

ONION JOHNNIES & MOCKING BANANAS
I take in a lot of food-related content. This week I was just watching a BBC documentary from 1957 about French peasants working as travelling salesmen across the Channel in the UK. Their wares? Onions. Men would leave their families in Roscoff , a commune in the Finistère département of Brittany, on the north end of the most westerly corner of Franc, and travel across to Portsmouth in ships carrying hundreds of tonnes of copper and rose Oignon de Roscoff . There they would
Jan 225 min read


THE MISSING "SPARK PLUG" or YOU CAN'T HAVE UN-NICE THINGS
There’s been a lot of discussion about Greenland the last few weeks. Other than the Norse arriving there and going on to Canada a thousand years ago and Greenland’s melting ice sheets dumping tremendous volumes of fresh water into the North Atlantic and disrupting thermohaline convection , I know almost nothing about the world’s [second] largest island. (I don’t know why we pretend Australia is not an island…) My favourite story from my recent readings is about a hydrogen b
Jan 1912 min read


ULTRA VIRES
The Federal Court of Appeal confirms that the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act was unreasonable and ultra vires [beyond their legal authority], and that it infringed paragraph 2(b) and section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Jan 172 min read


FOR THE WIN'
I keep hearing folks in Europe and the United States dunking on wind power, claiming it has been a total failure, and offering this as strong evidence of the lie that always was alternative/renewable/green energy. Of course, in the current atmosphere, the alternative commonly presented is nuclear. Great. That gives us something relatively simple to compare to see if there's any truth to that. The most recent nuclear reactors built in the US were Units 3 and 4 at the Vogtle El
Jan 126 min read


THE COMING TRUMPOCALYPSE or ECONOMICS IS NOT A SCIENCE
Probably the biggest and most lasting news story of 2025, even here in Canada, was the pending total economic collapse of the US and, as a result, likely that of the world. US consumer spending and GDP was supposed to crater. The imposition of tariffs and general Trumpist chaos was going to further worsen global trade and result, at the very least, in a global trade war — but perhaps translate into a world war — by the end of 2025. These were the predictions of the moderate p
Jan 97 min read

























































































