Posts in Arts & culture
Words Worth Noting - January 13, 2022

“Writing shortly after the Roman disaster at Adrianople in 378 AD, the able historian Ammianus recited a similar list of disasters, and summed up by saying that Rome had come back from all of them and, given political will and good fortune, would do so again. Thirty years later, the Visigoths were in Rome.”

Eric Morse in Globe & Mail August 17 2004

Words Worth Noting - January 12, 2022

“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”

The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

Words Worth Noting - January 8, 2022

“Now I wish to say I will never call any doll a liar, being at all times a gentleman, and for all I know, Bobby Baker may really think The Brain is handsome and romantic, but personally I figure if she is not lying to him she is at least a little excited when she makes such a statement to The Brain.”

Damon Runyon “The Brain Goes Home” in The Best of Damon Runyon

We all think we're larrikins, but...

In my latest Loonie Politics column I suggest the reason Canadians have been docile in the face of harsh and often arbitrary pandemic measures is that we are becoming a nation of sheep who bleat “I am a rebel” in unison because the government told us to.