A blast from the past

Chernobyl power plant, encased in a sarcophagus.

The ongoing developments in Japan, especially at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, are terrifying to me. I’d go into detail about what’s happening there right now, but it seems that with every hour that passes, something new is happening. Another reactor explodes. More efforts to curb the radiation. A rare outburst by Japanese Prime Minister Naoto, who stormed into the Tokyo Electric Power Company and demanded to know: “What the hell is going on?!”

No spectators in the Bertuzzi incident

The attack by Bertuzzi on Moore.

It’s been seven years to the day since my father and I saw the worst hockey game of our lives, in Darby’s Pub at 4^th and MacDonald, on March 8, 2004.

 

Yes, I'm talking about the Todd Bertuzzi incident.

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.