Monthly Archive: April 2018

Choiceless choices

A couple of years ago, when I got sick of the trouble Bell was having updating its Internet server, I fled to Rogers. The young man who signed me up assured me that Rogers had its own server and was constantly updating it. Of course, he was lying. Once aboard I could see that Rogers did not have its own server, they used Yahoo. I should have known one telecom was no better than another. My service has been OK, just the usual blips and hiccups, until a few days ago. Those of you with Rogers will have seen the pop-up declaring that Yahoo and AOL...

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Eternal sunshine of the thoughtless mind

Am I the only one who thinks Drake was showboating the other night when he wore that Humboldt Broncos hoodie to the Raptors-Wizards basketball game? You know Drake, don’t you, the Toronto boy who became famous as a rapper, the first music invented in my lifetime that I don’t like. But there he was, to the cheers of 20,000 fans, paying his respects to the sixteen hockey players and staff killed in a collision with a transport truck. These days, lots of people are wearing hockey jerseys as a tribute to the team. I was in the underground Path one day last week and many passers-by wore...

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The fifty-first state

I was writing a postal code, got to the Z, and said to myself “Zee” … not “Zed.” Has it come to this? Have I finally been totally Americanized? Little wonder, when you consider the inundations that daily roll into our country from across the southern border. Or as Derek Burney, the former Canadian ambassador to the U.S., used to call it, “The world’s longest undefended cliché.” Look at retail. U.S. banners from Amazon to Walmart dominate the Canadian shopping landscape. Eaton’s is long gone. The Bay seems to have been taken over by Saks Fifth Avenue, not vice versa. And there’s a Nordstrom...

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Black and white and gone all over

Pardon me for writing about newspapers two weeks in a row, but this is too much. In the Globe and Mail today, there’s a story about a man who has quit using toilet paper. Instead, he takes a short shower after every ablution and urges the rest of us to do the same in order to save trees, electricity and the free world. In yesterday’s New York Times, there was a piece about a man who’s gone cashless. So far, in 2018, he says he has managed to touch hardly any paper money or metal coins. When I went on cbc.ca on...

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