PEREGRINE PULP

I just wanted to say something, something vaguely accurate, about the land that is now Canada. I thought I knew something and the textbooks and encyclopedias, electronic and digital, make it look so easy. Turns out the encyclopedias and textbooks have entirely different aims. I don’t know what those are but if I had to guess I would say their guiding mission includes brevity, avoiding any interesting details, and manufacturing a weird set of narratives. Though I passed throug

The subject of the peopling of the Americas was always messy and it’s getting even more interesting all the time. Some will insist folks...

Terry Fox was a kid who developed bone cancer and at age 18 had his leg amputated. In 1979 (a real great year) he revealed his plan to...

Like so many places, until recently there were trolleys and trains zooming people all over Victoria and beyond. From 1888 to 1923, a foot...

Other than the city of Victoria and a few other places being named after her, I realized I knew little more about Queen Victoria. Even...

Spain warming faster than rest of northern hemisphere: study - Apr 2010 https://phys.org/news/2010-04-spain-faster-rest-northern-hemisp...

My current favourite conservative meme is a video showing Joe Rogan proposing to his guest, "You have people like Bill Gates saying that ‘planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous, that’s a ridiculous way to do it…’ How is that ridiculous? They literally turn CO₂ into oxygen. It is their food." There’s so much to love about this, but we can just stick with the planting of trees and carbon offsetting and don’t need to get into the politics around Bill Gates or how ‘20s

Like many folks, I’ve been playing with artificial intelligence off and on. Initially, back in 2023, I was turned off by how half-baked all the models seemed, especially on the visual front, while being somewhat pleased with what I was seeing and hearing in the realm of text-to-speech. Sometime in the late '80s, my mother brought a Commodore from work to train on. The text-to-speech that system produced was not meaningfully improved upon, by my own assessment, until just rece

As the independent senator from Vermont goes on a tour of America, we've nearly reached full reversal. The same media who engaged in...

Can we talk about CBC’s Vote Compass ? I'd love to know if it's actually possible to assess someone’s political leanings or which party...

Though I've been following along, I haven’t written at length about Ukraine since the opening weeks of this most recent Russian invasion. At that time, in late Winter and early Spring of 2022, knowing almost nothing about the conflict or what precipitated it, I was studying the previous decade of local and regional history with a focus on politics and ethnic violence. Doing so, most annoyingly, I was finding plenty that contradicted what I was hearing in the popular press and

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis . That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions , medical errors, psychological damage ,  and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study  on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments

I’ve been writing about this province's epidemic of overdose deaths and related themes for a while now. Just in recent times I’ve...

Nicholas Kristof — The New York Times Musk Said No One Has Died Since Aid Was Cut. That Isn’t True. Elon Musk says that no one has died because he slashed humanitarian aid. I went to South Sudan to check if that's true. It's not. Within an hour of starting interviews, I had the names of a 10-year-old boy and an 8-year-old girl who had died because of decisions by wealthy men in Washington. The visit that moved me the most was to a remote area that used to have no health car

What’s the deal  with the measles? ( Offered in the tone and tempo of Jerry Seinfeld, of course. ) Measles outbreaks are taking up a lot of time and space, even here in Canada, in the traditional and new press. Along with that, I keep reading that RFK Jr, the new head of America’s Health and Human Services, is promoting things backward and upside down as preventatives or cures and generally making everything worse, as he's always so determined to do. So what do you suspect I

OKAY I’m a fan of etymology and semantics and, really, everything to do with language; still, somehow I never gave much thought to the...

The West Vancouver Streamkeeper Society  was established in 2001. Their objective is to restore and sustain local aquatic wildlife...

Somehow I missed obelisks . Well, I suppose everyone missed it — or them . Discovered in human gut and oral bacteria, researchers...