Monthly Archives: January 2012

I wrote a book review and it got published! Wahoo! This will be relevant later, when I talk about trampolines and asphalt paving.

I invite you to compare the delicacies around my place: With the lovely meals that my cousin — who has a one-year-old! — prepares. Something about grad school is not right, and I think it might be the dinosaur sprinkle … Continue reading →

Once upon a time, I was the recipient of a wacky Canadian email forward. I am not usually fortunate enough to get email forwards about all the things that are wrong with Canada from the caps lock perspective, so this … Continue reading →

A recent incident reminded me of an amusing third-hand anecdote: Once upon a time, a Canadian lady was walking home from the grocery store in the rain in Kingston, Ontario. As you may or may not know, Dan Akroyd is … Continue reading →

… (other than Anne of Green Gables, of course) is the following anecdote from my Canadian Political Science class at McGill: Professor: America gets ‘Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.’ We get the Commonwealth expression ‘POGG,’ which means that … Continue reading →

But perhaps a meta-Ted-Talk is even neater?

If there are two great tastes that taste great together, they’ve gotta be cookies and ethnically-based origin stories. To wit, in Solomon Gursky Was Here, Mordecai Richler relates the following tale: “The first man made by the Great Being was a … Continue reading →

You may know him as the illustrator of The Phantom Tollbooth, author of The Great Comic Book Heroes, or Village Voice cartoonist. Or, if you are one of the students in my class who were (figuratively, but almost literally) born … Continue reading →

This post is not meant to belittle the experience of Stockholm Syndrome by actual captives, but rather to celebrate how friendship shakes me out of my occasional adoption of Canada’s / Canadian’s holier-than-thou attitude toward the United States / Real … Continue reading →

And all year, really! Well worth watching this video, which challenges everyone to limit their sitting and sleeping to 23.5 hours per day. Courtesy of EM.