To thine own self be true

another Bill Cosby sexual abuse lawsuit; this time by 9 women!

The product called “Unstopable”.
You do know, of course, it’s long been correctly spelled “Unstoppable” with 2 p’s.

“LOCK HIM UP!”

Archibald Lampman (1861-1899)

1967: I first encountered some Lampman poems in a gr. 12 anthology of English classics. The poem below had a rustic charm to it like a Cornelius Krieghoff painting. It immediately struck me as a realistic portrait of Winnipeg and Canadian winters.

Many years later I went in search of more Lampman, finding the hefty 1900 edition of Archibald Lampman’s Poems edited by another Canadian poet-friend Duncan Campbell Scott. It has pretty much everything Lampman wrote before his early death; certainly his best works. Scott gobsmacked CanLit enthusiasts 43 years later by collecting some unpublished poems in At the Long Sault and Other New Poems by Archibald Lampman.

Among the Millet, the book pictured above, was Lampman’s first published work (1888) and when I went looking for this rare title, I located and acquired an even rarer signed copy dedicated to his Ottawa friend, walking companion, and painter Charles Moss!.

In retrospect, I would say Lampman was Canada’s top nature poet before Robert Service at the turn of the century, and Newfoundland’s E.J. Pratt beginning in the 1920s. His best poems remain “At the Long Sault”, “Heat”, “Morning on the Lievre (a popular classic olde NFB title–to view, Google “Morning on the Lievre”, found on YouTube), “The City of the End of Things”, “The Frogs”, “To a Millionaire”, “Midnight”, “Solitude”, “A Thunderstorm”, “Ambition”, “Winter Uplands”, “Winter Evening”, “Life and Nature”, and many of the nature sonnets.

The 5 poems recited in the above video:

(Birney, when he lived in Banff, mountain-climbing in the 1920s.)

The Great Canadian Poem, “David” by Earle Birney, written in 1941 during WWII. Read by the teacher in my grade 5 class in 1960. A narrative classic, easy-to-visualize even in grade 5, written with wondrous mountainous imagery.

1. John McCrae–immortalized by “In Flanders Fields” (a WWI poem written before he died) every Remembrance Day.

2. Robert Service–older generations will remember him for his 1900esque Gold Rush poems: “The Cremation of Sam McGee” and “The Shooting of Dan McGrew”, written when he was a bank teller for CIBC in Dawson. Afterward, fabulously rich from his early poems, he retired to a chateau in France.

The instant making of an icon. Simply amazing!
Sinking a 72 foot (!) putt (certainly his longest ever) in a long playoff, Nick magically erased a 69-year (!) drought for Canadian winners in the national tournament.            Canadian golf continues its best year ever on the PGA since Mike Weir won the Master’s.

An old, ugly theme resurfacing recently with the outlandish 7 deaths at Churchill Downs before the 2023 Kentucky Derby. “They shoot horses, don’t they?”–an old quote with more than a grain of truth about it.

The Jockey Club estimates 333 deaths from 275,434 starts a year. Another estimate is that 2,000 racing horses die a year during races, training, or resting in their stalls.

A recent New York Times article expose, “At Churchill Downs, Humans Failed Horses Again”, makes for shocking reading. Like boxing, this sport needs to be rethought and reorganized.

You know that cynicism and neglect have set in when you read one expert saying “There’s always going to be a certain level of killing in horseracing and they know it. It’s almost like they have accepted that this is the cost of doing business.”

Danielle Smith still denying facts, truth, and science by refusing to blame the Alberta wildfires on climate change. Very Republican in attitude, approach, and unbelief. There will be many Albertans who will continue to distrust her; she is a liar and plays too many ignorant and stupid games with people’s heads.

The 4 Colombian kids rescued after 40 days in the jungle following a plane crash that killed their mother. Miraculous survival tale.