Month: November 2009

Still Alive

Apologies for the lack of content over the last little while, and the last week particularly–the preparations for The Big Move have just destroyed whatever slim shards of free time I can normally wrest from my schedule. Since everything is now on the truck and on its way, and I’ll be spending the next three days doing a very gentle… Read more →

The Men That Don’t Fit In

There’s a race of men that don’t fit in, A race that can’t stay still; So they break the hearts of kith and kin, And they roam the world at will. They range the field and they rove the flood, And they climb the mountain’s crest; Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood, And they don’t know how to… Read more →

The end of an era

So, last night was likely my last time as a regular attendee of the Halifax Gentlemen’s Poker Association’s weekly meetings. Since I’ve been pretty consistent about attending these for several years now–I think the first one I went to was just before Sarah was born, as I recall making jokes about having to leave suddenly to rush to the hospital,… Read more →

No Surprise Here

Speaking as someone who’s lifelong love ofSome might say “addiction to”… reading was to some significant degree ignited by regular trips to pick up comics from the used bins at Allison The Bookman, it’s no surprise to me that research shows that kids reading comics “increased their vocabulary and instilled a love of reading”. I’d say there’s a serious degree… Read more →

I drink alone

Well, my plan to try out a couple of interesting beers each night for the six nights kind of fell apart. Primarily this was down to too many nights when my all-day meeting schedule ran over into evening activities. (For the record, the official count was 57 hours of scheduled meetings over 5 days, and that doesn’t include the social… Read more →

Aside

Generally speaking one should not mess around with any kind of major upgrade (operating system, router firmware, web service, etc) while drinking–this was lies madness. WordPress upgrades are so painless though, that I can run one from a hotel room while sustaining a mild buzz.

Julio and religion

A very full day of meetings today, ending with a relatively late working dinner, cut short my beer exploration time tonight. So I only had time to explore one small beer: Saint Bridget’s Porter from the Great Divide Brewing Company. While the bottle describes this as a “Robust Porter” I didn’t find it particularly overwhelming in terms of robustness. That… Read more →

…down by the schoolyard

As is my wont when attending days of endless meetings in the “Boston” office, I’ve made a trip to see Julio and stock up the fridge for an exploration of some interesting looking beers that I haven’t tried before. After today’s marathon meeting session I retired to the hotel and sampled my first selection: Mayflower Porter, from right here in… Read more →

Aside

I have a tab open to the site where you can stream the Angora Napkin cartoon. I was keeping it around to point you guys at it, and explain why you should take a look. But my soon-to-be-comics-pusher Christopher Butcher beat me to the punch, so it’s a lot easier to just point you to his post. (As an aside, in an aside, I met Troy Little when he stopped in to do a signing at Strange Adventures–he did a sketch for me in my Chiaroscuro collection, which book I think I prefer to the Angora Napkin one, not least because it has a decidedly less Ren & Stimpy art style–and he seemed like a totally nice, straight up guy.)

Exceptional In Many Ways

What you’re looking at there are the results of the 2009 Global Peace Index. (The full ranking is available online, as are details of the methodology used.) Canada is #8, and for the third year running is “the most peaceful country in the North and Central America and Caribbean region”. That’s a kind of exceptional result, especially considering our neighbour,… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.