing similar disgust. From chit chat here and there, there were more than a few of us. Some people cancelled their subscriptions.

I wrote again yesterday in response to the Commentary. They actually published most of it except for the introductory part about the state of the Letters section of the paper which wasn't intended for publication, but omitted the paragraph about the "strategic advisor" some of which I found on his  website bio.

Dear Editor
I have noticed a considerable shrinkage in space devoted to letters from your regular subscribers. I am one - for now. This is not good. The Letters page was my favourite part of the paper - the one I turned to right after doing the puzzles. The Saturday edition featured an entire Opinions Section. I also noticed that the 250 words suggested size seems to be overlooked quite frequently, so I have not worried this time.

Author Fred Delorey was former Director of Field Operations for Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who now promotes superhighway 413 through vital green space; and Director of Political Operations for former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, slasher and burner of scientific research. We may see his skills employed closer to home in future. Context.

They also edited my description of myself as a "grumpy old Malthusian letter writer."  Perhaps they considered it too dismal, or they didn't fact check Malthus.  Oh, the trials of being a grumpy old Malthusian. I yam what I yam. 😱

A little background

• The province of Alberta just spent $7 million dollars on that propaganda blitz for Big Oil against a proposed Emissions Cap which would help us meet our climate targets. We're behind. What better use of that money might there have been to help Alberta citizens in ways other, especially when the Premier has stopped all research and development of alternative energy. They had been doing good work. It offered a way to move beyond job dependence on a very toxic form of oil extraction. The Premier is also also up for review with her party soon.
  


• The Isthmus of Chignecto is the narrow strip of marshland that keeps Nova Scotia from becoming an island. The Feds offered to pay 50% leaving 25% each to be covered by Nova Scotia and New Brunswick respectively. Our premier is snapping at them because he wanted them to pay 100% as they are doing for restoring the Historic Quebec Bridge across the St. Lawrence River.  Work on the isthmus is underway. It needs to be done now before another super storm takes it out and breaks the transportation link to the rest of the country and brings economic chaos. I don't feel hard done by to think some of my tax dollars are directed toward this. I confess, some nuance of my public sentiment may come from having been born there. I also cherish the privatized Via Rail line that has to cross the isthmus to the rest of Canada. Rail service to our part of the country is constantly in danger from the vicissitudes of weather and politics.
  


• In addition to slashing scientific research funding, and holding a flashy "victory" parade for the   Libyan misadventure, Harper also slashed the National Archives and National Library, then  claimed a substantial tax credit for donating records from his nearly ten years in power to Library and Archives Canada. They should be put there as a matter of course. I cannot pretend to admire the successes of this man.
  
  
• The Nova Scotia Premier shelved the Coastal Protection Act after it had been approved by a consensus of all parties. The timing was "curious," but that's another story .
  

Published on Oct 26, 2024

Reflections on having survived more than three quarters of a century

 

Thank You Dear Kith and Kin

I am beyond being overwhelmed by all the birthday greetings that have arrived via FaceBook, Jackie Lawson and a few tradition bearers using Canada Post. Thank you all.  I feel a verbal effusion coming on. I seem to have had so many lives in so many places on solid ground and on-line. 

When I was working for the Newfoundland public libraries, the library in Stephenville was presided over by the wonderfully, lovably eccentric Gilbert Higgins, rather a black sheep of a prominent legal family in St. John’s. He held his birthday party in his library every year. It was a movable feast. His birthday orations were worth the drive out to Stephenville. I tried to record one on primitive equipment.  Alas, this failed. They were worthy of the Newfoundland Archives.

I don’t usually make a big deal about birthdays, although people in Corner Brook may remember my 60th when I held a large fund-raising-and-thank-you-world party several years after events described below. Upon reflection, this birthday, too, is worthy of celebration.

Twenty years ago I spent my birthday in the ICU unit in Corner Brook, Newfoundland, with lines and tubes coming out of or into almost every orifice. Several weeks earlier I found myself in pain so bad I couldn’t move. We had to call an ambulance.  I foolishly told them it was probably arthritis. No fever? “Mummy” says you have to go to school, eh? They sent me home with Darvon. Lesson:  Never Self Diagnose!  Five nights later we went back. This time they did bloodwork. The locum doctor I had never met phoned me at home in the morning. “Who ordered this bloodwork? Your white blood cell count is through the roof. I’m having you admitted to the hospital immediately.”  Five doctors appeared around the gurney and asked me if I had had sex in Africa in the last 30 years.  I might have said, “I’m not that interesting,” or “I might’ve had sex with an African but it was in Denmark” but it’s all a rather merciful blur. It wasn’t tropical. It wasn’t highly contagious. It wasn’t contagious at all. No flesh-eating spectres appeared. Twenty four hours later the blood culture results came back: plain old Staphylococcus aureus sepsis. We never did figure out how I got it. It is everywhere. You can develop it after a paper cut if your immune system happens to be off duty. I was in the hospital for seven weeks, survived on popsicles and lost 25 pounds.   

As soon as I left the hospital I said to Ron, “Take me to the mall. I want to buy a pair of white jeans.” Ron, dearest pragmatist, said “You’ll spill red wine on them, and next year they won’t fit.” He took me to the Mall. I spilled red wine. I gained back weight. I had to use a walker for weeks and when I had gained a bit of strength worked with a trainer at the gym for almost a year.  But I gloried in those white jeans for the summer. I was monitored regularly for pleural effusions and was lucky that the only permanent damage was to one ankle and one shoulder. I was also lucky that I had found a new passion a decade earlier in storytelling. It was not quite so difficult to bid adieu to belly dancing and trying to play the fiddle.

For awhile I wandered in a lovely bubble amazed by everything upon which I gazed, filled with the greatest love for everything around me. I wanted to stay in that place forever but couldn’t quite manage it without mind-altering drugs. I once read an article about one of my favourite actors, Timothy Spall, who after surviving acute leukemia, described something similar; then one day he realized he was being petty and realized he was back in the world as we know it. I can’t find that article now, but I found a similar one online in The Express

“When you’re in a state of not knowing whether you’re going to live or die or not, you’re in a state of profundity,” Timothy continued. “So I remember going out to the park in between treatments and looking at a tree and for the first time really thinking what an amazing thing it was. “And for about 10 minutes, I thought, 'That is a really nice tree.' And then after a while I did it again, and after a while I thought, 'You know, this profundity thing is a bit overrated.”

Septic shock killed almost as many soldiers in World War I trenches as enemy fire. It still kills 15 - 30% of the people who develop it today. Just before Christmas, Martin, a member of our church choir and a truly fine human being, was stricken after testing positive for COVID.  He did not survive. It was a terrible shock to us all.

How I managed to draw a long straw on this one I’ll never know, but the last 20 years have been a gift. Amazing people were on my team working in a hospital in conditions that were not always “world class.” Great gratitude is due to Dr. Barry May, who died of a heart attack the year after my experience, and seemed determined I would survive. I hope I have done enough worthwhile things over these two decades to justify the tax dollars spent on me at Western Region Memorial Hospital.  

These 20 years have been filled: remarkable people I would have never met, places I would not have seen, stories I would not have heard, books I would not have read, ankle-biting letters to the editor I would not have written. I would never have been diagnosed as a soprano and sung “The Celtic Mass” with a Canadian choir at Carnegie Hall, where I hit the high B flat while my feet were asleep. Psst: We did have to practice.

I would not have been spared waking on my birthday in 1982 to the dreadful news of the Ocean Ranger disaster, which devastated people I know and love. I would not have seen the destruction of our only planet unfolding faster than my worst pessimism at the time,  nor been locked down in a global pandemic, during which I saw many random acts of community. 

I try, but cannot always rise above the weltschmerz. I’m not good at pretending it isn’t there, and that there are no monsters under the bed. Sometimes I think our bodies can feel the axe stroke of every tree that is cut, every resource torn from Mother Earth's belly or the sound of the last words spoken in a dying language, to allow us to live our lives  of privilege, far enough up the food chain - for now - to be warm and comfortable. Everything IS connected. We cannot really tell our cells that everything is OK.  

We can breath and listen to beautiful music - as we did on the weekend at two wonderful chamber music concerts.  We can enjoy Ron's creation of  a "Retro" meal of French Onion Soup, Boeuf Stroganoff on fresh noodles and a bottle of Beaujolais Villages and watch another episode "Masters of the Air," as we reflect on our parents'  earlier lives - my mother, a Sargeant in the Womens' Division of the Royal Canadian Air Force keeping maintenance records for the planes in which airmen trained in Eastern Canada before heading overseas; my father in the Signal Corps of the Canadian Army, sleeping in slit trenches under the heavy artillery and slopping through the Dutch fields in the The Battle of the Scheldt. He told a story  of a time when most of the soldiers on both sides was suffering from dysentery and the marshy air was beyond fetid. 

I tell fairy tales in which monsters are punished and kind children survive. Would that it were so.  And, if you love people enough, you can turn them into real princes, princesses or rabbits. A few nights ago Prince Ron and I took an absurdist break and watched “The Death of Stalin” It was on Obama's list of favourites from 2018.  

Frequently, Ron and I reflect upon a cartoon, that was posted years ago on a colleague's wall at Grenfell College, which was recently the victim of bad ransomware attack.  It has taken a long time to track it down but I finally traced it via JStor.  Somehow ...