When travelling to historic Burritts Rapids, Ontario from Ottawa (via Donnelly Drive or Dwyer Hill Road), one of the first landmarks you’ll see is Christ Church (Anglican), with an adjoining cemetery in the back. The parish formed in 1822, while construction on the church began in 1831, and was completed…

The following was originally posted in 2015 on my old blog, which itself now exists purely for archival purposes. While written at a time when I was much further to the left on the political spectrum, I continue to stand by what I said then, regardless of what some of…

I’m not the first to say it, but the unfolding Depp v. Heard defamation trial is serving to further expose the infantile and misguided nature of the “#BelieveAllWomen” sloganeering that arose from the “#MeToo” movement. Seeing Amber Heard’s narrative fall apart in real time underscores the hastiness of the knee-jerk condemnation Johnny Depp faced when she first accused him of domestic abuse, as well as the insanity of the de rigueur tendency to conflate mere accusation with actual guilt, presumably in the name of identity…

Something cool happened over the past month, or rather it was a confluence of cool things. As I have written previously, I recently got my diet and exercise groove back while also starting to make more headway in processing the loss of my mother. This kinda/sorta coincided with the beginning of Great Lent (itself the coolest of cool things), which for me means going vegan until…

By early September 2021, I had been feeling like William the Conqueror. I was months into a fitness and dietary regime that saw me continuously shedding pounds, and getting almost within striking distance of my goal weight. Physically and mentally, I felt like I had energy and self-discipline I had never known. Self-improvement had become a compulsion, seemingly with a will and momentum of its own. In short, it felt like I had reprogrammed myself in a way that simply eliminated negative habits and imprinting from my inner algorithms.

1. I am looking out the master bedroom window on this evening in early June. It’s not light anymore but it’s not dark yet, either. From Dad’s bedroom window I watch the younger neighborhood kids trying to squeeze in as much silliness and running around as they can before they get…

A few days ago, I decided that I would like to transfer a large archive of files from one computer (running OpenBSD 7.0) to another (running Ubuntu 21.04). The main reason for this was simply that I needed to clear some space on the hard drive. My first course of action was to do the file transfer via removable media, in this case a 32gb usb stick, which didn’t go so well. After issuing cp -R $HOME/archive /mnt/ from the command line, and then finding something else to do while the machine did it’s thing, I…

A recent article in Business Insider does much to betray the moral panic that has characterized media coverage of Donald Trump since that fateful day in 2015 when he announced his candidacy. In his November 13 piece, Trump took a victory lap after a woman who accused him of sexual assault dropped her defamation lawsuit against him, Thomas Colson writes in response to a statement by Trump spokesperson Liz Harrington in the wake of former The Apprentice contestant Summer Zervos having dropped…