Quirks & Quarks: No plastic, please

Hey, friends. It’s time to lose the plastic bags. Really, it’s time. It’s normal to be stopped at international airports to have your documents and luggage checked by officials, but I’ve never been stopped for carrying plastic. After landing in Rwanda last month and passing through customs at Kigali airport, I was just about to [...]

Elegant Heathens

Wow — that was probably the best modern dance performance i’ve even seen.  Dancers tend to have big egos, it occurrs to me, and the usual approach is for one or two to take the stage, command all eyes, and proceed to impress. Or not, depending. It’s a tall order, and few dancers have the [...]

Sat Chit Ananda

Well. The more i mess about in this new-age consciousness business, the more i think that everybody is saying exactly the same things. It can’t be described directly, of course — that’s the catch-22 of the whole game — so it must be illustrated obliquely, through yogic posture or Buddhist ritual or, most often, linguistic [...]

A Neanderthal Christmas

I spent Stressmas alone, delightfully free of the travel-and-consume imperative that grips my fellow lunatics in the West. Most memorably, i walked the Victoria streets for a couple of hours listening to two fascinating podcasts, courtesy of CBC Radio‘s Ideas program, called Homo (sapiens) neanderthalenis. From which I gleaned the following: There have been perhaps 20 different [...]

Surfmonkery

I finished (finally) the above book, which according to the blurb on the Long Beach Golf Course links page is “an e-novella by Mathew Stryanka that takes readers into the angst-ridden life of Roy Merck as he surfs across Canada, looking for a place to call home.”  It’s always interesting to read a piece set [...]