Dog On A Root

- j im Young 20240512 “What some people mistake for the high cost of living is really the cost of living high.” - Doug Larson I grew up in the 60s in a household that gathered together every night for a sit down dinner much like the Cleavers did. Each of us was encouraged to talk about our day. Everyone spoke and more importantly, everyone was heard. As an impressionable, young boy, I usually hung on every word my father would say when he told us about his day at work. My father and his brother were charter members of the IGA food chain in Stroud, Ontario. One of the things I find interesting is that, while there have been many changes in the grocery industry in the last 60 years, many things remain the same. Just like today, people would lament about the high cost of groceries even in 1965 and they weren’t shy about sharing those concerns with my father, their local grocer. In particular I remember my father thinking it odd that people were quick to grumble about paying $2.60 for a 2...

There’s nothing better to settle my upset stomach in the morning after a night of drinking than a slice of cold, leftover pizza. Unless it’s a cold leftover, half-eaten hamburger that sat in the fridge overnight congealing the grease and transforming the consistency of the meat into something like a soft rock. While the burger has hardened, at least it won’t break your teeth when you bite into it. Fortunately those days of waking up with a hangover are mostly gone for me. Pretty much, anyway.  I don’t miss them. The hangovers, that is. But pizza for breakfast is still one of my favourites that I enjoy even without a hangover, whenever we have left over pizza. But why should I have to wait for leftover pizza? Why not a fresh, hot pizza for breakfast? Well, for one, where can you get pizza delivery that early in the morning? So, if I’m going to make it myself, why not customize my pizza specifically for breakfast? With a coffee and a glass of cold orange juice, this recipe makes a p...

- jim young, originally posted March 9, 2013 "Well the girls are out to bingo, and the boys are gettin stinko, We think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday Night The glasses they will tinkle while our eyes begin to twinkle And we think no more of Inco on a Sudbury Saturday Night." - Stompin' Tom Connors Stompin’ Tom Connors recorded 48 albums in his lifetime, which lasted from 1936 to 2013. And that’s not counting the 10 albums of unreleased material that he left behind. To put that into perspective (even without the unreleased material), that’s about 4 times more albums than the Beatles released, 4 times more than Michael Jackson released and 4 times more than The Band released during their lifetimes. It’s almost as many as Frank Sinatra, more than Anne Murray, more than Gordon Lightfoot, more than the Guess Who, more than The Who, more than Led Zeppelin, more than Bruce Springsteen, and more than even Bob Dylan. And on the Saturday Night – not just in Sudbury, but acr...

  - jim Young “The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Illuminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory. The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control. The world is rudderless.” - Alan Moore Aircraft of any size passing overhead in Stroud in the 1950s was a rare event. Rare enough to cause my friends and I to pause whatever we were doing, whether it was playing marbles or baseball, and look to the skies. We were fascinated by jet planes that flew so high above us, we wouldn’t have even noticed them were it not for the vapour trails they left behind. And just as quickly as they appeared, the vapour trails began to dissipate, leaving us to return our focus back to our childhood games.    By the late 1990s however vapour trails seemed to linger longer in the...

  - j im Young "No-one's frightened of playing it, everyone's saying it, flowing more freely than wine." - George Harrison Memes are a funny thing - even when they’re not funny. Some of those that you see on Facebook of course are funny and mostly shared for entertainment purposes. But memes can also be educational, controversial and even political. They can be used to express an individual’s perspective or provoke discussion. So often memes fall into the same category as adages like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” or “everyone is entitled to their own opinion”. Some memes will likely become adages in their own right but of course for that to happen they would need to first express a “general truth”. Sadly some memes, either intentionally or through happenstance, share falsehoods some of which may be benign enough, but oftentimes can be negative in cruel, vicious or simply misleading ways. In this fast-paced world of ours, everyone wants to share their opini...