Sure, the birds are chirping and the dandelions are popping. But as another summer blooms into view, you can’t help the feeling that something is missing. Where has all the good baseball gone? First, the Guelph Royals, a fixture of senior baseball in this city, announced they wouldn’t field a team this summer because...
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Forget crab fishermen, firefighters or garbage collectors. One of the hardest jobs in the world has got to be doomsday prophet. They spend their life waiting for it to end. And when they’re wrong, we all point and laugh. Take 89-year-old Harold Camping. No, don’t take him camping, that’s his name. A retired engineer...
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Canadians like to complain that Stephen Harper is a cold fish, a man so devoid of personality and charisma he wears an earpiece operated by a real live human who tells him when to smile—or so I’ve heard. Yes, it’s true his staffers had to force him to drink a sip of champagne for...
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I have made a few poor decisions in my life. Like that time I sent my banking information to the nice Nigerian man I met through email. Or on Monday night, when I sent all those expensive “Atta Boy, Iggy!” balloons to the Liberals’ celebration party. Talk about awkward. At certain points in his...
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It’s well past 11 p.m. on a Friday night, and I’m pacing the room, throwing nervous glances at the TV screen. I’d tried to walk away earlier, pretending to do the dishes, but I could still hear it. The howl of 37,000 people screaming bloody murder over the questionable eyesight of a man in...
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The internet has brought us many wonderful things. Cheap music. Scantily-clad women. Free electronic mail delivered by tiny elves. But one of its greatest gifts may be what it reveals about our politicians, although not always in ways they’d hope. Once there was a time when we had to form our opinions of candidates...
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Call Canadian elections boring all you want. But I’ll take them over a Haitian campaign any day. Last week, I was in Port au Prince reporting on the work of the St. Joseph’s International Outreach Program, a medical aid group that has sent more than 100 volunteers to Haiti from around the region, including...
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Before we gather up the horses and send out a lynch mob for the young men who hauled down Guelph’s beloved Begging Bear statue, let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ll admit the facts, on the surface, seem stacked against them. Last Friday night, witnesses saw a group of about 10 young...
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Michael Ignatieff’s “cotton-pickin’ minute” comment from last week never quite drew the outrage his political opponents hoped it would. The Conservatives said it was a racist slur; the Liberals it came from Bugs Bunny. And we all laughed at how our politicians love to become theatrically offended to gain political points. But a column...
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When food shortages caused people to revolt in Tunisia, then Egypt, we yawned. When the cost of corn, wheat and rice began climbing in the past year because of droughts, floods and a surge in demand from livestock and ethanol plants, we shrugged. But when a global shortage of grain finally hits us where...
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