PEREGRINE PULP

While we were all distracted (with the internet and war or more recently social media and pandemics or the collapse of traditional media and the takeover of TikTok and ChatGPT and ladies on OnlyFans and fellows talking into a microphone in their bedroom earning more than leading actors and elite athletes) our understanding of the universe, most appropriately, seemingly sprung a whole bunch of leaks. Starting roughly around 1998 our best model of cosmology, that branch of astr

I keep reading about proposals for more pipelines to the BC coast from Alberta. Not only is all of this politics getting pretty interesting but I actually studied Alberta's oil and gas industry a little in college (and even held bitumen in my hand) and have also lived in Alberta, too. So, what comes to mind for me when there’s any talk of pipelines is what isn't mentioned and just the little bit of history and economics we all agree upon (not the ravings of ecowarriors from c

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 ass

I never knew anything at all about Halloween, other than the fact that folks in different places celebrate differently or not at all. The details are pretty interesting. The pagan festival of Samhain (pronounced SAH-win ) originated with the Celts of ancient Britain and Ireland. Samhain was the festival marking the end of harvest time and the beginning of winter. Halfway between autumn equinox and the winter solstice, marking a transition between the lighter half of the year

I’ve had some wonderful moments out on the quiet of the reef with green sea turtles. (If you’ve never done so, it’s really something you must seek out, even just once. I can recommend some spots.) Because they were abundant where I was, and knowing they’re found all over the planet , throughout the tropical and subtropical regions of every ocean, I never appreciated how threatened they were as a species ( Chelonia mydas ). Accidental catches (mostly fisheries bycatch and aba

I was just listening to some drunken, middle-aged Irishfolk. As happens four pints in, they started talking about their recent doctor visits. With two 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 having one. The other two barked and howled, exclaiming he was foolish or that, perhaps, there was something wrong with his head. I couldn't believe all the confident vigor of the

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

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

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

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...

Spain warming faster than rest of northern hemisphere: study - Apr 2010 https://phys.org/news/2010-04-spain-faster-rest-northern-hemisp...

My current favourite conservative meme is a video showing Joe Rogan proposing to his guest, "You have people like Bill Gates saying that ‘planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous, that’s a ridiculous way to do it…’ How is that ridiculous? They literally turn CO₂ into oxygen. It is their food." There’s so much to love about this, but we can just stick with the planting of trees and carbon offsetting and don’t need to get into the politics around Bill Gates or how ‘20s

Like many folks, I’ve been playing with artificial intelligence off and on. Initially, back in 2023, I was turned off by how half-baked all the models seemed, especially on the visual front, while being somewhat pleased with what I was seeing and hearing in the realm of text-to-speech. Sometime in the late '80s, my mother brought a Commodore from work to train on. The text-to-speech that system produced was not meaningfully improved upon, by my own assessment, until just rece

As the independent senator from Vermont goes on a tour of America, we've nearly reached full reversal. The same media who engaged in...

Can we talk about CBC’s Vote Compass ? I'd love to know if it's actually possible to assess someone’s political leanings or which party...

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

I was recently looking for some statistics on iatrogenesis . That's just a fancy term for the medical system screwing up and causing harm rather than preventing or relieving it. Think: hospital acquired infections, adverse drug reactions , medical errors, psychological damage ,  and the like. However, as so often happens, I couldn't find what I was looking for but accidentally stumbled upon this extremely interesting study  on the prevalence of ineffective medical treatments

I’ve been writing about this province's epidemic of overdose deaths and related themes for a while now. Just in recent times I’ve...