Magnificent Octopus

Tolstoy and Gilmour I was greatly interested to pick up the current issue of the Walrus upon discovering it contained a memoir by David Gil...

As you may recall, earlier this summer I bought some art from a cigarette machine . Well, after a few weeks, I felt a little niggling, an ur...

The Dora fishing rod (Zebco) actually works. I caught 2 fish with it last weekend. It's been a favourite toy of Helena's since she r...

This letter, signed by Jose Saramago, Harold Pinter, Noam Chomsky, and John Berger, appeared July 21 buried in The Independent's letters...

Umberto Eco on Hollow Earth theories : On various occasions I have written about "literary madmen," but they are not merely a fixa...

Tomorrow is World Jump Day ! Science or performance art — you decide. It's claimed that if 600 million people in the Western hemisphere ...

There's a spider living in our bathtub. I noticed him about a week ago. There he sits, occasionally runs a lap, minding his own business...

David Gilmour in "My Life with Tolstoy" (July/August 2006, The Walrus ): There's a way you read when you travel; it is, in its...

Share your thoughts on Napoleon while we dissect War and Peace . This novel is turning into quite the history lesson. I'm still exhaust...

Christopher Morley's Parnassus on Wheels is delightful — "graceful in style, light in substance, merry in its attitude toward life...

While I often crave and seek out the solace of a bookstore, I rarely find it, particularly since generally only big-box bookstores are withi...

We had a spectacular, if relatively brief, thunderstorm yesterday evening, just around Helena's bedtime. We lost power, and seeing as sh...

Discussion opens today (we hope) on the first chunk of Tolstoy's War and Peace (as if anyone else ever wrote a book called "War a...

The ever charming and irreverent Ella ( Box of Books ) has been vacationing for the last couple weeks, but she left behind for us a series s...

On a relatively quiet holiday Monday, we headed out to pursue our jazz education. La Petite Ecole du Jazz was specifically geared toward you...

I don't know much about jazz, much less how to write about it, but I remembered having read something , so I went looking for it, and fo...

The Festival International de Jazz de Montreal is on! Last night we took in John Zorn's Acoustic Masada , an event I'd been looking...

As defined by Waggish : "books that fall into the category of my having empirically observed them being read by a multitude of engineer...

Every morning Helena pitter patters to my bedside. Sometimes she gently shakes me awake, usually it takes only her whispered "Mama....