An afternoon with Meccano

Just imagine, this was once a few pieces of metal in a box.

Last week, on a road trip on Vancouver Island, I had a look in an antique emporium and to my delight, discovered a very old, just about complete Meccano set from the 1950s or 1960s. This was a treasure find.

A Selecão will rise again

I remember a few years ago when actor Johnny Depp went into a restaurant and ordered only the very finest wine on the menu, ordered the most expensive caviar and meals, and racked up a bill in the thousands, and paid it without so much of a smirk on his face.

Brazil's Olympics!

"No one is happier than Brazil's people. But maybe because we were a colony for such a long time, we always had this sense of inferiority, of not being important. We always thought that we couldn't do what the others could."

In the mind's eye

DSCF2641, originally uploaded by kmackenzie2003.

I snapped this goat with my trustworthy Fujifilm F10 Finepix camera - cigarette-pack size... no telescopes for this humble photographer-slash-writer - and was thrilled at the sheer detail of this photo. Look how the hairs swirl around this goat's eye, as it peers out through the centre of this whirlpool of fur.
It's quite remarkable. Beauty in the simplest things, really. All you have to do is look.

The Tiananmen ‘incident’

Twenty years ago, I was a cranky 17-year-old teenager looking at a vast, open future full of possibilities. It was June 4, 1989, and I was just weeks away from the graduation of a lifetime. After this month, I thought, I'd be free to do anything and everything I wanted to do. That was a breath of fresh air. Particularly away from the bullies I had to deal with daily during my time in that institution.

But, in another part of the world, at the same time, there were mightier bullies. As a result of their actions, many breaths were taken away – some say 800, some say 1,000, some say 1,500.

The site? Beijing. The square? Tiananmen.


The event? None other than a massacre that shocked the world.

Cutting Obama's mustard

People, please.

I've been living on this planet for nearly 38 years now, and I dare say I've never seen anything like this.

It starts like a bad joke between friends in the pub: U.S. President Barack Obama walks into a burger joint in Virginia and orders a cheeseburger with - horrors of horrors - Dijon mustard instead of the standard French (sorry, I mean, Freedom) yellow mustard. He was crucified for being snobby, upper-class, whatever.

Signed, sealed and delivered in the EU?

Before I start, I ask for your forgiveness for my ignorance.

My ignorance of certain things that, really, require too much of my time and commitment to deepen my knowledge of the topic.

The topic, specifically, is about free trade, the WTO, the G8, and other acronyms related to control of trade between countries.

The issue? Canada’s rather hostile response to the European Union’s ban on seal products, which was just passed this morning (Tuesday, May 5, 2009).