We meet 'neath the sounding rafter,
And the walls all around are bare;
As they shout back our peals of laughter
It seems that the dead are there. 

     They're gone now. All of them. Fred, Geoff, Cec, Gladys, Don, Blair, Marcella and the rest. All… Read full post »

       It was 98 years ago tonight, Christmas Eve, that two armies faced each other in hastily dug trenches in the mud of France and Flanders. The opening salvos of the First World War had been fired, and the race to outflank each other had ended in… Read full post »

     Jason Giecek -- Tinkerertink69 -- was one of the earliest people on my Open Salon friends list.
     I consider him a littermate, since we joined OS about the same time, and his demented overnight posts from the bowels of gambling casino IT hell made me how… Read full post »

     Today is the fourth anniversary of my first comment on Open Salon (on a hysterical post by Tequila and Donuts).
     I strongly doubt there'll be a fifth.
     That has much to do with the long-term technical issues, of course, and the r
…

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The Grey Cup (Wikicommons)

     And so it's down to this.
     Sunday, after an 18-game regular season and two playoff games, the Beast-in-the-East Toronto Argonauts will face the Best-in-the-West Calgary Stampeders for… Read full post »

"For Lake Ontario and Niagara regions, Toronto and Hamilton cities: Rain tonight. Cloudy, with occasional showers Saturday. Little change in temperature. Winds north 40 to 50 mph (64 to 80 km/h) this evening, decreasing overnight to northwest 30 mph on Saturday."

   Ralph Mayville   

     There are damned few of them left, and not many of those who are will be fit enough to make it to Washington this week for the award of a long-overdue honour: the Congressional Gold Medal.
     They're/… Read full post »

 
     Michael Connelly, novelist and former crime reporter, makes occasional reference in his books to an Edward Hopper print called "Nighthawks", which shows three customers and a cook in an all-night diner. The street outside is deserted.
     It capture… Read full post »

     Her Majesty's Government doesn't like it, but Alan Turing simply won't stay buried.
     The British computing and mathematical genius, who died mysteriously of cyanide poisoning in 1954, was convicted of gross indency in 1952 for engaging in homos/…

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     Every one of you reading this owes a huge debt to a man born 100 years ago today, and who died far too young.
     Alan Turing was his name, and he was an eccentric mathematical and computer genius.
  &nbs… Read full post »

"And everything looks worse in black and white...."                                         … Read full post »

     For most Americans, about the only memorable thing to/… Read full post »

     Lady Nancy Astor, the first woman elected to/…

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     You had to have been part of it to know what it was really like. This story is true. George was real, the equipment was real, the circumstances were real. Don't get me wrong, I loved it all passionately -- but we were the lowest form of life at the… Read full post »

     When  James Chaney Palms showed up at the Essex Scottish Regiment's recruiting office to volunteer for the Second World War, they say he was wearing riding boots.
     It might have been expected from an irrepressible young man who was the offspring of… Read full post »

     Not many people know about Ed Kennedy today, but on May 7, 1945, his name was on a dispatch from France announcing Germany's unconditional surrender.

     It was the biggest scoop of the Second World War, and it got Kennedy turfed out of Europe and fired… Read full post »

     One of the few vivid memories I have of high school is sitting in a hot crowded gym listening to Prime Minister John Diefenbaker give one of his characteristically bombastic speeches.
     I retain nothing of what he said. I do remember his reaction when a… Read full post »

 

 

 

"It was Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific on parade. I thought then ... that in those few minutes I witnessed the birth of a nation."

    It's not… Read full post »

 

 

     I almost lost it. Just the one time.
     It was when the trumpeter blew "The Last Post", the traditional bugle call that marks the end of the military day and which is now played during Remembrance services. But he wouldn't have appro…

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     When I decided last summer to take up motorcycling again, the first book I pulled from my depleted reference shelf was Melissa Holbrook Pierson's  The Perfect Vehicle.
     I'd read the book several times and was invar/… Read full post »

 

 

     The cold has seeped into my felt-lined boots, winkled its way around my ears and down my neck. My fingers are stupid with it, and I'm shivering. Mostly it's the temperature and wind chill.
     I'm wearing a scarf, watchcap and army… Read full post »

     I usually refrain from commenting on U.S. politics. After all, I'm not an American, and even though I'm a regular on Fark.com's politics tab, I have only a vague idea about how presidents are elected (except evil scads of money are involved).

     And anyw… Read full post »

      It was 97 years ago tonight, Christmas Eve, that two armies faced each other in hastily dug trenches in the mud of France and Flanders. The opening salvos of the First World War had been fired, and the race to outflank each other had ended in stalemate.… Read full post »

 

 

 

 "... 124, 126, 128 ... The dotted white lines are almost a solid streak a few inches below my left foot. ... A great surge of sheer joy electrifies me, adrenaline a wire in my blood, a 560-pound flesh-and-blood, steel-and-alloy, fire-spitting arrow shafting through… Read full post »