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Opinion General

GOG: If the Git says you’re going slow, you are way too slow

On Monday I tried driving fast down a fast road in a fast car. This sort of summer driving should be fun. Get the old girl’s top off (I’m talking convertibles here, but you can imagine whatever you want,) stomp on the loud pedal and head for the open road. Alas, nothing but frustration awaits....

LOEWEN: The Big Questions between father and son

My Dad hasn’t had a barbershop haircut since 1968. He’s fiercely proud of the stance. It’s political. When I first heard Dad’s bald confession, I was in Kelowna for a visit and I needed a trim. My folks had recently moved here after Dad retired from his professorship at the University of Winnipeg. As we...

PARKER: A twenty-something’s guide to being glamourously poor

What is it about being poor that makes a person immediately want to buy a bottle of wine? I just don’t think it’s very fair to be tested like that, you know? Because, yes, I’m well aware I should probably spend my last $10 on some sort of starch but, in the battle of Great...

GOG: You win this time, horrible package! Oh, probably next time too

I had to buy a pair of scissors this week so I could trim the cat. My scissors came encased in an impenetrable cell of hard plastic that could only be breached by scissors. Three days later they are still taunting me from inside their impermeable plastic fortress, while the cat remains disgracefully unkempt. Somewhere...

LOEWEN: Public education and the petri dish of B.C. politics-to-come

Christy Clark and her cadre are unwittingly shaping the voice of political leadership in British Columbia for generations to come. They don’t realize it yet. Christy Clark and her cadre are too busy sweating over a decade of political misdeeds and how these actions will hamstring them in the summer months ahead, when they’d far...

PARKER: Plenty of truth behind every twirsonality

I follow a girl on Twitter whose profile claims she doesn’t follow anyone with whom she wouldn’t have beers in real life. I can totally appreciate that, even though she doesn’t follow me back. In a world filled with Photoshop and photo-bombs, edit and delete, themes and filters and personal manifestos disguised as About Me...

JONESIE: What this strike is about, what it isn’t, and what it should be

What about the strike? What do you think about the strike? Do you support the strike? Or do you not support the strike? Oh man, here we go again, everyone losing their minds. I have a simple answer to the whole thing: I feel the same about this strike as I did the one before...

GOG: Put THIS in the bag, you stupid machine

I am old enough to remember the empty promise of the digital age, the big lie propagated by that young pup Gates and his cohorts, that technology would improve our lives. It’s the twenty-first century for God’s sake. By now we were all supposed to be relaxing at home being amused to death by our...

LOEWEN: Christy Clark and the price of ignorance

“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance,” — Sir Claus Moser Christy Clark does not believe in public education. If she did, her son would be enrolled in one of Vancouver’s many fine public schools. But he’s not. Young Hamish is enrolled at one of Vancouver’s many fine private schools. He’s a lucky lad....

PARKER: An uneasy return to pen and paper

For the past three weeks I have been unable to use my MacBook. My inability to find a UK adapter strong enough to charge the thing (or my hair dryer) left me paralyzed where technology was concerned (and frizzy elsewhere), and the first thing I did after flying into Pearson International yesterday was to find...

JONESIE: What I want Apple to do next

This is part prediction, part wish. First, a confession: I’m a tech junkie and the worst kind because I know not how it works. I care even less. I appreciate the knowledge and those who know that, er, knowledge. But if the tech isn't simple enough to work for me without having to know it—I...

LOEWEN: Too many churches, not enough love

I don't believe in an interventionist God But I know, darling, that you do But if I did I would kneel down and ask Him Not to intervene when it came to you Not to touch a hair on your head To leave you as you are And if He felt He had to direct...

PARKER: A joy ride from the wrong side

When I turned 14, I wrote a 730-day countdown to my sweet 16. It wasn’t that I was expecting anything special to happen for me — this was long before MTV started that craze — it’s just that I knew my life was about to change for the better. The day of my 16th birthday...

JONESIE: Sometimes I should just shut up

My neighbour’s a good guy. Usually I only see him over the fence. He works many nights and most weekends on his yard, often with his family tending fruit trees, scaling ladders, moving dirt and rock. I’m usually wearing painting shorts, Crocs and a wife-beater and I wave at them from Dandelion Alley secretly hating...

GOG: Get it? Athletic rhymes with pathetic

'THEY DISPLAY LANGUAGE SKILLS SECOND ONLY TO THOSE OF THE COOKIE MONSTER' I have finally figured out why it is that team sports annoy me. I mean watching them, of course, participating being totally out of the question. (Many decades ago I was persuaded, against my better judgement, to try out for a high school...

LOEWEN: Everyone’s entitled to an opinion

'WE NEED FOLKS WITH THESE KINDS OF OPINIONS BECAUSE, FRANKLY, IF WE'RE LEFT TO THE OTHER OPINIONS OUT THERE, WELL, WE'RE SCREWED.' So with that, I thought I'd take a final walk The tide of public opinion had started to abate The neighbours, bless them, had turned out to be all talk I could see...