Dog On A Root

 - jim Young 20210402 “You can believe me now or you can believe me when you find out I’m right. It doesn’t matter to me.” - Jay Benson (one of my mentors at Kolmar.) My father always taught me that I could do anything that I really wanted to do if I put my mind to it. My father was wrong of course, but I never held it against him. I quickly learned that there were sometimes outside forces that I had no control over working against me. Gravity, for one, comes to mind. I’m sure you can figure out what THAT was all about. But I also learned my father’s lesson was not intended to be taken literally. The emphasis was on “putting my mind to it” and learning to try. In a recent, obvious attempt to discredit Joe Biden, Brittany M. Hughes has attacked a speech made by Biden about teaching his granddaughters the same basic lesson. Hughes is not wrong in her theories, of course, but she might want to cut Biden a bit of slack here. Whether you like Joe Biden or not, it’s not just Biden that has m

 - jim Young "Mr. Watson - come here - I want to see you." - Alexander Graham Bell I don’t remember my first telephone number but it was something like 3R2 (Three-ring-two). Dialing it consisted of holding a button on the left side of the phone while turning the crank on the right side. We could hear the phone ring for all our neighbours that were on our party line and would recognize our ring by the number and sequence of long and short rings. We could also answer the phone for everyone else on the party line or listen in on their conversations if we chose to but this was never an issue as it was a forbidden rule of etiquette that most everyone respected. Our phone company was the Stroud Telephone Company that operated from 1910 to 1964. Painswick, just 3 miles away, was serviced by Bell. When we moved to Painswick we were required to switch to Bell service which covered the Barrie area even though Painswick had not yet been annexed by Barrie.  As my father was the Deputy Ch

 

- jim Young ”There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” - Ernest Hemingway I began writing at an early age. I remember one Sunday afternoon pounding away on the keys of my mother’s Underwood typewriter at the dining room table to create a 2 page Newsletter with short stories and jokes mixed in with a hand drawn and hand coloured Woody Woodpecker. It was a very labourious work of art requiring several passes of the page to type my stories into a 3 column format. Typewriters were very unforgiving when it came to typos and each mistake had to be painstakingly erased with a special typewriter eraser that would rip the paper more often than not, if great care and attention was not given to the task. But my newsletter served its purpose of filling my boring afternoon and it didn’t bother me that I was only able to produce the one copy. After all, I had no one to read it anyway, as we lived in the country away from any friends and neighbours. My parents of

 

This is a copy of the Letter to the Editor that I emailed to Time's Editor-in-Chief and CEO, Edward Felsenthal on February 4th. In spite of the instant reply promising a response within 3 to 5 days, I have had no reply at the time of posting. Letter To The Editor, Time Magazine RE: Kid Of The Year Editor-in-Chief/CEO: Edward Felsenthal Dear Mr. Felsenthal, What a wonderful thing you have done by recognizing the positive contributions made by young people with your new “Kid Of The Year” award in Time magazine. Congratulations to the first recipient of this title, 15 year old Gitanjali Rao of Denver, Colorado. These children are the future of our planet and deserve all of the recognition, praise and encouragement they can muster. I would however, request you consider one small change to this title of “Kid Of The Year” by making it “Child Of The Year.” And by extension might I also recommend you rename your website feature “Time For Kids” to “Time For Children”. I know most people are