Last week Russia celebrated its biggest public holiday, Victory Day, with tanks, missile launchers, and bluster from President Putin. It’s usually held on May 9th, but was derailed by the pandemic. Nonetheless, Putin insisted it happen because this year marks the 75th anniversary of Russia’s defeat of Nazi Germany. But more so, because it boosted […]
The Plague-Ground – We need a new Best Friend Forever. Read More »
You can scratch and claw and fight and hope and despair, and for years nothing changes. Then one day, everything changes. We are living one of those days now. Malcolm Gladwell called it The Tipping Point, “the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point”. He’s built a career on this 20-year-old belief that
The Plague-Ground – The herd has moved. Read More »
This week, the European Union will ban Americans from traveling there. Why? Because America is the worst country on earth in stopping COVID-19 – and is only getting worse. When Europe opens its borders on Wednesday, the citizens of 11 countries will be able to sip café on the Champs Élysée and float their gondolas
The Plague-Ground – Yanqui Stay Home Read More »
This week in Barcelona, a string quartet played to a full house of plants. The 10-minute concert was put on to reinforce how important art, music and nature are as life opens again across Europe. It was a weird and brilliant idea to give out all the tickets not to people but to plants who
The Plague-Ground – Plants Have Ears Too Read More »
Abuse is awful at the best of times, and these are the worst of times. Whether that abuse is verbal, emotional, physical or sexual, it’s hard to flee when you’re ordered to stay at home – or get sick and possibly die. By mid-April, less than a month after we were all sent home, domestic
The Plague-Ground – Cooped up with someone you dread? Read More »
Especially the most heroic front-liners of all: the nurses. And most especially, the 68,000 nurses working in Ontario hospitals who still haven’t seen a penny of their $4.00 an hour pandemic pay, who are forbidden from taking vacation and whose contract has been put on hold. In May, Premier Ford hailed nurses as the “heroes
The Plague-Ground – IT’S A LOT EASIER TO SAY “HEROES” THAN TO PAY THEM Read More »
Architecture has a new word to describe skyscrapers that are so high they really do scrape the sky. They’re called SuperTalls, and most of them are over 100 storeys. There are no SuperTalls in Canada. Our tallest building is rising 85-storeys at 1 Bloor West in Toronto, which makes it only SuperTall-ish. There’s also a
The Plague-Ground – We’ll Meet Again Read More »
At that moment, the sun was the highest it will be in the Northern Hemisphere this year and it was also The Longest Day. In fact, it was light long past 9:00 p.m. and the sun set not so much in the west, but in the north. Saturday was the summer solstice, the official start
The Plague-Ground – What were you doing at 5:43 p.m. on Saturday? Read More »
Toronto is one of the last places in North America still largely closed by the pandemic. Good. Because saving our lives or saving our economy isn’t an ‘either-or’ thing, though we seem hard-wired to think that way. And lord knows, the loud kid to the south is screaming that it’s time to move on, as
The Plague-Ground – It’s an “and-and” thing. Read More »
In America these days, pride doesn’t cometh before the fall. Lack of pride does. Yesterday, Gallup released a poll that said US National Pride Falls to Record Low. That headline caught me because I’d always thought Americans are the North Star of patriotism. Their own exceptionalism won’t let them be anything but the proudest citizens
The Plague-Ground – Stand Proud. Ok, Sit Proud then. Read More »
Denial constantly evolves in order to fulfill its destiny, which is hiding the truth. One form of denial claims: “I was just following orders,” and we all know what that was hiding. Another is: “I didn’t know.” This short list is in a devastating critique of Trump’s last week by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker.
The Plague-Ground – I Didn’t Know Read More »
Today is 13 weeks exactly since millions of us were told not to come back to our offices and stay home. Three months exactly. One quarter of the year exactly. A quarter of the fiscal. A season of the year. On Friday, March 13th, Jean and I packed our car and headed north to our
The Plague-Ground – What We Didn’t Know Read More »
