Earlier this week the book I was reading wasn't doing it for me and as I sat there on the couch staring off into space my mind started to wander. I started thinking about how old I was and the life I've lived and how it all seemed to pass so fast over the last 64 years. Don't get me wrong. It's been a great life and there's very little I'd change but I was starting to think about my mortality and how my cancer over the last ten years had kind of put a crimp in things. Remember the Who singing "I hope I die before I get old"? There was a time, years ago, I believed that. Not so much anymore. And who can forget that line from the aging, tossed-aside film star Nora Desmond in one of my favourite films Sunset Boulevard; "I am big. It's the pictures that got small". But like Desmond I'm not fooling anyone. Not even myself. I am old. Like when I go to bed. Geez, I'm under the covers, hearing aids removed by 8:30pm. Good thing...
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Baseball's Blue Jays didn't make it to the World Series. They lost their best-of-seven series against the Cleveland Indigenous People. Who? you say. Well, I call them that ever since well-known Canadian Aboriginal activist Douglas Cardinal took them to Ontario court in an effort to prevent them from wearing their "Indians" uniforms and using "Chief Wahoo" as their team logo. I understand Cardinal's sentiments but I don't think teams like the Indians or the Braves or the Kansas City Chiefs for that matter are going to change their names unless it's voluntarily. And I whole-heartedly support a change from such offensive monikers. I'm not a big baseball fan but when Canada's team gets into the playoffs you gotta cheer. I'm more of a National Football League guy. And the NFL isn't without it's offensive team names. For example, how about the Washington Redskins. The Redskins started out in Boston in 1932 and they've remai...
Tom and Jerry were the best of friends. But their fellow Grade sixers were always making fun of them asking where their friends Tweety and Sylvester were. It really riled them that their so-called friends bullied them and referred to them as an animated cat and mouse. They were;t cartoon characters. Or even folksingers. They were anything but. One day in the cafeteria they discussed the problem. "I'd really like to squish those guy" moaned Tom to Jerry one day. "Squish?" said Jerry. "That's a funny word." "It's an onomatopoeia" replied Tom. "On-a what?" said Jerry. "Sounds like something the dog did." "Huh?" said Tom. "You know, 'Spot, on the mat he pee, uh'" blurted Jerry laughing and blowing milk out his left nostril at the lunch table. "No silly, it's a term for a word that imitates a sound." "Burp" said Jerry after a long draw on his milk ...
It was embarrassing. Conrad hadn't had a poop in a week. No matter how hard he tried; no matter how long he sat it just wasn't happening. And he'd eaten enough prunes and ingested enough Benifiber to last a lifetime. After the third day his wife had jokingly started calling him Constipated Conrad. But to Conrad it was no joke. He needed to do something to rid himself of this accursed dilemma. Then in the middle of the night Conrad had awoken doubled over in pain. The build up of bile was becoming unmanageable as was evident in what was happening in his stomach. His wife called 911 and an ambulance was dispatched. Conrad didn't find it nearly as humorous as the ambulance attendants and he suffered through their questions of what he'd eaten and what he'd taken in an effort to break the dam, as it were. (Their words, not mine.) Wheeled into Emergency, Conrad suffered further indignation as the nurse asked him many of the same questions posed by the first re...
Damn, October already. And I'm not ready. Not for the cold, the snow, the sleet. None of it. Maybe I'm rushing things, but fall is definitely in the air as the leaves are starting to turn. So September's come and gone and I'm another 9 books under my belt since August. This brings my total reading this year to 46 books, four shy of my projected 50 for 2016. It was an interesting month for reading, as eclectic as ever. I started out with a four-book bundle under the rubric of Hyperion Cantos by Dan Simmons. This was recommended to me sometime ago by a good friend and I just never got to it until recently. It was a sprawling, science-fiction fantasy and while it took half th month to read was nevertheless quite enjoyable. Next up was the new Ian McEwan novel Nutshell, a fascinating tale told by the fetus in his mother's stomach. I also read Emma Donoghue's latest, The Wonder. She wrote Room, if you'll recall. This one ws very different about a pre-teen...