Rex Murphy, one of Canada’s best known, loved and hated TV commentators and columnists has died at 77. I have mixed feelings about his passing. I was Rex Murphy’s online editor from 1998 to 2003 when I was web producer for CBC’s The National. In those days his writing was superb and he had incitive […]
There is an interesting connection between Kitimat and Lahaina the site of the Maui fire disaster last week. After I saw the item on CBS Morning Sunday News last Sunday about the Happy Whale tracking site, I uploaded all the photos I captured of humpback whales in Douglas Channel over the past few years. Of […]
“There’s something familiar about this place.” I was on a bus tour of Kitimat’s giant $40 billion LNG Canada facility on Saturday, July 8. I’ve never been on site, but had this strange feeling I had seen it before. The LNG Canada Liguified Natural Gas project, is the largest industrial construction project in Canadian historythe […]
UPDATE THREE 1531 Pacific Time May 15, 2023 The UK ADHD Foundation has issued a statement Response to BBC Panorama “Private ADHD Clinics Exposed” As I suspected, Panorama failed to reach out the ADHD community groups in the UK. This is a major failure of journalistic ethics: Whilst we welcome responsible and informed television […]
A dark and stormy night 1813 edition (I don’t usually full post excerpts from my work in progress, I often put far too much into first drafts and then have to drastically cut. This episode of “a dark and stormy night” I discovered is too good to pass up. I am working on stories about […]
I’ve just completed five days of research for my Pennell Projects at the British National Archives at Kew. (And a couple of weeks earlier I spent the afternoon at the British Library in London). William Pennell was a diplomat and a spy under diplomatic cover from 1814 to 1832. That meant I had a […]
Topsham on the River Exe, in Devon, is the seaport for the larger city of Exeter. In the past week, I have had the chance to explore one of the towns where my roots are, the Pennells, on one main branch of my father’s side of the family. There were villages in the area of […]
Masthead for Field in March 1908 In May, 1908, 114 years ago, two presumably rich, presumably British, hunters came to Kitamaat Village, hired two Haisla guides named “Frank” and “David” and went bear hunting in the Kitlope, Giltoyees and up the Kemano River. One of the two hunters, named John H. Wrigley, would later write […]
(Warning: This post may be triggering to people or their families who were victims of real crimes against humanity. I didn’t want to raise the temperature of the Ottawa protest debate but the continuation of the blockades and remembering the anniversary date compelled me to write this). The so-called freedom convoy protestors on the streets […]
Version 2.0 Updated October 2023 Long read (Contains spoilers for It’s a Sin and may trigger some AIDS survivor readers. Names in quotation marks are pseudonyms. Many of the names from the 80s aren’t mentioned because I don’t remember. Other names are real, taken from my occasional diary or letters I wrote) This is an […]