Some of my neighbours have really scary stuff in front of their houses. Most of it has to do with Hallowe’en. But then there is this. What is it? And, more importantly, what the flaming heck is it doing in my residential neighbourhood? The canoe and the propane tanks make me think it is someone’s […]
Information is coming at us from all sides. We get news from traditional media, and news from non-traditional media. We get tidbits of stories from our friends and family in person, and we get them from strangers on Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/QAnon. Some sources clearly have a bias, some claim to have no bias, and some have a […]
The process for finding and meeting a psychologist isn’t hard, but when you are depressed it seems like a pathway strewn with obstacles. At each roadblock, it is easy to just give up. Having overcome some of those setbacks, I would strongly encourage anyone who is feeling unusually despondent to stick with it. With the […]
There are eighteen churches of various Christian denominations within a mile of my house. Here are numbers sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, plus one that used to be a church but is no longer, I think. It’s hard to tell. The principal character in Candide, by Voltaire, is travelling the cruel and savage world when he […]
Apparently, this part of Edmonton was once in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the greatest number of churches. I cannot prove this because I can’t find that record on their website, but I believe it. I have been photographing the churches within a one-mile walking distance from my house and so far […]
I have previously posted some pictures of the many churches in my neighbourhood that are representative of the many different nationalities and faiths of the people who originally populated, and currently live in, Edmonton. Here are a few more.
The residential area close to the core of the city of Edmonton was first developed about a hundred years ago. Some of the houses in my street date back to the 1920s, and they were originally occupied by immigrants to Canada. Each group of newcomers settled close to each other and each new group built […]
When we think about courage we are likely to imagine a big noble action: the athlete who performs a spectacular jump/dive/Hail Mary pass; the subordinate who stands up to the bad boss; the soldier who sacrifices their own safety for their platoon. Movies love this kind of courage, and it is often front-page news in […]
Covid-19 has given us all a new experiment in living. We are all (or most of us) trying to maintain social distances, wear masks, and wash our hands for twenty seconds. As the weeks and months have passed, we have gotten better at this. We now automatically make more space when we pass people on […]
A woman I don’t know just gave me the finger. The one-finger salute. She flipped me the bird. She flipped me off. She was walking past my driveway in the alley behind my house, and the security system whistled to let her know she had been seen. In response, she made that gesture towards the […]
A couple of weeks ago, when I was walking past the Northlands Urban Farm, I saw a woman leaving the farm with flowers peaking out from the top of her backpack. I asked her about the farm and if she had her own allotment; she explained that it was a shared community project. I wasn’t […]
Today I read something that made me stop and think. The behavioural economist Dan Ariely said: Behavioral biases affect everyone, including those of us who study them. Biases are like optical illusions: Even when we know what we’re seeing isn’t real, we can’t help seeing it. from Ask Ariely This goes a long way to […]
I had a long telephone conversation with a police officer yesterday. I didn’t call him, he called me. No, I was not in trouble but he did want more information about a report I had submitted online. We have had periodic problems with people who roam the streets and alleys at night looking for things […]
When you think about wings, what comes to mind? Birds? Butterflies? Angels? Hospital buildings? I’m pretty sure you weren’t thinking about politics. So, why is it that we are all being shuffled off into either a left wing or a right wing of whatever politics are available to us? It doesn’t matter which country you […]
No matter which country you look at, the politics are terrible. I mean, really awful. We could blame it on greed, or lust for power, or the Internet, or fake news, or whatever cause you choose. It doesn’t matter. It’s all bad. There is a hierarchy of bad governments with totalitarianism as probably the worst, […]
The City of Edmonton decided this week that everyone should wear masks indoors in public places as of August 1. There are some exceptions, such as when eating and drinking, and for those with medical conditions that make wearing masks impossible, but for the rest of us when going to the store, masks will be […]
America, I love you but some of your police actions are not helping you. Today I read about police officers in plain clothes grabbing people off the streets, putting them into unmarked vans, and driving away. How is that any different from a kidnapping? And, more to the point, how is the average citizen supposed […]
The first pecking order I became aware of was in housing. My family lived in a semi-detached house (known as a duplex in north America). At some point I began to realize that I went to school with some people who lived in detached houses, some who lived in council houses (social housing), and some […]
A little while ago, Mark and Patricia McCloskey pointed their guns at some protesters in St. Louis. One of those guns was a semi-automatic rifle, a weapon of war. The protesters were walking together past the McCloskey house towards the home of their city’s mayor in order to show their support for the Black Lives […]
