People of Toronto:

The most fabulous movie ever made (starring none less than Peter Duncan) is being played at the Royal Theater at 7:30 on April 21.   I will be there.  You should too.

Here was my M38A1 exactly one month ago.  It has sat out all winter with no protection.
( Read more... )

I spent the past two weeks with J at The Mayo Clinic in Florida, getting a second set of eyes on her condition.  Having spent much of the last year in Canadian hospitals, it was an interesting contrast.  Here is a brain-dump of observations:
( Read more... )

In 1998 the videogame Grim Fandango was released, and it can't have been long after that RH (as she is now called) set us up with a copy.  We played the heck out of it.  I don't believe we ever finished, but it entertained us for weeks.  Now I'm delighted to see that it has been re-issued in a "remastered" version with cleaned up graphics but ( Read more... )

I have always had a soft spot for the Icelandic Sagas, since I first read Egil's Saga in a stained-glass sunbeam in The Treehouse almost twenty years ago.  Yesterday, sitting in the ER, I read Kormak's Saga.  It does not disappoint, and I would suggest it to anyone looking to explore the roots of contemporary fiction ( Read more... )

... so I was not expecting the stubbed toe to be seen before the metabolic acidosis
Triage is weird.

We are all the heros of our own stories, and the victims of our own disasters. There is someone here in the triage area of the ER with an honest-to-goodness stubbed toe. The mind boggles.

KS took this picture of me last month.  I love the composition.  There's always sunshine up there, even if you have to climb through the clouds to find it.
( Read more... )

One of my favourite books is On The Beach by Nevil Shute.  It posits the question: what would you do if you knew with certainty that everybody would die in two years.  When I first read it I found it an interesting philosophical question.  If the time was a hundred years, you would probably continue with life as normal.  If the time was 24 hours, ( Read more... )

As I have mentioned before, I like to think of my business as alchemy.  We take base materials (copper, aluminum, fiberglass, solder) and with great labour fabricate a small amount of very precious stuff.  Over the years that stuff has become more and more valuable.  I've built some things (big simple electromagnets) that have sold for about $10, ( Read more... )