Today is the 51st birthday of the Canadian Flag. The familiar red and white flag with the stylized maple leaf replaced its predecessor on the 15th February, 1965. What was its predecessor? Officially, it was the British Union Flag (or Union Jack as it’s better known), but there was a variation on the Canadian Merchant Maine’s Red Ensign that was… Read more »
l’Académie Française has just announced that a set of 2,400 proposed changes to spellings and punctuations will be rolled out in school text books in the upcoming academic year. My knowledge of the Académie is not that great, but if I’m not mistaken, this is tantamount to revolution, not evolution. Apparently, these 2,400 changes affect approximately four percent of the… Read more »
The concept of a bad dress rehearsal for a play being the harbinger of a good opening night (and vice versa) has always puzzled me. This week, I had the opportunity to collect some data on the topic, so I thought I’d write and share a journal, then examine the saying. As I write this, the theatre group I belong… Read more »
For yearsandyearsandyearsandyears now, I’ve had a grudge against the word “nice”. It’s a nothing word. It’s a non-committal word. It’s bland, near-meaningless and flaccid. Plain. Vanilla. Un-descriptive. The trigger that caused my hate-on for the word was a British sitcom from the ‘70s, whose title and details now escape me. A guy had asked someone (partner? Friends?) their opinion of… Read more »
(The mission of this blog is to provide articles that address some facet of the arts and culture. Sometimes the connection is tenuous—occasionally, it’s a-l-m-o-s-t invisible. Although the context of the underlying subject matter is global, this article is geared towards the arts and culture elements of that subject. My support for the entire initiative is, at this point, wholehearted… Read more »
Things are a little frazzled this week here at the Hatchery. My goal was to get some of my writings laid out on a cyber-stall so that an indifferent world might have something new to ignore. Being an independent kind of a chappie (or maybe because I’m a tightwad) the only way to achieve this was with no paid help… Read more »
Prologue This is something I wrote in 2003, when the company I was working for was about to go through another re-org (read “downsize”). I held onto the piece at the time, just in case I’d written it in a moment of ‘temporary insanity.’ A few weeks later, I decided that the insanity was obviously permanent and published it to… Read more »
Dewdney Players, the community theatre group that I belong to, is rehearsing hard for a production of a pantomime version of Cinderella. In Canada, the genre is referred to as “British pantomime”, presumably in an effort to plausibly deny ownership or association. Many would regard this is a wise strategy. Pantomime has a long history, during which it evolved from… Read more »
With Christmas just around the corner, I thought I’d learn a little about that sing-song staple of the season, The Twelve Days of Christmas, and share it here. It’s a song that most of us learn as kids. It’s a song we teach our kids. It’s a song that gets trundled out at many Carol concerts. And it’s a song… Read more »
I try to theme my articles on this website around the Arts and Culture, but today’s piece might be a challenge. How’s this? “Have you ever seen people in a library or a study hall, fast asleep with their heads on the desk in front of them, maybe using their text books as a pillow? Have you ever thought that… Read more »