Month: March 2017

Fear and Trembling in Hope Ness

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A storm clod taking shape

(Author’s note, May 23, 2017: since I first wrote and published this post, U.S. President Donald Trump has fired now-former FBI director James Comey. He has offered several reasons for doing so, including to relieve the pressure he felt he was under on account of the FBI investigation into Russia’s meddling into last fall’s U.S. election to allegedly help his campaign. It’s been widely reported Trump told high-ranking Russian officials in the Oval Office the day after the firing that he felt relieved the pressure was off. Turns out it wasn’t, as subsequent events clearly showed. His firing of Comey may yet prove to have been a huge blunder for him, setting in motion fateful consequences. We’ll see. Anything, and I mean anything, can still happen. Trump will not let the investigations, finish, including the one now in the hands of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller.)

The definition of the word “terror” is easy enough: The Oxford dictionary defines it as “extreme fear.” Merriam-Webster defines it as “a state of intense fear.”

Some examples of how the word is used include, “a regime that rules by terror; bombings and other acts of terror; a campaign of terror against ethnic minority groups.”

But a suitable definition for the word “terrorism” is harder to come by. “The unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims,” says Oxford.  “The systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion,” says Merriam-Webster. Continue reading →

Remembering the Home Bank collapse

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The collapse of the Home Bank of Canada was the biggest in Canadian history and led to government regulations aimed at rebuilding and maintaining public trust and stability in the Canadian banking system.

Many years ago when I was living in Toronto I drove a taxi part-time to help make ends meet. One night I picked up several visitors from the U.S. at the airport. We were on the expressway heading downtown when the lights of several tall bank buildings came into view.

“You sure have a lot of big banks here,” one of my passengers said, with a note of wonder in her voice.  I was a bit surprised. Didn’t they have big banks in the U.S.?

I noted Canadians – at that time still largely of Scottish descent – were a frugal people and put as much money as they could into savings.

If I’d had more time I would have regaled them with some relevant, historical background, about the big bank failure that took place years earlier and led to Canada’s stable, government-regulated banking regime. (I note here in passing that it was that very stability that helped Canada cope with the financial crisis of 2008, and earned the country and its banks international praise.)

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Here’s hoping in Hope Ness

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Mirabella helped Grandpa in the potato patch last spring

Potatoes are a semi-hardy crop. You don’t have to wait until all risk of frost has passed, which is traditionally  the May 24th long, holiday weekend here in Hope Ness on the Bruce Peninsula, and most of the rest of southern Ontario. I’ve planted my certified seed spuds as early as mid-April and ran into a frost warning at least once later that month after those two rows young plants had just started breaking through the ground. So, I covered them with a fairly thick blanket of straw and hoped for the best. The frost didn’t actually happen. I pulled the straw aside and later used it as mulch around those plants. That’s how, by chance, I happened to discover mulching your potatos with straw is a fool-proof way of avoiding the major insect pest of potato plants, the Colorado potato beetle. Those two rows remained totally bug-free, while my many other rows that weren’t straw-mulched got the usual invasion, necessitating the usual early morning inspection and, well, crushing, one bug at a time. I later found from an agricultural professor at the University of Guelph who I happened to interview on another topic, that, with the straw mulch, “you interrupted the life-cycle of the potato beetle.” So, ever since then, I’ve mulched my potatoes with straw and never had Colorado potato beetle problem, thus saving myself a lot of time and money spent over the years on the organic pesticide known as bacillus Thuringiensis.

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