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15
Oct
2021
Thursday October 14, 2021
On Friday the 13th of October, 49 years ago yesterday, a plane crashed in the highest peaks of the Andes.
Thirteen people died instantly; five more died soon after of injuries and cold. Another eleven died when an avalanche buried the remains of the fuselage.
In the black and freezing night, Mando Parrado sometimes talked with his friend Arturo, slung in a makeshift hammock to ease the agony of two broken legs.
“What good is God to us?” Parrado said. “If he loves us so much, why would have leave us here to suffer?
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: love, Parrado, Andes, cannibalism
10
Sunday October 10, 2021
A rising tide of people in this country apparently believe – body, mind, and spirit – that they are called overthrow the established powers-that-be. By any means. Including physical insurrection.
They seem to buy into some kind of conspiracy which they – and they alone – know about.
I have a deep suspicion of all conspiracy theories. I find it far simpler to blame basic human emotions –greed, anger, ignorance, even stupidity – than to imagine vast numbers of people somehow collaborating in a mass movement to take over the world.
But that works the other way, too. I do not believe that the mainstream media – television, radio, newspapers, and magazines – conspire to censor negative information about masks and vaccines.
Categories: Sharp Edges
Tags: algorithms, Facebook, conspiracies, Haugen
Thursday October 7, 2021
I grew up in the United Church of Canada. It’s a rational church.
So it was a new experience for me to attend an all-black evangelical congregation in Barbados, back in my working journalist days.
My host, the Rev. Kortright Davis, a senior staffer at the Caribbean Conference of Churches, was sent to encourage The United Holiness Church to support the CCC’s social justice program – which was, I would guess, anathema to a denomination deep into personal-salvation theology.
As we drove up, I could hear what sounded like a riot down the street.
As we got closer, I could see that the riot was at the church.
Tags: Caribbean Conference of Churches, Barbados, Holiness
Saturday October 2, 2021
Today happens to be my old schoolmate David Bryson’s birthday. It prompts me to venture deep into nostalgia.
Our childhoods were so different from anything anyone might experience today, that occasionally I have to write my memories down. Otherwise, I fear, the day may come when I won’t believe them myself.
For one thing, we went to school in India. In one of the hill stations where the British Civil Service and other expatriates fled to escape the heat and humidity of an Indian summer.
The school was – and still is – Woodstock, 7,000 feet up in the foothills of the Himalayas. It was also a boarding school. In Canada, think of the infamous residential schools for indigenous children. Unless our parents came up to the hills for a holiday, we children lived the entire school year in dormitories.
Tags: India, Woodstock, Himalayas, boarding school
Thursday September 30, 2021
On the last day of this summer’s hiking camp, we hiked out to where Ripple Rock used to be, in the channel between Vancouver Island and the B.C. mainland.
At one time, Ripple Rock was a major maritime hazard. Two great spikes of rock jutted up from the sea floor, right in the middle of Seymour Narrows, barely three metres below the surface at low tide.
So in the 1950s, the federal government resolved to remove Ripple Rock forever. They drilled tunnels under the sea, then up into the rock’s twin peaks. They packed the tunnels with 1,400 tons of high explosive.
On April 5, 1958, they blew up Ripple Rock in the world’s largest non-nuclear peacetime explosion. .
So we hiked to a viewpoint, to see a rock that used to be there, but wasn’t there anymore, and hadn’t been there for 63 years, and that we couldn’t have seen even if it had been there, because it was all under the surface anyway.
Tags: Ripple Rock, grieving, surface