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As part of the NXNE concert series in Toronto, rapper Action Bronson was slated to perform a free concert in Dundas Square. Bronson is apparently known for lyrics and videos that degrade women and glorify rape. He has also bragged about assaulting a trans woman. Many people felt that this performer was inappropriate for a headliner act and a free event in the heart of Toronto. A petition was circulated calling for NXNE to cancel the Dundas Square show. Eventually they did.  Their statement says they will try re-book Action Bronson as a ticketed event in a different venue. That seems like a good decision. However, I was less disturbed by another misogynist shock act than by some of the reaction I read on Facebook, from friends and their contacts. It seems that many progressive people believe that what Action Bronson does should be illegal. Others believe that even speaking in support of such expression should be illegal. I find that deeply troubling. The people in this discussion seeme

My desire is to get the reader, well, first of all to read it. That story [“The Bottom of the Harbor”] was hard to write because I had to wonder how long can I keep developing it before the reader’s going to get tired of this. Here and there, as I think a fiction writer would, I put things that I know—even the remark the tugboat men make, that you could bottle this water and sell it for poison—that are going to keep the reader going. I can lure him or her into the story I want to tell. I can’t tell the story I want to tell until I’ve got you into the pasture and down where the sheep are. Where the shepherd is. He’s going to tell the story, but I’ve got to get you past the ditch and through these bushes. Every writer of nonfiction who has struggled with the ditch and the bushes knows what Mitchell is talking about, but few of us have gone as far as Mitchell in bending actuality to our artistic will. This is not because we are more virtuous than Mitchell. It is because we are less gifted

This year's crop: two tomato plants, basil, beans, and strawberries. Beans and strawberries are both new for us.  I love that we're still planting our little garden, with no thought to expansion, just trying a couple of new things each year. And since we should all be boycotting Driscoll's , we are growing resistance berries. ¡Si, Se Puede! Plus, bonus Tala, with her favourite Orbee .

Public school teachers in our area are on strike, part of a series of rolling strikes hitting different regions throughout Ontario. If the province doesn't back down before the beginning of the school year in September, we can expect all Ontario public school teachers to strike. The roots of this struggle stretch back to 2012, when the provincial government stripped teachers of their right to collective bargaining, unilaterally imposed a contract, then repealed the law taking away their union rights. My partner and I spoke with some striking teachers last week, and this is what they told us. ...Before we went on strike, we weren’t allowed to negotiate. Our contract finished in August of 2014, and before we announced we were going on strike, the Boards actually met with our union for four days. And they were short meetings. Nothing much was accomplished. As soon as we announced that we were going on strike, and we gave our legal notice, they were negotiating every day. We still didn

This beautiful little girl is the newest member of our family, the first of the next generation. Meet Sophia, brand new baby daughter of one of my nephews and nieces(-in-law). My brother and sister-in-law are thrilled to be grandparents, and my mom the great-grandma is over the moon. We hope to meet Sophia in person early next year, as part of a Big Trip we are planning. Stay tuned.

Thanks to everything-on-demand media, and no thanks to my schedule that doesn't permit me nearly enough time for baseball, Movie Season now runs all year, at least marginally. These annual awards now document the movies and TV series we've seen from Opening Day to Opening Day. To recap my silly rating systems: - Canadian musicians and comedians (2006-07 and 2007-08) - my beverage of choice (2008-09) - famous people who died during the past year (2009-10) - where I'd like to be (2010-11) - vegetables (2011-12) (I was out of ideas!) - Big Life Events in a year full of Big Life Changes (2012-13), - and last year (2013-14), cheese ! This year's ratings revolve around my favourite pastime, the moments I live for: travel. We can loosely call this theme types of holidays and vacations. I have always dreamed of traveling for an extended period of time - life on the road. My dream of extended travel probably dates back to reading Travels with Charley when I was 12. But ev

Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us by Michael Moss is an excellent addition to a bookshelf that includes works by Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, Marian Nestle and others who write about the health of our food and the un-health of the industrial food system. Moss lifts the curtain on the giant corporations that engineer and market convenience foods and processed foods. What he reveals is largely invisible to us on a daily basis, yet affects our society significantly - and catastrophically. Moss is a seasoned investigative reporter - he was the first to expose trans fats , and more recently " pink slime " - and this book is a tour de force of research. Moss takes you to the laboratory and the board room, where chemical engineers and marketing executives contrive to get North Americans eating more and more of everything unhealthy. (The book is written in a US context, but it is equally relevant to Canada.) Salt Sugar Fat is full of wonderful mini-histories of corpo