PEREGRINE PULP

A popular debater, streamer, and social media personality was recently posting about the ongoing war in Ukraine. Specifically they were concerned with the discussion of Nazis making up some portion of the force the West is backing against Russia. The argument was that it was deeply silly and unethical even to purity test the armed forces of a nation who had been invaded and had its territory stolen by a vastly larger neighbouring nation. Though emotionally compelling, I only

I’ve only taken the train in Canada and the US a few times. Each time I’ve been struck by how — on what are considered some of the worst transportation systems in the developed world with terribly slow, outdated, and limited service with no luxuries available — taking the train is so preferable to flying. If there wasn’t such a stark contrast in the travel times, speed, and routes I don’t know why anyone would fly. One mode is relaxed and civilized and the other just abounds

I'm constantly contacting encyclopedias and other educational sources and their authors after discovering them publishing wild errors. Constantly. And almost universally people confirm they do not care about their organizations' stated missions. They also love declaring they don't know or don't care about the their own publications or even the subject of their life's work and have nothing to say nor, thusly, are they willing to rectify the situation. Finding that to be the ca

When attempting to write about the city of Victoria I couldn’t help but delve into the history of the place. Doing so inevitably resulted in diving into who arrived here and from where they came, something far more messy and complicated than you might imagine. Then, far enough down the road into discussions of ships from Spain and Russia (with crews from Asia, Oceana, the Americas, and Africa) plying the west coast of North America, it seemed worth mentioning the history of t

Imagine you’re driving in your truck with your nephew, towing a camper through California’s Los Padres National Forest in the hills between Bakersfield and the sea. You’re on amphetamines and been sipping whiskey as you drive (it’s 1965). Nearly to LA, you stop along the side of the road in the Sespe Creek Wilderness for some air. There you start a little fire to keep warm. The fire quickly gets away from you. (“Only YOU can prevent forest fires.”) It builds into a tremendous

I don’t really want to discuss the current conflict in Iran. That’s being beaten to death by the uninformed and by those who’ve only ever failed to make accurate predictions about prior conflicts. Alas. Noting how contradictory the accounting seems has been entertaining, however. And that contradiction comes from every vantage point on nearly every aspect: from what is happening and to whom, why, and what the inevitable outcome will be. Every bit of it seems zany to me. A per

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 ma

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 comp

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