(Long read) It was the summer of 1965. I just turned 15. That August, I first encountered Frank Herbert’s Dune as I browsed the paperback racks in a small independent pharmacy on Toronto’s Yonge Street, north of Lawrence Ave, close to the old Glen Echo trolley bus loop (I can’t remember the exact spot).I still […]
This is an edited excerpt from my current nonfiction book project about the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron enforcing the ban on the slave trade between 1819 and 1822, the story of two Black seamen who served on the Squadron’s HMS Pheasant and the role of my fourth great grandfather, William Pennell, British consul in […]
It’s early in the season for the new anchor of the storied CBS Evening News, but with three regular broadcasts, Tony Dokoupil has fouled out every night. That doesn’t look good for the third-place network news show. Breaking news can always disrupt a carefully planned remote newscast that is out of the studio and on […]
So who is this Bari Weiss, the new editor-in-chief of CBS News? She was a critic of cancel culture who is now a leading advocate of cancel culture from the right. In one of her founding columns in her Free Press blog, “The New Founders America Needs” from a 2022 address at the “conservative” University […]
On Tuesday, November 11, 1975, I was just a few months into my first reporting job, mostly as the police reporter, on the Sudbury (Ontario) Star. That day would unexpectedly provide me with my first news “scoop,” a UFO story that would eventually be picked up across North America, first by the wire services and […]
This is really a story about my crock-pot. A “vintage” Sunbeam Heritage Pot slow cooker. On Wednesday night, I planned take a photo as I sat down for my dinner (something I seldom do, not usually given to posting food pix)when Blue Jay Dave Schneider opened Game 5 of the World Series with a solo […]
In my first professionally published science fiction story in Analog, November 1988, the Toronto Blue Jays meet the Los Angeles Dodgers in the World Series. The story is “Wait Till Next Year.” It begins in the year 2048, not 2025. The morning before the seventh game of the World Series, the universe changes. In the […]
It’s nine o’clock on a Saturday. I am usually at home watching a streaming movie and getting ready to go to bed just after ten. This past Saturday at nine, I was watching Part 2 of the documentary Billy Joel: And So It Goes on Crave in Canada (HBO in the United States). I seldom […]
It’s not unusual to discover, while writing a non fiction project, that the most minor of characters deserve their own book and more . This week as part of my own book research I have discovered a forgotten age of fighting sail officer who is likely worth a biography or a novel or even a […]
Captain’s log 18191029 It was October, 1819. The Royal Navy sloop HMS Pheasant part of the new anti-slavery West Africa Squadron, was on patrol off Accra in what is today Ghana. For the research and writing on my latests book project, I was reading the log and came across a reference that I had not […]