This issue must have been one of the very few where the women’s liberation movement had something in common with the Yippies. The abolition of pay toilets was part of the Yippie “platform” in 1968. Though I can’t rule out the possibility that the Yippies, being put-on artists, just borrowed the idea from elsewhere for…

I saw something very like the Humvee fiasco, at an air show at Trenton Air Force Base, Ont., in 1981. A big dozer or similar, on a skid, was being pushed out the cargo door of a Hercules flying very low over the airfield. It was supposed to drop six feet or so, and skid to a stop. But something went wrong, and it…

Well, just so. No dog would have sat in judgement in that way.

Yes — a wonderful movie. As someone said upthread, “hokum of the highest order.” But that never stopped certain Hollywood pictures being great as well.

One of my favourite “Golden Age” movies. Based on a play I think. Which makes the Dowager Empress’s — and the movie’s — last line (“The play is over. Go home”) a bit of an in-joke. But it’s more than that. The exiled aristocrats have been living in a dream world, and now, finally, have to learn something about their…

THAT CAT IS LOOKING INTO MY SOUL

One of my in-laws tried to rope me into Herbalife or some shit. When she started on the subject of “toxins,” I asked “which toxins, in particular? Name one, please.” I thought she was going to spit — she said “bah!”, flapped her hand in contemptuous dismissal, and turned to talk to someone sitting to her other side.

Slate of course is running their “Trump Apocalypse Watch” series — but unless I’ve missed it, they haven’t played around yet with any of that Revelations stuff about trumpets, let alone “the Last Trump” from Corinthians. No doubt they’ll get to it sooner or later.

I agree. Sometimes it’s trivial and/or laughable, like North American buildings usually skipping 13 when numbering building floors (or, where I live, 4, because of Chinese superstition; and granted, that’s just a business decision or practice, not as far as I know mandated in any building code or the like). But then…

Brilliant, though it’s hard to say what zombie Drumpf would un-live on. I imagine, even in that form, that he’d disdain brains.

Years ago, I read where New York-area graveyards were facing a land crisis back in the 60s or around then — they were filling up and no new ones were being created or zoned. So someone proposed that they save space by buying coffins vertically. But people were creeped out by the idea, so after an outcry, the…

Well this is just it. All the cant that’s routinely fed to us about the need to be flexible, entrepreneurial etc. can’t change the fact that there are very very few people around who have the ability to be really good at several technical specialties.

Only nurses and doctors can administer botox and injectables.

Nah. Don Cherry won’t be running for office at his age, and Rob Ford just died.

Plus he’s gay as a French horn...

Four examples should probably suffice: two substantive, and two merely symbolic. In foreign policy, his government was more mindlessly pro-Israeli, and anti-Iranian, than even any US government of recent memory, and certainly than most European governments. Under John Baird especially, “Israel right or wrong” was more…

Canada literally got EVERYTHING we wanted; a non-contested gentle launching from the mother ship....

True about Pearson, whom I’d forgotten about temporarily; and maybe even he too was ahead of his time, in some ways. Just style-wise, it’s too bad for him that “retro” wasn’t a term of praise in his day. Nowadays, the youngs might say that he could rock a bow tie, which even in the 50s was reckoned (to borrow the…

I suppose I meant to say, also, that Oliver kind of missed the point of the comparison — perhaps somewhat deliberately, for comic effect.

That sequence was funny, of course (it was by John Oliver, after all). But Pierre Trudeau succeeded in politics (until he didn’t, because all political careers end in failure, except maybe some of the term-limited ones) almost despite, rather than because of, his towering analytical intellect. To really do well in…