It’s long, but it’s not complicated. Stay with me.
The things you stumble across on the internet.
The things, maybe, you were meant to find.
We need the honesty and courage to consider with an open mind and heart points of view that challenge our beliefs — even our deepest, most cherished identity-forming beliefs. We need the intellectual humility to recognize our own fallibility — and that, too, requires honesty and courage.
Never mind. Forget I asked. Caffeine is not optional at the moment. One of the lesser-commented-upon fallouts of the pandemic is the disappearance of caffeine-free Diet Pepsi® from my local grocery sources. And no, I haven’t checked on the availability of caffeine-free Diet Coke® because, well, Coke®.
Modified from the Foreword . . .
In 2014 I published a technical manual on proposal development — my work for 25 years — using little stories to illustrate many of the points I was making. It was a whack of work: the writing, the revising, the laying-out, the marketing. A. Whack. Why had no one warned me?
Certs is a candy mint.
Certs is a breath mint.
The commercial’s voice-over narrator settles the improbable and stagey argument between the two twins in polka-dots by giving them a verbal shake.
Stop!
You’re both right.
New Certs is two mints in one.
The more polarized our politics becomes and the more obnoxious our public discourse, the more I find myself wanting to verbally shake participants on both sides. Stop!
How did I come across this video? By checking in on the Twitter feed of a corvid researcher. As she feels necessary to point out these days, that’s a corvid researcher, not a covid researcher.
How did I come across the corvid researcher’s Twitter feed? By being directed to a post she’d written on distinguishing crows and ravens.
The raiding party hides in the woods, waiting for their signal to advance on the fortress. It boasts primitive defences by our military standards, for sure, but primitive is all you need when the attackers are similarly armed.
It’s a mixed-gender raiding party: an undetermined number of men, and one woman who is the partner-in-love-and-war of the leader, a Viking Dane of the type that rampaged up, down, and across the British Isles during the 8th and 9th centuries as one of a never-ending series of invasions. It was a “So-Called Friends, Romans, and Every-other-Country’s-men” free-for-all: Romans, of course, but also the Germanic peoples, Vikings, Normans, French and Dutch.
I step into the sauna and try to breathe deeply. Nope. The air is too thick.
Well, it’s not really a sauna, it’s really The Great Ottawa Outdoors, summer 2020 edition. The heat and humidity are just indistinguishable from a sauna. This season, already hammered by COVID-19, has now been pounded into the ground by, wait for it, excessive heat and humidity.
Four weeks plus a day after two juvenile robins launched from the nest above our porch — we think successfully — a singleton launched from the same nest, rather less successfully we fear.
To our uneducated eyes, and just going by the timeline the last time, it looks like buddy jumped a day or two early and then had trouble getting up and flying. But we don’t know the outcome. Continue reading
I invite you to help me make a difference by buying my latest book. All my royalties are going to Food Banks Canada to help with the problem of food insecurity, made even worse by this pandemic.
Posted: 06 Aug
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