It was the purchase of a used pickup truck that took me into the shadows of the new reality that grips us in the 21st century. The truck was a beater, as the expression goes. That expression covers a vehicle which is far from new but is something that runs okay. It is just used to “beat around”. The truck was a decade old so the first thing I needed to do was give it a good cleaning up. Up I went to the vacuum place and car wash up The Shore. By way of context let me share the observation that the price of using the vacuum machine at the car wash has gone from $2 to $3 which is astounding beca ..read more

They are the ghosts of another generation. I hear the sounds of their play sometimes. It is the sound of skates on new ice and the sound of pucks rattling off wooden boards in old rinks. These are the sounds hockey players now gone to dust who were hired to jobs in Newfoundland that allowed them to make a living with their hockey skills long after their dreams of the NHL ended. Before the St. John’s Maple Leafs ever stepped on the ice at the old Memorial Stadium a kind of semi-pro hockey was played in this province. The names of the players are a litany of very skilled hockey men, many of whom ..read more

For the third time in the last six weeks, I put pen to paper to mark the passing of someone. I asked of wife Judy, who is my editor-in-chief, why this was happening, and I was writing so often of death. She said there was a simple explanation. I was just living too long while those around me were going to their eternal reward. With that as background, here it goes. Former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney was buried on the right day of the week for spectacle. The funeral was on a Saturday which, in practical terms, made for maximum coverage and guaranteed a big television audience. I watc ..read more

Religion when I was growing up in Newfoundland is certainly not part of the much talked about ‘good old days’. So much of our history was a divide along religious lines. Many won’t want to remember this because it isn’t comfortable, but I can tell you some horror stories. Religion was part of sports. It was part of education. It was part of everything. When I think back now, I am reminded that in this poverty-stricken province, in education, we struggled with various religions running their own school systems. What a dumb idea. My God the money wasted in various cities and towns constructing d ..read more

Joe Smallwood believed in the democratic process. Well, sort of. Once following a by-election that the Liberals lost, Smallwood said to the assembled press the next day that the voters in the district had exercised their God-given right to be wrong. That is a good introduction to pointing out the developing political situation in the United States. There is more to Donald Trump than a name. That is a punchline to a joke about orange hair or his many court dates. Donald J. Trump is the duly elected Republican candidate for President of the United States in the upcoming November election. He did ..read more

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