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Opinion
LOEWEN: Want to experience joy at Christmas? Turn off the TV
Family gatherings can be marvelous measures of familial love and support. The crackle and spark from a well-stoked hearth, the mellow numbing of mind after a few cocktails shared in the proper spirit of the season, the laid-back luxuriating in one’s favourite chair with the soft chatter of folks well-fed -- all of these aspects...
PARKER: The importance of being your own dungeon master
SEVEN ADULTS TOOK THE OPPORTUNITY TO LET GO OF THE MOULDS THAT WE TRY SO HARD TO FIT INTO OUR DAY-TO-DAY “Should I use my force punch or my scorching ray?” I asked the table seriously. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my short 27 years on this planet, it’s that if you can’t...
HELSTON: What a young Vernon artist showed us all this week
Marie-Anna Michaud didn’t start rinsing paint off a vandalized mural because she was disturbed by the obscenities scrawled there. She didn’t do it to right a wrong, and she didn’t do it out of anger for the perpetrators. No one asked or paid her to do it. Her act of kindness came as a surprise...
GOG: He knows you when you’re driving
Last week I had occasion to drive to the Fraser Valley, not long after a minor snowstorm. When I arrived I was inevitably asked “how were the roads?” “The roads were fine,” I replied. “It’s the idiots on them that make it difficult.” Here for your edification, and in the name of public safety, is...
LOEWEN: Remembering John Lennon; a cautionary tale
We marked the 34th anniversary of John Lennon’s murder on Monday the eighth of December. The failure to neutralize an unsettling agent in America's midst by the paranoid Nixon administration and the machinations of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) was carried out, eventually, by Mark David Chapman,...
PARKER: Two macarons can make a right
I’ve never confessed to being much of a baker. In fact, I’ve openly confessed the opposite. True, I don’t give myself much credit. I mean, I can bake gluten free Graham crackers from scratch, and that’s more Martha Stewart that your average threat to the kitchen. However, I’m not winning any awards. I’m not going...
GOG: Get on with this global warming, already
This is an uninhabitable country. In the past weak the temperature has plunged to levels only normally found on planets a few light years further from the sun. The sensible seniors have all buggered off to Arizona, while those of us left are expending every last bit of energy and emptying our meager bank accounts...
LOEWEN: ‘The need to let suffering speak is a condition for all truth’
The impossibly slow, shuffling pace of the man with the walking stick, and the tattered cloth coat, way too large ordinarily, but accommodating enough for an indeterminate number of layers beneath, marked the individual across the street from me as decidedly different from all the other busy pedestrians. They were dressed in the season’s finest...
PARKER: The anti-social media
Until you’ve sat beside someone for a five-course meal without uttering one single word to him or her, but having successfully Instagramed soup through dessert, you haven’t experienced real social media addiction. Until you tweet something that gives away the fact you were not in bed sick, but instead out with Jenny as opposed to...