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Who killed Google+? A fable
May 21, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed I like that! Once upon a time, there was a humongus privacy-challenged social network giant called Facebook. The giant, who was lonely and craved company, swooped down, scooped up all the humans from around the world, and...
Senior? Hell no
May 7, 2012 / 5:00 am
I had a woman complain to me that she hates it when people used the word ‘old’ in reference to people who are, in fact, old. She told me that those people (whippersnappers?) need to be ‘educated’ on the proper term, which, she insisted, is the word...
Pole dancing moxie
Apr 23, 2012 / 5:00 am
A month or so ago, I wrote a column about the game of chess. It wasn’t really so much about chess as it was about my surprise at discovering a game I really love, yet one I had ignored for so many (too many) years. I regret all the years that I could have been playing, and...
Terror! Mayhem! Destruction!
Apr 9, 2012 / 5:00 am
Please be calm and sitting down when I tell you this: it is tax time again. Tax time can be an unnerving time for people, but fortunately, I enjoy a very close relationship with my accountant, even though (or maybe because?) she has never actually met me. I send...
Meeting da Catester
Mar 26, 2012 / 5:00 am
It’s hard to get Cate Eales to settle down long enough for an interview, however we finally managed to Skype some time together. As many of you know, Cate writes a weekly column for Castanet called ‘Getting Along With Your Computer’. Of course if you have a Mac...
Dishwasher personality appraisal test
Mar 12, 2012 / 5:00 am
As Jim Morrison of the Doors once told us (in the event that we hadn’t noticed for ourselves), people are strange. I’d say Morrison managed the understatement of the year with that one. Yet even though strangeness is rampant, people don’t think they themselves are strange, they...
Checkmate
Feb 27, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed No longer chess-less. Chess is a game that I’ve managed to dodge my entire life. Now, don’t stop reading if you happen to be indifferent to chess,...
Today
Feb 13, 2012 / 5:00 am
Today I took my old dog Angus outside for a pee in the driveway, after which I was going to head out for a bicycle ride, the only reasonable thing to do on such a spectacular surprise of a sunny day in winter. These days the driveway is about as far as Angus can make it for walking....
Post-apocalyptic Castanet
Jan 30, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed The evil-eye squint. I'm sitting here completely out of my element (you thought I was going to say completely out of my head, didn’t you), because I am typing on my grandson's computer...
Die: update Facebook status
Jan 26, 2012 / 6:00 am
Death happens to everybody sooner or later, or so they say. And until recently, this pretty much meant the end of you in all senses of the word. You dropped dead, got planted, then people stood around the grave and said stuff about you. “Oh my, how sad”, or “Nothing...
Dancing with Roy Henry Vickers
Jan 16, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Roy Henry Vickers Back in 2006, I did an interview with one of Canada’s most beloved artists, Roy Henry Vickers. I was doing a lot of interviews in those days,...
Thinnest ice
Jan 12, 2012 / 5:00 am
Bored indoor cyclists have been asking me, “How the hell do you stay unbored while cycling indoors? Isn’t it the most boring thing in the world to do?” “Why yes,” I tell them. “It is.” There is absolutely...
Small stuff vs my dad
Jan 5, 2012 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed I trusted this man not to drop me on my head? What was I thinking? In December of 2006, hundreds of trees in Vancouver’s Stanley Park were uprooted in a particularly brutal windstorm. I have to wonder if any children were...
On top of the world
Dec 29, 2011 / 5:00 am
According to the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar, the world is supposed to end in 2012, but I think people will still want to celebrate on New Year’s Eve. Of course, the way people celebrate often involves over-indulgences of some kind, be it alcohol or food, and heaven knows...
The handwritten letter
Dec 22, 2011 / 5:00 am
Ha ha, or should I say ho ho ***ity ho, here’s your THIRD Christmas column. It will never end. Being the season known as . . . well, as Season, I decided to send handwritten letters to all my friends and family. Not typewritten letters, no no, handwritten letters....
Reinventing Christmas
Dec 15, 2011 / 5:00 am
Welcome to your second Christmas column. I can’t help it. I’m just that way. Christmas is about tradition, and tradition is sometimes very cool. Sometimes though, after doing the exact same thing year after year in the name of ‘tradition’,...
North Pole(arization)
Dec 8, 2011 / 5:00 am
We are now fully launched into the month of December, which means it is ‘way past time to torment you with a Christmas column. Why would I want to torment you? Well, because being tormented is pretty much part of the Christmas way of life now....
Are you a whiner or a stoic
Dec 1, 2011 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Moan, groan, drip, snivel, whine. If you have kids, you’re sick. No, not sick for having chosen to have children, although that might be a good subject to discuss another day. What I mean is that if...
What the . . . where's the sun?
Nov 24, 2011 / 5:00 am
Photo: Contributed Shiver, shiver. Winter does not officially arrive until December, but by November most years, something suspiciously resembling winter has usually shown itself, at which point people will say things like, “Oh look at...
Winterized bicyclist
Nov 17, 2011 / 5:00 am
Last year I was totally fired up to ride my bicycle throughout winter. “Why not?” I thought, feeling smug and obnoxiously self-righteous. I was pretty sure that only wussies stopped cycling because of a little bad weather, so I sneered at the idea of using the gym or...
The views expressed are strictly those of the author and not necessarily those of Castanet. Castanet presents its columns "as is" and does not warrant the contents.
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