ONCE AGAIN, I am rocking the achy, fevery, too-tired-to-move-around thing. I should probably cook some real food, but meh. The good news is that, if a bag of Moritz Icy Squares and two teaspoons of horseradish can cure an infection, I should be fine real soon. If this is not a cure, then at least it was lunch and we’ve all learned something scientific about infections and their relationship to Icy Squares and two teaspoons of Armoracia rusticana.
All posts by Wayne K. Spear
Inside the Glamorous Life of an Author
TODAY I MET my book about residential schools — called … um … Residential Schools — for the first time. For that reason alone it was a good day, and I wasn’t even sure if I’d be up for it, since I spent a good part of yesterday in bed with a fever, dreaming about the apocalypse. Or at least I think it was the apocalypse. It could have just been about the publishing industry. Haha! Ever funny that one.
Really, Isn’t It Time I Had A Lifestyle Empire?
THAT POOR GWYNETH PALTROW, and her terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. Only it’s more like months now, of Martha Stewart using code to trash her in editorials, and Chris Martin dating Jennifer Lawrence, and having her part in a movie taken by Nicole Kidman, and the Paltrow lifestyle business losing 1.6 million dollars. Or maybe that’s pounds, and not the kind Gwyneth is trying to lose on her kale juice, carrot soup and balsamic-miso-root-salad diet. Rumour is she’s either trying to get fit for a movie role, or she’s detoxing from a martini she had a couple weeks ago. I have a good martini detox, btw, and I call it another martini.
Apparently I’m rich, but you should buy my new book anyways
MONEY. Paul McCartney says it can’t buy him love, but Paul McCartney complaining about not being able to buy love is like Paris Hilton lamenting that she can’t smooth-talk her way into a West Hollywood restaurant. And my point here is: where do I sign up to have Paris Hilton problems? Just point me to the office and I’ll be on my way, and thanks.
Approval is a Funny Thing
MY FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD son probably wouldn’t approve of me mentioning him in print, so it’s a good thing this is about my friend Wally’s fourteen-year-old son. To those of you who think I am making up Wally and his son, I have two words: plausible deniability. That’s something I learned from a former American President who may or may not have been from Arkansas—it all depends upon what the meaning of the word Arkansas is. Or I’ll just say I was in the bathroom during that meeting, and I don’t remember anything, which I also learned from a former US President whose son was also a former US President.
Let’s Put On Our Science Hats
THE OTHER DAY the United Nations released a report on global climate change, whose title I don’t recall but I’ll guess is something like OMG We Are So Screwed People, and it concludes that:
– the Earth’s climate has warmed at a rate faster than any other time in the past 800,000 years
– it is 95% certain that global climate warming is anthropogenic
– if global greenhouse gas (CO2) emissions are not reduced to zero by the end of this century, we will miss the below-two-degree-celsius target we need to meet if we’re to avoid volatile and catastrophic weather events.
Okay, now for the rest of this you’ll need to put on your science hat. You have a science hat, right? Good! I’ll wait here until you’re ready.
Coffee Talk
HOWDY, and thanks for dropping by! And what a week it’s been! You can tell I’m right about this by all these exclamation marks! Or maybe what’s happening here is that I’ve managed to get all the punctuation my friend Shelagh Rogers is not using today …
… and I have no idea why, but I’ll be sure to ask her and report back. Er, I mean, I’LL BE SURE TO REPORT BACK!!!
Anyways, people, this is the part of my little blog where we pour ourselves a beverage and talk about the issues of the day. So here we go (!)
Someone Needs to Teach Me a Lesson by Sending Me to Malta
NOT FAR FROM where I live there’s a neighbourhood called “Little Malta.” And in the Little Malta neighbourhood, there’s a travel agency with posters in the windows promoting travel to—you guessed it—Malta. I used to chuckle when I passed the Little Malta travel agency, not because I think there’s something wrong with Malta. More like I don’t think very much of anything about Malta. I mean, apart from Maltesians and Maltaphiles and Maltists, if those are even words, who does?
Don’t Do Drugs, Young People. That Is MY Job.
ACCORDING TO the not-very-helpful stuff I’ve read, I’m either a Baby Boomer or a Generation Xer, and that’s because I was born in the year that one ends and the other begins, which is also the best year in human history. I’m not going to explain why 1965 is the best year ever, and not only because it was the year I was born—although, really, what more could you possibly need? It’s like explaining all the many reasons why pizza is great: number one is gobs of oozy cheese, and number two is who cares, give me a slice NOW.
E-cigarettes? Kids, Cigarettes Were Better When They Were Acoustic
OH, LORDY, THE OLDEN days. Gather round, kids: grandpa is going to tell you allaboutsem.
The moving pictures. They were all black-and-white, just how we liked ’em. Take Humphrey Bogart. He was strong and smart, and not only did he know what was right, he did it, too! Every man wanted to be like ol’ Bogart, which is why men wore fedoras and trench coats and spent their time on the Moroccan tarmac, in the fog, waiting for Ingrid Bergman. Yeah, now that you mention it, it does sound creepy.
How Hard Could It Be to Have a Billion Twitter Followers?
OKAY, first of all. So I joined the Twitter around February, nine months ago. That means I’ve been on it long enough to make a baby. Which I guess means that I have made a tweets baby, or maybe it’s a Twitter baby, because premise-conclusion is how logic works and you can’t argue with it. Because it’s logic. Anyways, I’m thinking that when my baby grows up, all the other kids are going to call her “twit,” which is so wrong. But that’s for another post.
Remembering Tom Magliozzi (1937–2014)
IT’S BEEN SO LONG now, I don’t remember exactly when I discovered Car Talk. But I know what got me hooked immediately, likely around twenty years ago: the infectious laugh of Tom Magliozzi. He and his brother Ray had already by then perfected their schtick—a couple self-deprecating shmucks, fumbling their way through a lousy radio show that brought embarrassment to the NPR management.
Today I Answer Questions from My Blog’s Spam Folder
Letters, oh I get letters. But mooostly I get SPAM. Lots of thousands of hundreds of lots of spam. So, you know, when life hands you a blog folder choc-full-o’ lemons, what do you do? You make artisan organic gluten-free Lemon Spamade! Cos that’s the ri-dic-u-lous kind of society that we’ve become! (Kidding.)
K!—time for the spam questions, peoples.
Terrorism vs. Mental Illness: I Say Bring on the Debates
IN AN OCTOBER 30, Ottawa Citizen column (“Terrorism vs. Mental Illness: a Totally Bogus Debate”), Terry Glavin sketches out the respective positions and concludes that, whatever one’s view—that recent murders of Canadian soldiers were an act of terrorism, or that they were the work of mental illness—the current Parliament lacks a capacity to confront either.
A Picture. A Thousand Words.
OTTAWA, 1999: my partner’s uncle shows me the program of a reunion, several years earlier, of Fort Erie Secondary School. Leafing through, I see a photo of a rugby team, taken in the year 1932-1933—the fourth of the school’s operations. In the background, the familiar school building. I discover my grandfather, Alfred Spear, in the front row, second from the right.
Journalism, Essays, Broadcasting, Books 