PEREGRINE PULP

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

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 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.

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

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

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 Ohi

Narendra :  They’re not trying to hide anything from you, though. Adrenalina :  Aren’t they? Narendra :  They would if they could. For...