PEREGRINE PULP

I haven’t had a GP since 1998. I was recently given the opportunity to apply for a rare patient spot at a local health centre. Though I have no medical concerns, I was glad to finally have someone I could see should something come up. And then I received the patient intake application form. It’s hard to describe the lunacy that is this form. As you read the following, please appreciate that this is the intake form for a health centre populated by four doctors and a team of nu

In recent weeks and months there has been a whole rash of articles about rising temperatures killing people. The reporting started with...

This is what I understood my ancestry to look like: My father’s family name is extremely English and my mother’s maiden name is a sort of anglicization of an Austrian surname, as I understand it. My maternal grandmother’s maiden name is also extremely English while my paternal grandmother’s could only be Scottish. And all of those folks and some of their parents and grandparents, like my parents and myself, were all born in Canada. Everyone else on the family tree I’m aware o

I was wanting to learn about and write something on how leaded gasoline became a thing. But then I came upon the biography of its inventor. Thomas Midgley, Jr. was born in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania in 1889. He grew up in Columbus, Ohio and studied engineering at Cornell, earning a Master’s of Engineering in 1908 and a PhD in mechanical engineering in 1911. Five years later he was working for General Motors, at their Dayton Engineering Laboratories (DELCo) subsidiary in Ohio

A pair of revelations have surfaced relating to the pandemic. I didn't catch these being widely reported when they took place many months ago, they did not land anywhere in my news feeds, and neither were being shared or commented on by anyone I know. Instead, I accidentally stumbled upon one of these long after the fact and then the other while looking for more information about the first. DP (DURING PANDEMIC) In 2021, the US FDA was posting messages on social media and thei

Folks seem to think people (other people) believe nonsense due to poor intelligence, low educational attainment, or lack of knowledge....

In 2020 a massive wildfire, known as the CZU Lightening Complex Fire, broke out in the Santa Cruz Mountains. Initially, several small fires were sparked by lightening. Those fires eventually grew and coalesced into one much larger conflagration. Part of that fire surrounded and consumed the ancient old-growth forests of Big Basin Redwoods State Park, along California’s central coast, just south of San Francisco and north of Monterey Bay. Though ignited by an unusual lightning

You’ve heard about the devastations to the world’s reef ecosystems. Most notably, the Great Barrier Reef off Australia’s east coast saw...

In their ongoing effort to frame everything Palestinian as benevolent and peace-oriented, CBC sought once again to amplify the voice (and fabulous fabrications) of reporter and associate producer Keena Alwahaidi. Like so many before her, at the beginning of July Alwahaidi gleefully pushed the Gaza famine myth. That, of course, only came after this fiction had been debunked many times and on many fronts by anyone able and willing to muster the sympathy to look into the situati

I was hearing about all this stuff around Trump-related court cases and some being consequential far beyond those cases. Knowing nothing...

With a couple of communication degrees, I think of it as my job to comment on media matters. But at this point the relentless barrage of infelicity — from serious reporters and journalists at all our leading news outlets — has become pretty overwhelming. To be honest, I find it tiresome, too. But it's also hard to look away. Aside from how I feel about all this, folks also like to tell me this “obsession” of mine is both pointless and overly pedantic. All I can offer in respo

As a kid I was always a big fan of triceratops. But at that time we knew only half the ceratopsian species we know today. There was a boom of ceratopsid discoveries between 1870 and 1925, then very little for almost a century. Then over the last two decades a whole bunch of new finds arrived. 1996 saw the discovery of Zuniceratops , significant for being the earliest-known ceratopsian with brow horns and, it must be noted, discovered by an eight-year-old in New Mexico. 2006 s

I want to love nuclear. I really do. But there’s so little to like and proponents continually refuse to win me over. Here’s just one more...

Some folks really hate Jared Diamond. And those folks love hating Jared Diamond. As any good polymath (with backgrounds in physiology, ecology, evolutionary biology, geography, history, and anthropology, degrees from Harvard and Cambridge, and professorships at UCLA in both medicine and geography) Diamond has written several books. His first popular work came out in 1991 and was titled, The Third Chimpanzee: The Evolution and Future of the Human Animal . He followed that in

I don’t know how I got here. Somehow I developed this crazy belief that firefighters fought fires. Crazy, right? My bad. Per capita, Vancouver is one of the country’s busiest fire departments, and getting busier all the time. But almost none of that fire service activity involves firefighters marching into buildings, masks on and hoses over their shoulders, to beat back flames. As a matter of fact, if you eliminated calls for service that weren’t for fires or false alarms (w

You read that right. I’m all for burning books, as I'm pretty sure you are. Just because you can conjure a pithy line you heard in a film or picked up from someone on social media about democracy or free expression doesn’t make the sentiment true. Yes, there was most certainly a time when books were precious items and libraries temples celebrating and preserving the world’s culture and collective wisdom. And, yes, in that context destroying a book or a library, god forbid, co

For years we were hearing about the replication crisis in the world of psychology; how so much accepted work in the field had never been...

Thinking about journalism and public perception, I was reminded today that in 1979 Australian journalist John Pilger entered Cambodia....