Ideeahs

Over the last few weeks I have thought about how gift-giving has changed over the last few decades.  In some ways I find that the act of giving has become more virtual, generic and risk averse.  As a result exchanges have lost some of their mystery.  They've become less tangible somehow, less memorable.  They relay less about the personalities of the individuals doing the giving and receiving. As I child I used to go to my grandmother's house for Christmas. All my aunts, uncles and cousins were there. With so many of us present the presents spread out way beyond the shade cast by the fake silver tree.  Wrapped boxes with surprises waiting to be discovered were stacked all the around the back of the tree.  While some of the boxes did a poor job of masking their contents others were generic cubes. My cousins and I were especially fond of music and so many of the gifts under the tree took the shape of a flat, square record sleeve. We were left having to...

The Sandy Hook tragedy has sparked many comments from all kinds of people. Journalists, politicians, left leaning, right leaning, city slickers, country bumpkins, seniors, children, parents, the educated, the uneducated.....you get the picture.  Human beings of all colours, beliefs, ages, regions and backgrounds have commented either publicly or privately. Whether or not an audience read or heard our thoughts it is likely that, in the grand majority of cases, we all reacted with instinctive emotions - shock and sadness.  In the end, those instincts, the ones that unite us all as a species, shows an amazing amount of unity among the seven billion humans on Earth. Unfortunately, as the minutes passed from the time we heard the horrible news, our initial reaction of shock and sadness gave way to that other uniquely human characteristic - our ability to think, recall and imagine.  And so our divisions started showing. The need to defend.  The need to protect. ...

Hello there. A set of coincidences over the last few days has brought me back to the editor page on Blogger, the site that hosts this blog. Ideas have started popping up again over the last week. Today I watched a movie....The Magic of Belle Isle. While I was watching the above movie I received notification that one of my oldest friends had just liked my Ideeahs page on Facebook. When I logged on to Facebook to look at my Ideeahs page there was a picture of Morgan Freeman, who happens to play in The Magic of Belle Isle, attached to a post attributed to him and commenting on the Sandy Hook tragedy. That event has really stirred my desire for expression. Good enough for me. See you tomorrow and hopefully for a good and long run. Let me know what you think about what you have just read. Please and thanks!

Small is slowly disappearing. In our rich world small really does get a bad wrap. Oh, to be small. Tall, grande, large, even medium is better than small. Anything but small. Today this was proven yet again. I read this morning that Tim Horton's, a doughnut chain in Canada, had decided to eliminate the small-sized drinks serving and replace them with the medium-sized. So I guess that in theory small still exists.....it just got bigger. It's been sometime since I wrote in my blog but this story has given me the itch again. Consumption is king in our society and "more for less" is seemingly the law that guides consumer spending and thus the actions of corporations who seem to just blindly accept this law. I believe I have already written about the pizza ordering episode I once had to endure. I simply wanted to order a medium pizza for delivery. I was told by the nice girl on the other end that I should rather get the special which not only gave me a second pizz...

I have really tried hard to avoid writing about this. If I look at the draft articles I have written for this blog and kept in draft, no less than three in the last eight months, touch on the subject I am going to breech today. I wanted to avoid the subject, as I tell two of the guys I regular commute with, because I really wanted to believe in the train system and support it. I did not want to whine about it. Today, unfortunately, I just can't hold back and I will be hitting publish on this article - an amalgam of the drafts. Let me sum it up very simply....trains in North America are terrible. Unreliable and aging they trudge along their lines achingly. Some recent examples from the last ten days...yes only in the last ten days: A week or so ago I went to Toronto. Rather than drive or fly, I thought I'd try the VIA Rail train that runs between Montreal and Toronto. I arrived at the station thirty minutes prior to boarding, as recommended. At the designated time o...

At 2:30 pm this afternoon I cracked open the plastic container that contained some plump blueberries I had bought a few hours before at the local supermarket. My mouth was watering thinking of the tasty sweet blue fruit that I was planning on combining with some strawberries, granola and some vanilla yogurt. It was going to be great. As I started rinsing these BBs I started getting annoyed. Many of them - too many! - were mouldy and soft. I was literally throwing money away and I was annoyed with these fruit and with their seller. How could they sell me such garbage? Such low quality produce? After about one minute of these thoughts, as I started rinsing off the strawberries, I realized that the annoyance should be directed at a different target - myself. How foolish of me, really, to expect fresh, high quality BBs in Canada during the winter season. How could I expect fruits that were picked who knows how long ago, some 8000 kilometres away, to be fresh when they reached t...

The first day of the year is, arguably, the most optimistic day of the year. With determination we, as individuals, decide at this moment of time to affect some positive change into our lives or those of others. As a result of this clean sheet of paper offered to us by the New Year we feel that all the possibilities of the world are in front of us awaiting the reach of our hands. We can write the script. With all of the previous years baggage thrown out on December 31st there is nothing left to weigh us down and prevent us from attaining our objectives and resolutions. It is an optimistic day and we are hopeful that this sense of optimism will last for the remainder of the year's days. A new beginning. It would seem to me that this would, therefore, also be a day when world leaders might be feeling slightly more optimistic than normally. They may be entering 2011 with some real beliefs that this just might be the year that they can, as individuals, affect positive change...