Month: April 2013

This morning’s shot from Sue in Regina. In response to her emailed photo, she got the one below.

It’s been a while since I received photos from Rebecca. She’s been working long hours at the office but it hasn’t affected her steady hand or her photographer’s eye.
Here are a couple more…

Indefatigable John Robert Colombo, “Canada’s Master Gatherer” has another important book to his credit. The Northrup Frye Quote Book will soon be available through publisher Dundurn Press and it’s already in the online catalogue.
Although many Canadians will be unaware of Northrup Frye‘s writings, he was a literary critic of the highest international status. Colombo has been working on this book of quotations for years and I will be very happy when I can get my hands on a copy. It will make the wit and wisdom of Mr Frye more accessible, although his entire oeuvre has been published in 30 volumes by the University of Toronto.
I enjoy a sneak peek, reading the quotation on the cover about advertising:

Advertising — A judicious mixture of flattery and threats.

The cover, by the way, is not one of my designs but I like it very much. I might have cropped around Northup’s mane more carefully, but that’s a quibble. It’s a well chosen photo of Frye. Great facial expression and I get a kick out of the devilish way the red quotation marks stick out of his head like horns.
Congratulations on your latest publication, JRC. You continue to live up to that Order of Canada citation you received years ago.

Until today, I was paying Teksavvy $29.99 a month for a DSL (phone line) internet connection that gave me a real life 4.2 Mbps download speed, The service allowed me 75GB of data downloading but I use about a third of that.
When I noticed a 10 Mbps package for $32.99, of course I went for it. The real life speed is 8.5 Mbps and I’m allowed 300GB of downloading. There was a one-time fee of $50 to have a guy come over and fix up a high speed connection. Well worth it, I think.
Teksavvy lets me use my own modem, so no rental fees for that. I bought my own a couple of years ago and it paid for itself in a few months. From here on, my speedy internet will cost me $32.99/month plus tax.
Canadians pay too much for communications services that are lame compared to those of more advanced countries, but until enough of us shout about it, the telco/cable oligopoly isn’t going to do any better by us. The best a single customer can do is to shop around and get the best possible deal. At present, Teksavvy looks good to me.

Cheryl and Lloyd Cooke chose to stay in Mexico long enough to enjoy the Easter celebrations and I can see why. The Mexicans make big, colourful, papier maché effigies of all kinds of devils, witches, capitalist pigs and other baddies, parade them around in the streets and then blow them to smithereens with firecrackers.
I think Lloyd said the effigies are about 9 feet tall. There are more short videos here.