While researching the work of my fourth great grandfather , William Pennell, while British consul in Bahia, and his vice consul, his nephew, William Follett, the question is what is the Brazilian side of the story? I did find an academic reference that showed the correspondence between the British Consul and the then government of […]
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 […]
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 […]
Updates with CFIA statement saying Marmite not banned When I was a little kid my father insisted—yes insisted—that I eat my Marmite. This morning I woke up to the news that the Canadian Food Inspection Agency has apparently banned Marmite, a yeast extract spread, in this country, along with some other British “comfort foods.” (After […]
IBM’s smarter planet ad campaign had been on television for sometime, with “ordinary” folks from around the world talking about smarter cities, smarter everything, to be answered by others saying “I’m an IBMer.” While I am a CBCer and have worked for many years under the expanding C logo of Mother Corp, also known […]
With the unfortunate death of the old “garret tree,” killed by a fierce late summer Ontario thunderstorm, at the same time that I was redesigning my website, I decided the time had come to launch a new blog. So I shut down The Garret Tree. So now Robin’s Weir will be my blog on writing […]
