PEREGRINE PULP

Back in 2019 I wrote about bison. I noticed that the numbers and circumstances commonly offered relating to the historic abundance and eventual disappearance of this species, who at one time thrived across nearly the whole continent but were rapidly reduced to almost zero, made little sense. If you’ve never come across it, the usual version of events deviates little from what is found on the US National Park Service website: Bison herds in the western United States were so m

It was just one more shocking revelation exposing my total ignorance of history and human behaviour. But it seemed like too much of an aside at the time I was writing my last book, and I’d already taken so very many provocative tangents. So I made no mention of it. CHATHAM When I was writing my book about this town I went looking for some of the street names I knew nothing about. I used to live on Chatham Street but couldn’t recall coming across a Chatham in my readings. The

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

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

Writing about income had me thinking about housing. I’m really not sure why anyone talks about anything else. Curiously, even when I find the matter being discussed, what's presented is seldom anything more than current rental rates or home prices and sales volumes. Pretty rare is something offering any context of any kind. As far as I can tell, adjusted for inflation, a median single family home in Victoria, BC in 1980 was around $400,000. Two decades later the median was ro

Someone online was explaining how if one earns $250,000 annually in Ontario the average tax rate is over 37% and the marginal tax rate is 50%, meaning $94,220 is taken and you are left with just $155,780. This was framed as a crime. I was attempting to propose that earning $44,000 in Ontario, around median income and far higher than full-time minimum wage, would mean tax deductions leave a person with only $32,500 — in a province where typical rent is between $26,000 and $32,

Though I don't think of myself as being passionate about nuclear energy I do try to learn what I can about it. I take book recommendations and watch informational videos, read the latest about new reactor plans and completions, and try to keep track of the state of the art in experimental fission and fusion. Knowing anything at all (some details about the performance and problems with existing reactors including the latest builds) results in discovering plenty of curious assu

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

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

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 a novel genus and 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 turt

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...

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