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28
Jun
2017
Canada will be 150 years old this Saturday. I was asked by the organizers of the Canada Day celebrations to put together a historical presentation about the churches of Lake Country. Eleven, by my count, for a community of 14,000.
So, last Tuesday morning, I drove around to all the current churches, to take pictures. I already had pictures of the earlier churches, thanks to the Lake Country Museum’s archives.
On Tuesday mornings, I discovered, Lake Country is a religious dead zone. Locked doors. Empty parking lots. Closed gates. Silence…
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: churches, dead zone, history, Canada Day, museum
26
If you want to invest in a growth industry, consider hate crimes. London police report a five-fold increase in attacks on Muslims – particularly Muslim women – since the terrorist attacks on London Bridge, the Westminster parliament, and the Manchester concert.
But the increase is not limited to Britain, where the reaction might be understandable. Here in Canada, Statistics Canada indicates that attacks on Muslims more than tripled over three years, from 45 in 2012 to 159 in 2015. During 2015 alone, according to a CBC report, hate crimes against Muslims soared by 60 per cent.
No doubt attacks on Muslims are a form of retaliation for acts attributed to Islamic extremists. But if so, why single out women? Not one of those acts was committed by a woman.
Or are women simply easier to identify by their head scarves?
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: Jesus, Muslims, Islam, Darren Osburne, Kinsbury mosque, Golden Rule
21
For a few years, I taught writing and editing courses for businesses. Some workshops flew; others foundered on the simplest points.
Pharmaceutical companies, in particular, often hired Asian immigrants. I’ve no doubt they were well qualified, highly trained, even brilliant. They had studied English. But they came from languages that didn’t use little things like prepositions. Or articles. Or even commas.
“Why you need ‘the’ before noun?” someone might ask.
Or perhaps, “Why sometimes ‘agree with,’ sometimes ‘agree to,’ sometimes ‘agree on’?”
I offered examples. They would ask, “Where we find book that teach us these rules?”
There isn’t one. Or more accurately, there are hundreds.
Tags: rules, Language, authorities, fluency
19
t’s infuriating. It’s offensive. You go to a public park, a main street, and you see artwork damaged. Seats smashed. Trees chopped down. Graffiti splattered on walls. Not even hate graffiti, which at least has some motivation -- even if I reject it -- but just graffiti for the sake of defacing a virgin wall.
Vandalism. It’s mindless. Purposeless. Meaningless.
In the village of Telkwa, on Highway 16 through northern British Columbia, people woke up one morning to find that during the night someone – or more likely, a small group of someones -- had trashed a garden display in Eddy Park, where the Bulkley and Telkwa rivers meet.
Sometime during the night, vandals smashed flower pots, trampled plants, scattered debris throughout the town.
Tags: vandalism, Descartes, Telkwa, Bulkley
14
Let’s quit calling evolution a “theory.” When Darwin first proposed the concept, evolution was a theory. It’s not any more – it’s a reality.
Gravity was a theory too, when Newton first advanced it. But no one today would step off a cliff because he believes gravity is an unproven theory.
Evolution is not open for debate or denial. No more than, say, the mathematical concept that one plus one equals two. Or the value of pi.
Darwin did not invent evolution. He recognized what had been there all along.
Since then, not one scientific discovery has disproven evolution.
Tags: Evolution, Darwin