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Mortality redux...

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In my father, I observed mildness of temper, and unchangeable resolution in the things which he had determined after due deliberation; and no vainglory in the things men call honours; and love of labour and perseverance...

I was thinking of those lines from Marcus Aurelius today as I sat and watched my father in his...



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Reflections on mortality

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Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas wrote those lines in an address - more properly a villanelle - to his dying father, in 1951. I had reason to recall that poem when I visited my father in hospital...



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Sudoku madness

I woke up in the middle of the night with swaths of numbers swirling in my brain like the arms of a spiral galaxy. And at the centre was one integer.

“Eight,” I said aloud and sat upright. The cat tucked against my legs growled his displeasure and moved to the centre of the bed.

“Can’t be eight,” my wife muttered from her...



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Where is Che now that we need him?

Maybe it's simple nostalgia, but it seems to me the world was a lot better off when the Soviet Union was around.

When the USSR was the main enemy of our (allegedly) free and democratic society, we struggled to measure ourselves against its yardstick. If the USSR claimed to have the best chess players, we had to beat them with...



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Musings on municipal politics

I spent several years in the media pontificating on how to run a community. I critically assessed every decision of council, then handed down my judgment on How Things Should Have Been Done in an editorial or a column.

Like most back-seat drivers, I always found it easier to tell others how to do their jobs, rather than...



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Desert island top 10 list

If you could take no more than 10 of each of the following items, which would accompany you if you had to spend a year in a retreat, a vacation off the beaten path, or stranded on a desert island?

Sure, it's sophomoric psychology, perhaps (how appropriate on the Net!), but our choices give us insight into what we value and...



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Intrawest in Zihua - reprint

Nestled against the sharply rising cliff that borders Zihuatanejo Bay is a new resort in the final stages of completion. It’s a small development, only 91 units, but it’s exceptional in many ways beyond mere size.

This is the new Club Intrawest destination, a shared vacation resort with an allotment of hotel space (66 units),...



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Jeeves and Wooster

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse of late, enjoying the Jeeves Omnibus Vol. 2 and Blandings Castle in particular. What drew me back to P.G., after so many years since my last read of him, was finding one of his works at a yard sale (I fail to see how anyone can sell or dispose of books, but it's fortunate for me they...



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Your call is important to us...

Nowhere has such an egregious lie been promulgated than "your call is important to us." Jean Chretien's "We will rescind the GST" pales in comparison. Even the grand whopper of the era, George Dubya's "We're in Iraq because of the weapons of mass destruction" is little more than a passing...



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Our past haunts us

There's no place to hide on the Internet.

I was doing a little gratuitous searching for my own name today to find our where it might stand on the ratings and I found a list of computer articles I wrote in the 1980s for Antic (like my...




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