Unquestionably, Kate Middleton is being ridiculously trolled to the nth degree. Ludicrous crazy harassment of a public figure. *Frankly much ado about much ado about nothing.

My money is on diabolical, egregious Putin and his hitmen using nerve gas or such on Americans in Cuba. Trying it out on innocent people, seeing how many they can poison.

This was an article I wrote on a Friday afternoon, 1967 (gr. 12), hootenany rally. (I was really into folk music by that point.)

I wrote for the school newspaper The Huskian for gr. 10, 11, 12 (1964-67), and started by covering the sports beat for the various teams, sometimes travelling with them to tournaments in Steinbach, M.B. and Grand Forks, North Dakota.

I would receive my assignments on mimeographed paper and deliver articles to the editors’ houses on weekends.

Looking back, that was my first significant writing of any kind, long before I published an article in university, Secondary education–English (1971) about Canadian literature in high schools,  for the Alberta English magazine. The prof, R. Glenn Martin, later a poet-friend, was the editor at the time.

The next big step would be co-creating, co-editing, and co-writing with teacher-friend Glen Kirkland Gage’s Connections series which began with book 1 Imagining, 1980. I truly became a published book author then at the age 0f 30. About 50 textbooks and guides would follow by 2007, which ultimately sold over 1 million copies total and which were used (and still are), variously, in all provinces and territories.

Taking stock/for the record: 30+ years later, surrounded by my books and periodical publications:

1. Frequent illnesses–catching colds and other bugs from students; sometimes losing my voice
2. The treadmill of never-ending marking and report cards. Much worse for senior high English teachers marking batches of essays and other compositions
3. Unnecessary, perpetual useless, ‘make work’ meetings at noon, after school, and on PD days.
4. Feckless, useless administrators, particularly in discipline cases
5. Encroaching technologies: parents phoning through to classrooms, e-report cards (getting worse when I retired)
6. Parent-teacher evenings and open houses: ‘dog and pony shows’
7. Forced extra-curricular expectations, especially after hours
8. (for elementary teachers) paying for learning resources out of pocket and not being reimbursed

A bit breezy and cold (6C), but sunny streets are dry enough to justify pumping up the tires.

Full circle. Riding the bike at 74 always takes me back to my Wallasey St., Winnipeg youth, after I got my old Eaton’s 3 speed glider in the summer of 1958. Went everywhere with that, delivering Tribune newspapers after school on my Wallasey-Thompson route, riding out to East Selkirk one weekend, to the old Winnipeg Arena on a school hr., to Assiniboine Park, and back to when I briefly did drugstore deliveries on snow-covered Portage Ave. in the winter.

was described and prophesied by Graham Greene in this ‘unfunny’ novel nearly 60 years ago.

Again, a case of literature and writers (other e.g., Shakespeare, Yeats, Huxley, Orwell, Bradbury, et al) predicting the dark world we live in now.

Danielle Smith’s flippant solution/’answer’ to the desperate hospital shortage now that the promised city hospital won’t be built despite an ample budget.

(Queen Danielle’s middle finger\Marie Antoinette rejoinder to Edmonton and its populace)

(Daughter’s wabbit into the spirit of things)

(it’s all about the classic Irish folk tunes; 2 great CDs)

(Creme de menthe pie, an old favorite)

(Creme de menthe parfait, a decadent March 17 treat with ice cream; here, maxed out with Oreo ice cream)

The Ultimate St. Patrick’s Day Comedy-Fantasy

they have neglected, ruthlessly dismantled and destroyed health care in the province.

And they are destroying family practice and driving out doctors in our province. Several doctors in our area are shutting down their practices this year, for instance.

Frankly, the only hope to bring back health care and family practice normalcy (if there’s anything left from the rubble) will be to vote in NDP in the next election.

Our lives and any moments or situations you care to name are simply a combination and interaction of three things: process, context, and choice. Life and its many episodes consisting of seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months is nothing more than a process–a long series of never-ending moments that unfold in a person’s life. We talk of life process whether we are describing a man, a pelican, a tree, or the ocean. Process can be applied as a concept to many things: the history of a nation, a procedure such as a medical operation, or a stage in one’s life such as adolescence.

Context is simply the situation one finds oneself in whether one is a child in a day-care centre, a career woman encountering a “glass ceiling” in the work world, or a group of oppressed people within a repressive political regime. Context can be personal, social, political, religious, medical (as in the case of having an illness or condition), and so forth. Context is what we, as individuals, are presented with at any given moment, what we find ourselves in. Sometimes the context is familiar, as in waking up in the morning and making our breakfast. Sometimes it is unfamiliar or unstructured, as in when a concert-goer finds himself being pushed to the front of the stage by an enthusiastic crowd. All contexts frequently require response and choice, especially in the face of obstacles or crisis.

Confronted with the never-ending flow of our days and process, and the fact of similarly morphing contexts, we have but one way to respond—via choice. Some Existentialists suggested that the important thing in life was the fact of personal choice. Victor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist who wrote movingly of World War II concentration camp experiences, said much the same thing about those personal choices we will into being, especially in contexts of conflict and crisis.

To a large extent, our choices finally define us, whether they are ‘good’ or ‘bad.’ If you want to understand others, consider their choices and decisions. What do they choose to do? How have they chosen to live their lives? What other choices might they make or have made? And what, then, of our own choices? How and why do we choose as we do? What do those choices say about us, our values, and beliefs, and the unique individuals we all are? Understanding our choices can move us forward in our lives. As novelist George Eliot once said, “The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.”