Jim Taylor's Columns - 'Soft Edges' and 'Sharp Edges'

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29

Jul

2021

Going ‘round in circles

Author: Jim Taylor

Thursday July 29, 2021

 

Long long ago, I had a Baby Brownie camera. It had no settings at all – just point and click. But it let me take grainy black and white pictures. 

            As time went on, I graduated to a 35mm camera that would do almost everything for me except choose my subject. It would set the aperture. Choose the shutter speed. Auto-focus on whatever I had on the screen. 

             Except that one of its dials sets “picture mode,” in which the camera automatically amends its settings to suit special circumstances -- portraits, landscapes, close-ups, etc. 

            Not long ago, I took a series of photos of our Rotary club picking up litter along a popular walking route. Somehow, I bumped that dial from “Auto” to “Art.” 

            I got grainy black and white photos that I might have taken with my old Baby Brownie.


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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: aging, letting go

24

Jul

2021

Retribution, rehabilitation, prevention

Author: Jim Taylor

Sunday July 25, 2021

 

 “A teenage girl who stabbed a boy to death in downtown Kelowna was sentenced to one day in custody after pleading guilty to manslaughter.”

            That was the first sentence of a story in Wednesday’s paper.

            It took me aback.

            One day? Especially when that one day was the day she appeared in court?

            Part of me says that murder, even an unpremeditated murder like this one, deserves punishment. No one should get off with a verbal reprimand.

            That is, of course, the principle behind what’s called retributive justice. Make ‘em suffer for that they did.


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22

Jul

2021

Learning to live with smoke

Author: Jim Taylor

Thursday July 22, 2021

 

Smoke cloaks the Okanagan Valley, as it does much of North America. With wildfires burning all over B.C. and through the western states., smoke can’t help drifting through this valley.

            It hangs like frosted glass between me and the far shore of the lake. 

            To the north and south, water sky and hills merge into an opaque curtain. 

            There are no horizons. 

            Smoke is becoming a new normal. As extreme weather patterns come tumbling one after another, we can expect more heat domes. More droughts. More smoke.


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20

Jul

2021

If I were a coronavirus…

Author: Jim Taylor

Sunday July 18, 2021

 

COVID-19 cases have started surging again, in places like Brazil, India, Indonesia, and the U.S.. Reports blame the rise on anti-vaccine movements, distrust of authorities, misinformation, and government incompetence. 

            If I were a coronavirus, I’d be celebrating all of those.

            As a virus, I have only one goal – to get inside the cells of as many humans as possible, so that I can take over their cell mechanisms to make more copies of me, so that I can get inside more cells of more humans. 

            We viruses run the ultimate assembly line. All we need is victims. 


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20

Jul

2021

Things that happen in threes

Author: Jim Taylor

Thursday July 15, 2021

 

Bad things happen in threes, my Irish relatives used to tell me. 

            Some sources will tell you that the “rule of threes” derives from trench warfare in World War I. Two soldiers could safely light their cigarettes off a single match. But if you kept the match alight long enough for a third soldier to light up, enemy snipers had time to aim. One dead soldier.

            But the rule of threes surely goes back far before that. 

            Threes are endemic in Christianity. The Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In baptisms, people are dipped or sprinkled three times. Everyone knows that there were three Wise Men – although the Bible itself never cites that number. Resurrection came on the morning of the third day. Peter denied Jesus three times; Jesus countered by asking Peter three time, “Do you love me?” Jesus rejected three temptations in the wilderness…



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Categories: Soft Edges

Tags: Threes

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