In my latest National Post column I say apologies are nice, at least some of them, but what really matters is whether like Scrooge the person who claims to see the error of their ways leads a different life afterward.

“In another illustration of dwarfed ambition, Whitby bills itself as ‘Durham’s Business Centre.’”

Christie Blatchford in National Post November 25, 2000

“Ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got no control over ‘cause, if you ain’t got no control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’. And it ain’t no sense worryin’ about things you got control over ‘cause, if you got control over ‘em, ain’t no sense worryin’.”

U.S. baseball player Mickey Rivers, quoted in The Write File Quarterly Issue #5, Summer 1995

"That is the worst idea... since Abraham Lincoln said, ‘I'm sick of kicking around the house all day, let's go take in a show.’"

Edmund Blackadder in Black Adder Goes Forth [it turns out he actually called it “the worst idea in the history of entertainment” according to https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0526713/characters/nm0000100 - such are the perils of checking quotations].

In my latest National Post column I say if we let our leaders get away with obvious lies it will prove fatal to self-government. And sorry, I’m two days late posting it so the column is missing the latest greasy twists and turns, but they only add to the list of obvious lies told after another.

“A person who never travels always praises his own mother’s cooking.”

A Baganda proverb “roughly translated” according to Philip Turner, who spent 10 years as a missionary in Uganda, in First Things June-July 2005.

“I no longer think of it as [writer’s] block. I think that is looking at the problem from the wrong angle. If your wife locks you out of the house, you don’t have a problem with your door.”

Anne Lamott Some Instructions on Writing and Life (her point being that you’re not blocked from getting something out that is inside you, you’re empty)