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A tempest in an ashtray

03 June 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Social values, downtown-BIA, Collingwood's municipal m...
Last week, Councillor Keith Hull gave a notice of motion that read, "THAT Council of the Town of Collingwood herein petitions the Province of Ontario, Ministry of Health and the Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing to change legislation to permit municipalities across the Province the ability to prohibit smoking in public places that...

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Tags: Collingwood's municipal madness, downtown, smoking 0 Comments


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Vintage ukulele music site online

31 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Music and ukuleles, art, culture and reviews
Finally finished my site for vintage ukulele music, a place where I can write a bit about the music, composers and performers from the 1920s and 30s. And it's a place where I can show off (and sell) my collection of song sheets and song books scanned to PDF. I have developed a real passion for the music of this era since I started playing the...

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Tags: vintage, ukulele, music 0 Comments


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Six months of politics

28 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Election 2010, downtown-BIA, Collingwood's municipal m...
I haven't blogged much about local politics over these first six months of this term. That's because:
In general, it's been uneventful;
In general, everyone's been respectful;
In general, we resolve our differences without rancor or animosity;
In general, meetings are short and speeches shorter;
In general, we recover from our...

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Tags: Collingwood' municipal politics 0 Comments


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Things that go bump in the bank account

25 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Social values, Science, Collingwood life
There's a front page story in this week's Enterprise Bulletin about self-professed ghost hunters looking for a "haunted" house in Collingwood to feature on a new TV series called "Paranormal House Inspection." That really bothered me because it reads like an advertorial on the front page (and equally that the Discovery...

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Tags: psychics, claptrap, superstition, haunted houses, gullibility 3 Comments


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The end of the world, a little earlier than expected...

13 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Spirituality and religion, Social values
Apparently the world will end on October 21, 2011. That's exactly five months after the "rapture", which takes place this month on May 21, when, the site says, Jesus will arrive for his third official visit to this planet.* Judgment Day, apparently, is only a week away. I thought I had at least until December, 2012 to get the...

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Tags: religion, apocalypse, eschatology, rapture 8 Comments


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Buddhism in the West

11 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Spirituality and religion, Social values
I've been reading James Coleman's excellent book, The New Buddhism (Oxford University Press, 2001) of late. Subtitled, The Western Transformation of an Ancient Tradition, it chronicles the many threads of Buddhism on its complex journey into Western culture. Fascinating, thought-provoking stuff, even if the material is a decade old...

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Tags: religion, transformation, Buddhism 0 Comments


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Election results for 2011

03 May 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Federal follies
Conservative: 167 (majority and a stunning win, 39.6% of the popular vote)
NDP: 102 (now the official opposition for the 1st time, 30.6% of the popular vote)
Liberal: 34 (a huge drop and a crushing defeat for Ignatieff and the Libs; 18.9%)
Bloc Quebecois: 4 (collapse, and not even an official party now; 6%)
Green: 1 (first victory, but popular...

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Tags: election 2011, results, national 0 Comments


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The clattering keys grow silent as the curtain falls

27 April 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in technology, Personal reminisence
The typewriter is dead. That news didn't surprise me, but it certainly saddened me.

The clatter of typewriter keys was sweet music to my ears, when I was much younger. I remember banging out stories and poems on my grandfather's ancient Underwood, watching the mechanical arms rise and fall, the letters not quite aligned on the paper. That...

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Tags: writing, reporting, typewriter 0 Comments


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Creationist victory a sad day for American education

22 April 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Science, Pointless legislation, Social values
It's pretty easy to make fun of American education these days. There are viral videos on YouTube that paint a bleak, even frightening, picture of the average American unable to locate Iraq on a world map, unable to identify the name of a country beginning with the letter "U", the religion of Buddhist monks, and so on. Rick Mercer did...

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Tags: America, creationism, evolution, science 3 Comments


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Giant spider fossil found in Mongolia

20 April 2011
Posted by Ian Chadwick in Science
I developed an appreciation of spiders around age 10. I came down with one of those childhood diseases - chicken pox, mumps, or measles, I forget which now - and spent a week in bed. I was a voracious reader even then, but I had only one unread book on hand, a library title taken out for some school project. It was Jean Henri Fabre's 1912...

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Tags: spiders, fossils, science, paleontology 0 Comments



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