PEREGRINE PULP

I was just listening to a jolly gaggle of middle-aged Irishfolk. As happens four pints in, they started talking about their recent doctor visits. With a couple of males involved, the conversation inevitably turned to the digital rectal exam. One declared he'd never had the procedure done and had no interest in ever having one. All the others barked and howled, exclaiming he was foolish at best and what he really needed to do was have his head checked. I couldn't believe all t

I keep being sent, and encountering in the wilds of the internet, essays from social commentator and professor of American history Heather Cox Richardson. She has a Substack with millions of subscribers, titled Letters from an American , a daily newsletter, and the requisite podcast , too. All those deliver her scholarly, history-informed take on current events to a nations-worth of inboxes and feeds. My first real encounter with the professor was some years ago when I was c

You know this phenomenon, this optical illusion, that occurs when you stare too long at something and fatigue your photoreceptors? When you close your eyes you get what is called "retinal inertia", where those burned out receptors don't stop responding even in the absence of light. What you see then, with your eyes shut, is a "negative afterimage" that is the inverse of the light intensity and colours you were just looking at with your eyes open. Yeah. Now imagine that but wi

The Vancouver Sun just published " Crime destroying B.C. downtowns, municipal leaders warn ." Many other news outlets offered similar reporting. Just a couple weeks ago it was " ' When a street dies, a city dies': B.C. businesses say disorder, crime jeopardizing their survival ." The trouble here is, well, that none of this is happening. We actually have good data on criminal code violations and crime severity in British Columbia (and around the country). And if you go lookin

Someone I like and follow on the internet was using the Marshmallow Test as an analogy. That famous test, of course, put in front of kids...

Comedian Dusty Slay ("Okay. We're havin' a good time.") tells a story about attempting to join the army. The whole thing is a much longer story about how he reasoned that there was no chance America would be involved in a major conflict before he could get some training and life skills, do some travelling, put in time as a cook, and to save some money to pay for culinary school and maybe build a restaurant when he gets out -- and that he should have been sent to basic trainin

Are there questions you cannot ask, have answered, or even work with someone to arrive at an answer to? Around the time of the last federal election I was writing about my shock at taking the CBC Vote Compass survey. This assessment of one's political perspectives was wacky for a bunch of reasons, mostly because it was not designed to assess your political stance; but, aside from that, I was surprised by how, among this huge swathe of seemingly irrelevant topics, there wasn't

Folks just love flipping everything on its head, applying absurdist euphemisms or simply arguing that what we can all see happening is somehow the reverse. My favourite local examples have been "harm reduction" and "safe supply" which have only ever correlated with far more harm and even whole new dimensions of it. On the international front we've seen the most aggressive form of this phenomenon come out of the war in Gaza. In the continued insanity surrounding Israel's confl

Guy One : "This whole 15-minute city thing is a scam." Guy Two : "Absolutely." Another hour passes. They chat about the weather, politics, sports, and why contemporary popular music is not as good as what they grew up with. Guy One : "Check this out." * Shows pamphlet * "Dream vacation. Look at that. That's eighteen floors. Holds almost 8,000 people ! " Guy Two : "Wow, look at that ! Is that Norwegian?" Guy One : "Carnival." Guy Two : "Right." Guy One : "Wait, look. T

LIVING AND A LIVING Part of what makes this place so great, aside from the natural beauty and great climate, is that it’s almost...

What Victoria lacks in cultural or economic might she makes up for in geography, climate, flora, and fauna. If you’re from Victoria, or...

You should know about one of Victoria's greatest exports. It's not Nelly Furtado or Taya Valkyrie . No, it's not Emily Carr , either....

You can’t spend time anywhere near the Salish Sea without hearing about the mystery feet. Averaging about one a year, sneakers with...

Pet rabbits, primarily domesticated European rabbits ( Oryctolagus cuniculus domesticus ), had been abandoned on the local university...

Because it needs reiterating: nearly a millennia after the first known European settlement in present-day Canada, well over two centuries...

EARLIEST VISITS? Almost eight centuries after Norse arrival in the east and two-and-a-half centuries after the start of the Columbian...

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

A strange dinosaur fossil first found in 1988 along the Puntledge River , flowing from Comox Lake through Courtenay on Vancouver Island (first described in 2002 and declared the Provincial Fossil of BC in 2023), was just now identified as novel genus, unlike other elasmosaurids . Imagine something like a penguin-whale hybrid but with the neck of a giraffe (only six of those long, unlike the image above) and with the head of a komodo dragon, or something. Maybe a turtle th

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 have always been on these lands while others conjecture about a traversal from Asia, across land, ice, or sea, or all of the above. When any of that took place is still more complicated. I bring this up here because so many disruptive findings have emerged in recent years, much of which changes the story pretty significantly but also doesn’t

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...

GUY: So, you won the lottery and want to bring power to the world (or just your own city.) You read Our World in Data and find their work compelling. You and the folks in government want to go all-in on a public-private nuclear partnership; after all, nuclear is safe, clean, reliable, and cheap (in the long term). Oh and it’s sexy right now. That helps. Great. What existing reactor do you use as your model? What engineering and construction firms do you go with? How do you g

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 just a cursory survey reveals a pretty interesting life. Queen Victoria was born Princess Alexandrina Victoria of Kent (named after her godfather, Russian Tsar Alexander I ) on May 24th, 1819. Her father, as you would expect, was an Englishman, Edward, Duke of Kent, and her mother German, Princess Maria Louisa Victoria of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfald.

For the first time ever, dinosaur nerds (who sometimes go by the label paleontologist ) have identified the 100-million-year-old fossilized footprints of an ankylosaurid, and a special one at that. You know the ankylosaurs, those guys from the Cretaceous who were low to the ground and built like a tank, with bony armour and a murder-mallet for a tail, doubtless for keeping carnivores at mating competition at bay. They look something like the ancient cousins of the armadillo