Today I Learned

Mark Carney & Mike Myers, via YouTube Canadians are an odd breed. While I think most of us love our country, we do not brag about it, or...

Survivorman Logo, via YouTube The TV show Survivor is described as a “ reality-competition ”, but it never struck me as realistic, and I...

Is Religion Like a Drug? | Rev | BBC Comedy Greats, via YouTube “You’ll feel that God reached out to you with his love.” “What does that...

Emo Philips, Opening for Weird Al Yankovic at the Apollo Theatre Today I learned the word “ paraprosdokian ”. According to Wikipedia, the...

Tuwiuwok Bluff, via Haven, Maine fan wiki When I thought about the TV series Haven , I remembered vague details, and thought it must have...

MAMMÚT Everyone has heard the stereotype of the older person complaining about the “new music” younger people listen to, and we can all...

Nine Princes in Amber, cover, via OpenLibrary.org My Dad didn’t particularly like Roger Zelazny’s work. He thought it was a bit too...

Dead Kennedys – Nazi Punks F^ck Off cover For the past few weeks, I’ve had a song stuck in my head, or at least a part of it. The song is...

Joni Mitchell, 1983, via Wikipedia I’ve been hearing the song Both Sides Now  since earliest childhood, but I had no idea just how many...

Duane Allman, Fillmore East, 6-Jun-1971, via Wikimedia Commons It’s amazing what you can find if you look. All I did was search for songs...

Skeptical Science, John Cook, via Wikimedia Commons Words are fun! Today, let’s ask whether the words “equivalence” and “equivalency” are...

Artificial Intelligence is- Hey! Come on! I haven’t even said anything yet! Ahem. As I was saying, Artificial Intelligence is a term that...

Let’s talk about the end of the world, shall we? Or maybe not. Fortunately, some stories of impending doom are overestimated, and some...

“‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’” George Orwell,...

Contrary to the apparent belief of some in the world today, the book Nineteen Eighty-Four  was not intended to be an instruction manual...

Words are weird. The word “weird” is a particularly weird word. Aside from the spelling, the way it has been used is hard to pin down,...

One of my all-time favourite songs is Welcome to the Machine , by Pink Floyd. While the song appeared on the 1975 album Wish You Were...

Who’d have thought that music could be political? Or that musicians might have political views? Let’s take the song Killing in the Name...

As I have noted before, I tend to avoid politics as a primary focus of my writing. But this last Ontario election worries me quite a...

The Greek philosopher Diogenes is famous for carrying a lantern during the day, claiming he was “searching for an honest man”. Yet...