On July 10^th the organizers sent a set of prompts and entrants had 10 days to write a maximum 3,000-word story based on the chosen prompts.

Here were the rules:

CHOOSE ONE OF THE CHARACTERS LISTED BELOW. This character does not have to be your protagonist, but they must play a significant role in your story.

A fugitive

A queen

An amputee

A carpenter

A teenage prodigy

CHOOSE ONE OF THE SETTINGS LISTED BELOW. Can be set in any time-period, including the future. Can deviate slightly but the majority of the story must take place in one of these settings.

A summer camp

A vineyard

A production studio/film or tv set

A rehabilitation center

A treehouse

THE ONE THING THAT MUST BE INCLUDED IN ALL STORIES IS:

A piece of amber with something relating to or derived from living matter preserved in it.

I set to work using the prodigy and vineyard and submitted my story with about 36 hours to spare.

There were almost 700 entrants, and it took until October for the feedback to arrive, but when it did it was helpful and encouraging and called for stronger character development. ( I was well into writing a novel at that point and took some of the advice and applied it to parts of the novel which is now in at least its third draft.)

Here is the revised contest entry sticking to my original story and still coming in under the 3,000 word limit.

Hope you enjoy it and feel free to add your own suggestions on character development.

El Graeco

The Ape was not yet a mature female, but she was big. Normally moving on all fours, she was close to five feet tall when she rose up to survey her surroundings. At age seven she was still a teenager but already weighed 400 pounds. She had a vision that she would challenge the leader of her matriarchal troop, but right now she was in pain. Her mouth hurt. It stung to chew on the tubers she dug from the ground and biting down on her favourite nuts was impossible. The pain was so intense she chased off the males wanting to mate. Munching on handfuls of leaves was all she could manage and she would starve if the pain did not go away.

Neel was bored. His parents had packed him off to Greece to spend time with his relatives who owned a vineyard, leaving his beloved books behind in his Danforth-area home.

“I know you’re a smart kid,” his father had said as his first year of high school was winding down, “but you need to experience more than just books and the museum. You need to experience life BEFORE it makes it into a museum or a book.” Neel didn’t want to experience life. He had enough of that coping with a new school and being the odd kid in his class.

He had met Aunt Areti and Uncle Anastasios a couple of times when they had come to Canada to visit and grudgingly admitted they were cool. An old family, they were full of new ideas to revive traditional Greek winemaking. Working for the summer in their vineyard however, was not what he wanted. He had hoped to have another summer learning how to catalogue fossils; but here he was, waiting for his uncle who had said they were going for an “outing” this morning. An outing he did not need or want.

“Come with me,” Anastasios said. He handed Neel a knapsack. “There is food and water for you, and you’ll need this as well.” From inside his own knapsack, Anastasios produced a sheath holding a large, curved knife.

“Where are we going?”

“We are preparing to harvest the resin from our Aleppo trees up where the vine rows meet the hillside.”

It was early and the temperature had not started to rise, but Neel was not used to strenuous activity and was soon labouring as they climbed up the hill. Anastasios tossed him a straw hat. “You’ll want this.”

“We make retsina, Neel. It’s a Greek wine that has been around for at least 4,000 years. My family ― your family ― is trying to bring it back to life. The key ingredient is the resin of the Aleppo pine tree. We grow the grapes carefully in our vineyard, but we harvest the resin just as the tree offers it. Our trees have grown in the soil of our family vineyard for generations and some of the individual trees are 150 years old. The whole forest is as old as these hills. We look for mature trees to preserve the traditional flavour we add to our wine.”

The path led them higher up and once they were into the forested area where it levelled out and was cooler, Neel felt better. “We’re almost there,” his uncle assured him. “You should be able to catch the fragrance of the pine needles as they warm up from the sun hitting them.”

Neel took a deep breath and experienced a smell unlike anything he had come across back home. Was this how it smelled millions of years ago? As the sharp aroma of wild thyme hit him, he could visualize what it would have been like.

He excelled in school because of his exceptional memory. A memory that was as much a gift as it was a curse. He remembered big things and tiny details. Sometimes it was those tiny details that left him confused as he tried to sort out what was important, what was interesting, and what really didn’t matter. It made him different from everyone at school. He had read up on this part of Greece once he knew there was no choice but to accept his summer fate; picking out the bits that were most important. How had the early hominids wandering Eurasia ended up as people like his aunt and uncle? How had land once covered in dense forests become beautiful hillside vineyards? He learned that this part of Greece had been home to Graecopithecus macedoniensis who had died out seven million years ago. His knowledge of the prehistoric world helped him link it all together and he started to form images of how things happened.

The pain was becoming too much to bear and the big Ape reached inside her mouth desperately looking for what was causing the pain and cried out when she touched the tender spot. There seemed to be nothing she could do to stop the hurt and with her powerful hands, tore a branch off a nearby tree, and poked inside her mouth to push away her pain. Her nose twitching at the unfamiliar smell from the branch.

Neel and his uncle passed through the tree cover and into an area that was more open with dry rocky soil before it gave way to steeper slopes beyond the vineyard. The aroma of the Aleppo pine was strong and unmistakable. Anastasios told Neel he had made a trip up here weeks earlier and marked many of the trees with bright red ribbons. He pointed at the pine grove.

“We are after the trees that are marked.” Anastasios pulled his curved knife from its sheath and motioned for Neel to ready his own knife. “We need to get the resin flowing by wounding the tree but not wounding it enough to kill it.”

Neel could see the reverence his uncle had for the trees and imagined the scene at this very tree 150 years earlier. His ever-wandering mind took him further back to ancient Greece and then to this same grove ten thousand years ago, then ten million years. He saw creatures roaming right where they were standing now. As his uncle talked, Neel was casting back to scenes of whole species, now long gone.

“Hey! Neel, pay attention. You get lost inside that cluttered head of yours?”

“Sorry, Uncle; yes. I like to think about what it was like here long ago.” He remembered the online references he had found while waiting for the flight from Canada. “There are some theories that say common ancestors of great apes and humans—you know like you and me—actually lived here and migrated to Africa; not the other way around.”

“Well Neel, focus on the job at hand. You can solve the mysteries of mankind another time. Watch carefully.”

Anastasios made several long, shallow cuts in the trunk of one of the pine trees, then moved on to the next one.

“We leave the blade dull intentionally so we don’t cut too deep. You’ll have to apply pressure to start the cut, then pull down slowly.” Neel took the curved edge of the knife and made a hesitant first cut, which released a stronger, mustier aroma. His uncle nodded, and Neel made another cut. They moved across about two dozen trees, making several cuts in each one; Neel feeling more confident with each cut.

“Now, let’s go back and look at the first one we did.” The tree had started to slowly ooze resin. Neel knew it was meant to protect the tree when it sensed it was being attacked by insects or disease, or to seal off physical damage but to his mind it looked like the tree was bleeding. A glistening, honey-coloured blood that caught the light of the mid-morning sun.

“Go ahead,” his uncle said. “Taste it.”

Neel dipped his finger in the sap and licked it off. “Tastes almost like it smells. Like pine. Bitter and sweet at the same time. Makes my tongue feel odd.”

“That’s about right. We’ll come back in a week to scrape off the hardened resin then prepare it to flavour our wine. Now let’s have something to eat.”

They sat on a fallen tree in the grove of trees downslope from the Aleppo pines to eat the food they had brought with them. Neel pointed up past the trees to where the slope became more rugged, with small cliffs and stony outcrops. “What’s up there?”

“I suppose millions of years ago it was much more rugged than now, but you might find it interesting. There are a few small caves which were inhabited in the past by wandering bands of nomadic herders. You still see feral goats descended from those old herds. Rumour has it those nomads found amber which they used for trading. We had some archeologists from the university in Athens poking around a few years ago, but I don’t know what they found. Or if they found anything at all. You should head up there tomorrow.” He gave Neel a wink and a playful nudge. “No telling what a young genius like you will find.”

The big Ape began to rock back and forth and whimper. One of the adult females in the troop settled beside the Ape as she closed her eyes to slits, hoping sleep would allow her to forget the pain. She had no idea what it meant to have a broken tooth. All she knew was that something was terribly wrong. She put her head on the female who had come to comfort her and grunted each time a new wave of pain shot through her mouth and jaw.

When they made it back down to the vineyard, Neel went straight to his room to study up on what he had seen and felt earlier in the day. He went online and learned more about Graecopithecus macedoniensis ―nicknamed El Graeco ― and the era it lived in before the entire genus died out. He studied the Aleppo pine. He learned more about resin. By the time his Aunt Areti called him for dinner, he knew everything he needed to know before going back up the hillside the next day. Over the evening meal he couldn’t stop sharing everything he learned. The teen’s headful of science and history seemed to make more sense here; surrounded by trees that had witnessed generations of families and smells that had been around for thousands of years.

“I was right; there used to be ape-like animals here at least seven million years ago. I read the research papers. Huge apes that could have been scrambling around those very cliffs before coming down to forage for food in the forests that covered your vineyard. They would have eaten wild walnuts and nuts … kinda like pistachios” He pointed at the salad his aunt had made. “Just like the ones you have in there.”

Boredom was no longer a problem for Neel and for the rest of the meal he spilled out all the ideas he had trapped inside his head. He went on about a Miocene fossilized jawbone discovered near Athens that supported the idea that pre-humans lived in Greece. “They could have been here in your vineyard!”

“And I found the research paper written by the team you said had been here, Uncle. They didn’t find any hominid fossils, but they also said there was no reason to believe that pre-humans had not lived here and there is another dig planned soon because they are sure there is evidence to be found in those caves.”

Anastasios and Areti ate mostly in silence, letting their nephew release his new energy. Areti promised to make lunch for the next day and said there would be a small flask of retsina so he could truly experience what generations of families had come to know. “A very small flask, mind you,” she said and smiled.

The Ape tried looked around the forest trying to distract from the pain. She noticed a brightly-coloured substance oozing from the tree where she had torn off the branch earlier. It was something she had not paid attention to before but it was a new smell, and she reached out to touch it with her long forefinger. It was soft and stuck to her. She was hungry and this would not need her to bite down, so she licked it off her fingers. It had a bitter sweetness her palate did not recognize which made her lips tingle. She scraped fingerfuls off the tree and stuck them in her mouth until her lips and gums were numb. It went down easily, and she did not stop until there was none left on the side of the tree. She would look for more.

Neel set out early. On my own! he thought to himself. He wore the straw hat his uncle had given him the day before and in addition to the food, the small flask of retsina, and a couple of bottles of water, he still had the curved knife for cutting the Aleppo trees. He passed through the rows of Assyrtiko grape vines—Vitis vinifera species he noted to himself—which his aunt and uncle used to make the wine which would be flavoured later with resin. He passed through the forest, too busy identifying every plant and tree he saw to realise how quickly he was climbing. He finally made it to the family Aleppo grove and continued up to the base of the cliffs stopping often to wipe the sweat from his eyes.

He poked and clambered around the rocks and went into the caves he guessed the archeological team had been exploring, mapping it all out in his mind. Even better than indexing fossils, he thought.

The pain in her mouth was beginning to ease. She couldn’t bite down on hard nuts, but managed berries and leaves that helped ease her hunger and searched for more of the sticky sap. Some of it she could lick off her fingers right away, other parts were gummier but could be chewed carefully.

Neel continued to roam the cliffs and mentally catalogued every spot he wanted to return to. By noon he was hungry and sat in a cave entrance, just out of the full sun to eat the fruit, nuts, and fresh vegetables and indulge in sips of the still cold retsina. He sat back and tried to imagine El Graeco in this very cave, maybe seeing the same pieces of sparkling rock that he was seeing. They would have hidden here for the night and in the morning moved down the hillside toward the vineyard, stopping to pull wild walnuts or pistachios off the trees or dig for wild garlic or the prehistoric tubers that looked like carrots. Neel stood up and marched down the rocky slope. The same slope he knew early hominids had walked. He tripped on the scree and scraped his hand but ignored it as he hurried to soak in the scene of an Aleppo grove that had once been full of apes.

Chewing remained difficult for the Ape, but at least it was now possible. Digging for tubers yielded treasures that were not too hard on her mouth. She was surrounded by trees that had more of the sticky food she now knew was helping ease her pain. She scraped off more and started chewing it while the small group stopped to rest before heading back to shelter in the rocks as darkness approached. She was still chewing when they finally settled for the night.

Neel’s hand was stinging from his fall when he reached the grove where he decided El Graeco would stop to rest so he decided to do the same. He knew about the medicinal qualities of resins and in particular the resin of the ancient Aleppo pine. He took out his knife and made a shallow cut on one of the trees to get some of the resin while it still oozed freely and which he could easily spread on his hand. He knew that resins were traditionally used to relieve pain whether applied to a wound like he was doing, or as a poultice for abscesses.

He sat down against a tree and as he imagined the troop heading back up the slope to shelter against the rocks for the night, he suddenly thought about one of the caves he had catalogued in his head. He remembered what his uncle had said about the nomads finding amber to use in bartering and trade. Resin hardens over millions of years to form amber which is both beautiful and often contains pieces of ancient history trapped in a golden-coloured and reflective gem.

He turned and moved as fast as he could back to the cave where he sat in the exact spot where he had stopped to eat earlier.

Closing his eyes, he tried to remember where the sun had glinted off something stuck in a crack running through a rock. He opened his eyes, spotted it, and moved to pick it up. I am the first human ever to touch it.

Encased in amber that had taken millions of years to form from the Aleppo resin, was a tooth.

As total darkness settled in, she was still awake and chewing the gum she had started earlier. She rolled it around with her tongue and felt something hard. She spit it out against the wall of the cave and saw that a tooth had come out, covered in the goo.

By the time the sun rose, and it was safe to move, the Ape was herself again but she still felt uneasy. The troop was now waiting for her to lead the way; they trusted her new vision, but as she surveyed the landscape below, she was unsure which way to take. The vision of their future was blank.

And it will also be my last.

After 82 editions of producing this independently, and years worth as part of my Comms career, I am putting it to rest. It is time consuming to get it right and and I have other projects I want to focus on. My short stories from songs turned out well and I want to focus on fiction now.

So, for one final time:

We crossbreed cattle, crops, and flowers to come up with more hardy stock or new varieties. Trying it with coral may help endangered reefs around the world and that is where we’ll start this final edition.

First a quick primer on coral. Despite what they look like in a picture or video, they are living marine invertebrates. They grow together in colonies and can be either a soft coral or a hard coral and when the hard coral colonies come together, they form a coral reef. Each of those little polyps you see in an image of a coral reef has a body, mouth, and stinging tentacles to capture food. These coral reefs are important for protecting coastlines and are key habitats for 25% of all marine life. The are sometime referred to as the “rainforest of the sea”. As climate change warms oceans, coral becomes too weak to compete with other marine life and they eventually die. They are also being killed off by pollution, human caused physical changes, and from sewage released into coastal waters or runoff filled with agricultural fertilizers. The International Union for Conservation of Nature said last year that 44% of reef building coral are on its Red List of Threatened Species.

Different types of coral live in different ecosystems, and this is where crossbreeding comes into play as part of the effort to save a coral reef off the coast of Miami which is dying off as the water warms up. Down in Honduras where the water is warmer coral is still doing well. Researchers from the University of Miami, the Florida Aquarium, and Tela Marine in Honduras came up with the idea of crossbreeding the coral from the two environments to come up with a variety more likely to adapt to the changing conditions in Florida. The coral were raised in tanks at the Florida Aquarium then transplanted into the Florida coral ecosystem. It is the first time international crossbreeding has been allowed in a wild reef. Selective breeding of coral has been an ongoing project in Hawaii since 2021, but the Florida crossbreeding program is unique.

A story in The Guardian last month said that many coral reefs in the world have been damaged passed the point of no return and more will follow as the climate warms.

I seem to have devoted a lot of space in this newsletter to the latest species or ecosystem that is either past the point of no return or teetering in the edge. This latest effort to save coral may be able to slow down what seems to be an inevitable fate.

An article in The Guardian earlier this month said that U.S. President Donald Trump is “waging war against the media and winning”. The latest win in what appears to be an ongoing effort to intimidate media, is a settlement with Paramount, which owns CBS News, to pay the president $16M US in the form of a donation to his presidential library. At issue was the editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris that he believes was done to paint her in a better light. Many media analysts and legal experts believe Trump would not have won the lawsuit, but the threat to Paramount was enough to convince the company to settle and which led the Executive Producer of 60 Minutes to quit over the decision. The President has called many media outlets “scum” and his Vice President has called for investigation into media for colluding against Trump in 2020 so the fear at least, was real.

When the leaders of a country openly work against media outlets that are critical of their work it inevitably trickles down to the public. Add in the outsized influence of social media, mis- and dis information, and an increasingly splintered and financially challenged media landscape, and over the last couple of decades we have seen trust in media institutions fall. A Gallup Poll last year found record-low levels of trust in mass media. 36% of U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media and another 33% said “not very much” confidence. An Ekos poll in Canada around the same time showed only 32% of us trust mainstream media (that number drops to 24% here in good ol’ Alberta).

There is a glimmer of hope however, but one that comes with the caveat that we will not let our political and personal leanings push aside critical thinking. (I fear that is a losing battle)

The 2025 Reuters Digital New Report released last month shows that while mainstream or institutional news outlets are losing ground, people are still hungry for news. They are just looking for their news in manty different places such as TikTok, X, YouTube, or podcasts. Many of those polled not only admitted to finding it difficult to sort out real from fake but consider mis- or dis- information a threat. The survey was based on 100,000 responses from people in 48 countries.

And the report found that in many countries (14% in Canada) we are willing to buy subscriptions to get our digital news. Across the world we also tend have a higher level of trust in the publicly funded news. In Canada the two of the most trusted sources are the BBC (60%) and CBC (62%). We Canadians also like to commiserate about the weather and in a Pollara Strategic Insights poll last year The Weather Network received a whopping trust score of +58 with CBC, CTV, and Global in the +40s. Like the Reuters study Pollara found that we still like to get news but are getting it online whether it is social media or sites run by media outlets and 28% are paying for subscriptions. Like the other surveys and polls, Pollara also found high levels of concern about accuracy.

Isn’t there an expression that the first step in dealing with a problem is to acknowledge you have a problem?

My fingers are crossed that as individuals we take steps to deal with it.

If you are reading this when it lands in your mailbox on Saturday, you may well be bracing for Monday morning already. For some, those Monday mornings come with stress and maybe a feeling that the weekend just wasn’t long enough. Forbes magazine said in 2023 that 80% of respondents to a survey considered Monday to be the most stressful of their work week. (Interestingly 22% said it was their most productive day.)

Turns out that the Monday morning blues are real according to a new study in the Journal of Affective Disorders which found that Mondays drive long-term biological stress. The study was led by researchers from the University of Hong Kong and in a media release the university said there was significantly higher long-term stress hormone levels in older adults who felt anxious on Monday mornings. This biological stress wasn’t just for those in the working world, but retired people felt it as well because of cultural “stress amplifiers” which remain ingrained even after leaving the 9-to-5 grind.

Oder adults in the study who reported Monday anxiety had 23% higher levels of cortisol which helps your body manage stress, regulates blood pressure, and plays a role in controlling our sleep-wake cycle. Monday also shows a 19% spike in heart attacks, likely linked to the dysregulation caused by the cortisol levels.

While the new study uncovered the biochemistry of your Monday morning stress, it did not dig into exactly why people find it a tough day, and the authors said that addressing Monday-specific stress could combat hearts disease and stress in older people.

Admittedly this may well be a first world problem with an established 5-day work week and 2-day weekend cycle. It also seems to be most disliked day by people with an annual income of more than $75,000 and better tolerated by those in the $50,000 to 75,000 income range according to a 2023 survey by the career site, Zety.

The Easybeats summed it up in 1966:

“Monday I'll have Friday on my mind”

As I write this newsletter there are 246 wildfires across Canada and 81 of those are classified as out of control according to the National Wildland Situation Report. There has been some decent rainfall over the last few weeks here in parts of Alberta, but it is warming up and warm dry conditions are forecast across the prairies. As we have learned over the last few years, smoke can be a problem and though it is not always visible, there are also dust and organic compounds and soot which scientists refer to as ‘black carbon’.

A Bloomberg article earlier this month pointed out that the rising hot air from wildfires carries this mixture high into the atmosphere where it can be blown over huge distances. The “hotter the fire, the higher it can be lifted”. Apart from the health effects when it hits urban areas, black carbon can make it to mountain glaciers, into Arctic areas, and in the case of intentional slash and burn fires in the Amazon, down into Antarctica. The Bloomberg story suggests that as we have focused on cutting fossil fuel emissions, we may have taken our eyes off the black carbon ball.

Where that black carbon ends up will determine its effect on the climate and on the ice surfaces below it. Lower down it will warm the surface. Higher up it may brighten clouds and reflect sunlight and reduce the rate of sea ice loss according to Phys.org and a study published in June in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study suggests that boreal fires will “actually slow warming by 12% globally and 38% in the Arctic”.

Don’t think that somehow this is a genuine upside to wildfires. First off don’t forget that the increase in the number of fires and their ferocity is largely because of global warming which is hardly good news.

The science around the effects of wildfires is complex and has a lot to do with location and where soot ash ends up. Last year’s Jasper area wildfire dumped much of its soot and ash on the Athabasca Glacier. As we all know, dark surfaces heat up faster. What should be a bright white surface of a glacier reflects heat, but once it becomes grimy with dust and the fallout from a fire it holds the heat and can increase the ice melt by as much as 10%.

This could turn out to be another long hot summer so keep your eyes on the wildfire news because it comes with interesting, complex, and often devastating impacts.

Cannabidiol or CBD is one of the chemical compounds found in marijuana and hemp plants. Unlike THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) which is the part of the plant that gives the familiar high to users, CBD is often used to relieve anxiety, pain, and to help with sleep issues. I used it on a senior dog (with a vet’s supervision) to relieve his arthritis, and it seemed to help. CBD products became legal to buy in 2018 though CBD hemp oil was easy to find before that without having to find a dealer in a back alley somewhere. Since it became legal however it has become popular as a ‘natural’ remedy for many ailments. In the U.S. sales of CBD products could hit $4.16 billion CAD ($3.04 billion USD) this year and in Canada sales are expected to reach $300 million CAD ($219.2 million USD) in 2025. There is only one U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved CBD drug for human use. A 2022 study found that use of CBD drops, topicals, edibles, vapes, and capsules is common and on the rise in Canada and the US even though consumers had “relatively low levels of knowledge and understanding”.

While the sales figures are impressive and the fans and proponents of CBD products are many, a new clinical trial suggests there is little evidence of its efficacy and questions about its safety according to an NBC story earlier this month. The new study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine. The study evaluated CBD usage based on dosages reported by consumers of CBD products. Most of the people in the study did not show any problems but 5% showed signs of liver damage. That might not seem a lot, but participants receiving a placebo had no signs of liver damage and the authors considered the results significant.

While some claims about CBD's benefits are disputed, some research has indicated that it may have certain positive effects.

Over-the-counter CBD is marketed as a supplement and not as a medication which means the testing, rules, and regulations are different so as is the case with most supplements, the common sense rule applies: Consult your doctor before using this product.

As the talk of more pipelines ramps up in the halls of political and corporate power in many parts of Canada, there is no shortage of ideas about where they should run. Each route comes with questions about how it would affect the environment, the impact on Indigenous communities, and what it will mean to the bottom-line numbers for oil companies and for the economy.

One of those options started to get more attention back in February and this week a CBC headline said it may be time for Manitoba to prepare for year-round shipping access carrying everything from oil and gas to grain to construction materials. Almost unnoticed last week was a decision by the Canada Energy Regulator to allow liquified natural gas exports through Hudson Bay.

It seems to have become inevitable.

Hudson Bay and the Port of Churchill have a history dating back to fur trading days as a hub for import and export traffic because it is the shortest route from Western Canada to Europe. Though whaling and fur trading brought it to prominence, when a rail line was completed in 1929 (at a cost of $45M) it became a major centre for agricultural exports from the West.

Apart from the political and economic drivers of the renewed interest in the Port of Churchill, climate change and major advances in ship design is bringing it closer to become a year-round route to Europe.

The environmental cost of turning it into a major shipping route is significant.

A 2021 report prepared by Calgary-based Western Energy Corridor Inc. is worth taking the time to read both for what is says as it lays out the case for a corridor ending at Hudson Bay, but also for its glossing over of environmental considerations.

It ignores the ever-present threat of an oil spill or that the route will cross and likely alter or destroy wetlands and peatlands. Given that Churchill is famous for its polar bears and now equally for the environmental threat to those bears, the report does not say a word about it. Inevitably an energy corridor from the West to Churchill will increase shipping traffic and roads which will break up habitats and ecosystems. With greater access to a port, we’ll see increased fossil fuel development and mining which is of course the whole purpose of the corridor, but each one of those developments, regardless of size and scope, carry an environmental impact.

The threat to Hudson Bay land and marine life is not all down to increased shipping or pipelines. Much if it is climate change, pure and simple.

I may not be writing about it anymore, but I’ll be following the development closely.

My last story for my last newsletter is fittingly about something I have written about many times.

Coffee. (or any of the slang terms for your favourite brew)

Ground coffee has gone up in price by 19% since the start of this year. Considering we average 2.7 cups of coffee a day in Canada (Americans knock back 3 per day), that will start to hurt eventually.

We could blame the US tariffs for the jump but unless it passes through an American supplier, coffee is mostly unaffected by tariffs here in Canada. In the US however, if the 50% tariff on products from Brazil takes effect on August 1^st, there will be a lot of unhappy sleepyheads first thing in the morning.

Growing coffee is a risky business at the best of times but climate change has made it significantly worse, and it is the price of the green beans from producers that is jolting your pocketbook as much as the caffeine jolt you are after. A 2022 literature review in the journal Plants, said that temperature extremes, precipitation extremes (drought and waterlogging), and disease and pests are all driving down yields while demand continues to increase. Brazil, the top coffee producing country, is at one end of the spectrum with the worst drought in decades, while Vietnam has experienced severe flooding.

Coffee chains like Tim Hortons, which serves up 5 million cups a day, and Starbucks have full time departments focused solely on securing long term coffee supplies so you may not notice those price changes as dramatically as buying your home coffee supplies, but that too will not last.

What choice do those of us hooked on the black brew have? Well, there are coffee substitutes, which apart from not having the same taste, usually lack caffeine. I have tried several of the alternatives and the only one that I have stuck with is Camp Coffee, which is a blend of coffee extract and chicory that has been around since 1885. It doesn’t really taste like coffee, but it is pleasant tasting and does contain some caffeine. You won’t find it on the average store shelf and will need to track it down in shops specializing in British imports, but they tend to run out regularly.

So now that you have the final edition out of the way, pour a cup of what is increasingly becoming liquid gold, and listen this podcast from The Big Story. It has everything you need to know about the future of coffee in Canada.

Thanks for all your support over the years!

Now that’s a headline I didn’t see coming.

Taping your mouth while you sleep will give you more energy and improve your looks and there is even a specific tape to get the job done. At least if you rely on TikTok for your healthy living advice, that is.

Apparently, the idea is based on very slim evidence says an article by Jonathan Jarry from the McGill Office for Science and Society. Thank goodness I had not already stocked up on Joe Rogan’s favourite “hostage tape” before discovering the story.

The idea of mouth taping grew out of a 2020 book by James Nestor, called “Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art, which according to the author’s website will prompt you to “never breathe the same again”. It didn’t take long before it was a hit on social media, garnering 69.2 million of those hits when I last checked. A little push from people like Gwyneth Paltrow didn’t hurt. In fairness to Mr. Nestor, his book was more grounded in the science of genuine breathing problems than it was in hostage tape, TikTok, and the opinions of influencers.

Not wanting to miss out on what could be an easy path to health in my old age I did some digging. A paper from earlier this year in the American Journal of Otolaryngology conducted an extensive literature search and came to the same conclusion as Jonathan Jarry. Namely that “Most TikTok mouth-taping claims are not supported by the literature” and “more high-quality research is needed”. The DIY practice of mouth-taping may in fact be potentially unsafe for people hoping to treat their sleep disorder breathing or sleep apnea according to a peer-reviewed PLOS One article in May. No less an authority than Glamour Magazine on the other hand will give you a guide on how to tape up your lips.

What is true is that breathing through your mouth exclusively can cause problems which was part of James Nestor’s book. It can result in a more fragmented sleep, you end up snoring more, and there is an increased risk of dental problems. In a quick-fix world however, using tape at night, seems, well.. a simpler quick fix and not a long-term solution. As an asthmatic and a former competitive runner, I learned a long time ago how to use breathing exercises such as these ones recommended by the American Lung Association. The benefits of that approach are numerous because breathing is controlled by several muscles and organs. Your lungs, diaphragm, the muscles between your ribs, muscles in your face and neck which come into play when you exert yourself, and your windpipe. It is a complex system that is not controlled by your mouth.

There are also a host of lifestyle habits that can affect your breathing while you sleep, ranging from caffeine and alcohol intake, to stress, to the temperature of your bedroom. And of course, social media influence which may send you down a whole different road. So, take a deep breath and put down the duct tape.

This is shaping up to be a good year for ticks in parts of Canada and the U.S. which makes it a bad year for people and pets.

Last week, Montreal’s public health department said that Lyme disease is now endemic on the island of Montreal and that people should take extra precautions to avoid contracting the tick-borne disease.

According to Tick Talk Canada, ticks are an arachnid like spiders, mites, and scorpions. They don’t jump, fly, or drop from trees. They get around by crawling. There are 40 species in Canada and while you may think of them as preferring more remote or rural areas you need a reality check if you and your dog want to stay tick-free. The little critters like wooded areas, tall grasses, and hide out in leaf litter. For me, that makes at least two city parks within walking distance, and my own backyard as an ideal tick hang out.

A tick can carry up to a dozen different diseases and because they thrive on blood can easily transmit one of those diseases to wildlife, pets, and you. The most common disease and the one that triggered the warning in Montreal, is Lyme disease.

Lyme disease has proved to be a difficult disease to accurately diagnose and treat. Symptoms can appear anywhere from three to thirty days after a bite. Stage 1 of the disease can mimic other diseases, but include fever, headache, tiredness, joint stiffness, muscle aches and pains, and swollen lymph nodes, and if left untreated it gets progressively worse. Even testing for the disease is not an exact science says the Canadian Lyme Disease Association.

Antibiotics are effective early on, but long-term antibiotic treatment is often required. The other complicating factor in treatment is that co-infections can arise along with Lyme disease. A specific enzyme is also being studied as a possible treatment. Unfortunately Lyme disease can remain dormant for extended periods of time – perhaps even years. A study published in April and funded by the Global Lyme Alliance said that the remnants of the Lyme bacteria can continue to cause inflammation long after treatment has been completed and other symptoms have subsided.

A CBC story in June said there is some hope for a vaccine that is undergoing clinical trials in 9,000 people living in the eastern United States, Eastern Canada and parts of Europe. You can get one for your dog already however.

In Canada there were 144 cases in 2009. In 2024 there were more than 5,000. As ticks bask in the warmth of climate change at least one expert says we could have half a million cases in Canada every year by 2050.

An NPR story from last month will give you a quick overview of ticks and how to handle a slow threat that needs quick action when you are enjoying your walk in a city park or a hike in the mountains.

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The 138^th edition of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships got underway this week, and for the first time will use the automated Hawk-Eye technology for line calls. Often referred to as the best-dressed line judges in the game, most of the 300 Wimbledon line judges that were part of the annual event will be out of a job. The tournament has used Hawk-Eye since 2012 for players to challenge line calls made by human line judges, but this year it is fully automated. About 80 or so people will be kept on as “match assistants” to be on hand if the technology fails.

The Hawk-Eye system at Wimbledon uses 12 high-speed cameras positioned around the court to track the path and position of the ball to within three millimetres. That’s 0.11 inches and if you have watched enough tennis, you’ll have an idea of just how difficult it is for the human eye to make a correct call on a ball travelling at 193 kph (120 mph). The information feeds into a computer system and if a ball lands out or there is a foot fault, a voice is triggered within milliseconds to shout out the call. That voice is an actual recorded human voice which the BBC says are those of people working behind the scenes including tour guides. Different voices are used on different courts to avoid confusion.

Hawk-Eye got its start in 2001 for cricket and has made its way into 23 major sport leagues since then. The pandemic gave it a big boost as sports venues looked at ways to keep events going while reducing the number of people needed to support games and tournaments.

Wimbledon had vowed to not put Hawk-Eye to full time use, but now that it has given in to the technology, the French Open is the last major tennis tournament to rely on people-powered line calls.

We’ll know next year if they remain the holdout.

AI can do a lot of things. What it can’t do is the work of tradespeople. It can’t crawl under your kitchen sink to fix a leak or sit on a backhoe on location to excavate the foundation for new homes or the trenches for sewers and pipelines. Those tasks need people who work in the trades sector, and 700,000 of those are set retire over the next few years. 245,100 of them in the construction sector alone. To bring more tradespeople in to the sector you need people to teach them and according to a CBC story, we also have a shortage of shop class teachers. In a bit of a chicken and egg problem, between 2016 and 2021 the number of tradespeople aged 15-24 dropped by over 31,000. Fewer students in shop class means fewer shop teachers, which makes fewer shop classes available.

One reason why young people are not rushing into the trades may be outdated stigmas as RBC highlighted in a 2021 report. The trades are often viewed as heavy, dirty work not suitable for “white collar students”. Back when I took shop (and I was bad at it!) fixing a car or manually turning a table leg on a lathe required skill and craftmanship but it was not the future that guidance counsellors steered us towards. Fast forward to today where a tradesperson needs a computer background to navigate the software in your car or to understand what is needed for a computerized lathe to turn out a perfectly cut piece of wood, and to understand a set of error codes flashing on your energy efficient furnace when it fails.

Skilled workers are getting older and retiring and the number of young people coming in to fill the gap is dropping and Canadian plastics said last week it is only going to get worse. They suggest that education programs are not aligned with market demand, that apprentice programs should be less rigidly time-based and more competency based, and that there should be tax incentives for employers to invest in more training and upskilling programs for those already in the workforce.

Our housing shortage is a real problem as well and no government policy is going to solve the problem if there are not enough people to build the house and develop the infrastructure to service a future housing boom. Remember those 245,000 construction workers set to retire? The Business Council of Alberta said recently in a Calgary Herald article that efforts to stimulate housing starts will fall flat without workers. Among the problems says the Council is one already noted in this story. “Some people tend to look down on blue-collar workers as not being as smart as other people”.

I for one never thought I could rebuild a carburetor or that a YouTube DIY video would help me fix my stove.
Give me a skilled tradesperson anytime.

In a recent Bloomberg podcast (you’ll probably need a subscription to hear the whole thing) about energy hungry technology, the guest was Mike Schroepfer, a former chief technology officer with Meta and now the head of the venture firm Gigascale Capital. The discussion covered a lot of ground, but much of it focused on where investment is headed as clean tech loses its luster and AI energy demand is attracting new energy investments. No sooner had I heard him say that it is generally not a good idea to bet on technology that doesn’t exist yet, than Google said it had agreed to buy 200 megawatts of fusion power from Commonwealth Power Systems, an MIT spinoff company that has yet to generate any fusion power. Nor has any other company yet to generate fusion power.

Despite the lack of success and no proven technology, the latest update from TechCrunch of startups which have raised more than $100M USD for fusion power has 12 entries. The list includes Canadian company General Fusion which has Jeff Bezos as one of its investors. Like many fusion startups it has hit a “rough patch” and laid off a quarter of its staff in May, less than a month after Intelligence Brief said it could “change the future of global energy”.

Which begs a question asked by The Washington Post last month – why spend billions of dollars on it?

The answer lies in what fusion power is and what it could be. While commercial fusion power is not a reality, fusion is very real. It is what keeps the sun shining at 100 million degrees Celsius. In the sun, light hydrogen atoms combine to form heavier atoms like helium. The process releases huge amounts of energy which could be harnessed to produce electricity. Science has been chasing the dream of taking a tiny amount of fuel to create a tremendous amount of energy since the 1960s. It didn’t take long to understand what fusion was and grasp its potential, but the problem lies in those extreme temperatures and containing the energy. Solving that problem puts the world on the path to a zero-carbon source of energy. In the case of fusion, it really is zero-carbon. Not carbon stored somewhere else or by the switcheroo of trading carbon credits. It uses an isotope of hydrogen as the fuel, generates no greenhouse gases, and operates continuously. Unlike nuclear fission reactors used now, fusion reactors would not generate long lived nuclear waste, and the process does not translate into a new type of bomb. Check the International Atomic Energy Agency’s FAQs on fusion for the complete lowdown.

Bottom line is that the potential is there but realizing it could be as far away as the next century according to a cosmologist writing on Space.com. Or sooner?!

Chances are you have a can of Del Monte fruit somewhere in your kitchen or your pantry. USA Today calls it an “iconic brand” and CNN refers to it as a “grocery staple”. Yet those headlines are accompanied by news of the 138-year-old company filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy this week in the United States. In a media release the company goes all-in on business speak and says it is announcing “Strategic Action to Strengthen Financial Position and Pursue a Value-Maximizing Sale”. The release also says it has secured financing to continue operations while it looks for a buyer.

Apart from its canned fruit products the company owns the Contadina tomato brand, College Inn and Kitchen Basics broth brands, and the Joyba bubble tea shop brand. Those products continue to perform well, but an Associated Press story quotes an analyst as saying that consumers are shifting away from preservative-laden canned food in favour of healthier alternatives. In a post on X , Sylvain Charlebois from the Dalhousie Agri-Food Analytics Lab said that to survive, Del Monte needs to pivot fast, as consumers shift towards fresher and healthier options.

While the taste of a fresh peach may be much better than opening a can of peaches, the cost and seasonality of fresh peaches in Canada works against the idea of skipping past the canned fruit (or vegetables) aisle in your grocery store. Studies have shown that the nutritional value of fresh vs frozen is similar. Consumers do still have to read the label and look for no sugar or salt added to make the best decisions. Dalhousie’s Agri-Food Analytics Lab has said that consumers can get high nutritional value at a lower price point by adding frozen produce to their shopping list. Its Food Price Report 2025 found that affordability was the most significant factor in food purchases which again, puts the lower price of canned or frozen produce as a reasonable alternative.

Fresh fruits and vegetables also account for 45% of food waste in Canada and the long shelf life of canned produce reduces the waste and saves money in the long run. The latest Canada food guide goes as far as to offer “10 reasons to buy frozen vegetables and fruits”.

While Del Monte may indeed have fallen victim to a shift in consumer preferences perhaps the real issue is about consumer perceptions of fresh vs canned or frozen.

A story this week from CBC is another example of how climate change and other human activity, is messing with the minds and migration of birds. The least flycatcher is a tiny bird that enjoys our Canadian summers and like many humans, head south for Mexico or South America when winter rolls around.

In a paper published in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology, Alberta researchers used 32 years’ worth of data from 7,000 banded birds to conclude that it was heading south two weeks earlier than in the past. The least flycatcher, like most birds, takes cues from its environment to decide when to make its migration. While heading out on the migration flight two weeks earlier might seem to be a minor deviation it is enough to cause problems. Leaving earlier in the spring may send the bird into heavier storms and while nesting, could face more extreme heat making it difficult for the young to survive.

This study adds to the growing body of evidence that changes to migratory patterns caused by climate change are putting increased stress on birds around the world. An MSN story notes that birds arriving early to their usual breeding grounds may face food shortages, exacerbated by insects changing their own life cycles because of climate change. Birds which rely on wetlands enroute to their destination are finding those habitats dried up, dug up, or paved over.

This disruption of cycles for birds, insects, and other biological events is called a “phenological mismatch”. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Animal Ecology linked the green-up of forest canopy trees, emergence of adult butterflies and the arrival and breeding of migratory birds. The result of the new human-made timing mismatch caused problems for bird and insect populations.

If you want a detailed look at the types of problems facing migratory birds in our changing world, this six-minute documentary is a well-produced look at whooping crane migration from Texas to Alberta and back again. The Whooper Highway was produced by Cornell Lab of Ornithology and uses data visualization to tell the story. I highly recommend this one.

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Bes sure to check my series of short stories based on Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories.

As I work on other projects, 1 Week 7 Stories will continue to arrive in your Inbox every other week.

The Direct-to-Consumer genetic testing company 23andMe is facing tough times including a Chapter 11 filing under the US bankruptcy code. What will happen to the personal genetic and health information of its customers?

23andMe was founded in 2006 and I dived in shortly afterwards to have my genome sequenced by the company. I was working for a NFP biotech research organization, and I submitted spit kits to several companies and start-ups so we could compare results and see what this brave new world of genetic testing was all about. 23andMe is the second of the for-profit companies I have engaged with to be sold, one of the not-for-profit organizations folded, and the final two for-profits changed their business model considerably and I eventually cancelled my account with them.

As part of its information disclosure to 23andMe customers, Kroll Restructuring Administration LLC sent out an email with links to information including an extensive background to the case and a notice of the potential change of personal information from the bankruptcy court. None of the information sent out to customers suggested that any action was necessary by customers though many privacy experts have recommended deleting your personal information.

At the beginning of this week, 23andMe reached an agreement with TTAM Research Institute, a nonprofit public benefit corporation run by Anne Wojcicki, CEO and co-founder of 23andme to take over the company. Regeneron Pharmaceuticals had been considered the most likely to win the bidding but according to a TTAM media release its successful bid has been approved by the 23andMe Board of Directors though it still needs court approval. The media release also outlined how TTAM has made binding commitments to “adopt additional consumer protections and privacy safeguards to enhance protections for customer data and privacy”.

Case closed now? Maybe not. Apart from the pending court approval, it is not clear how TTAM will turn around the balance sheet of 23andMe or what existing customers can expect to see in the future. Right now, as new information and research comes to light on how genetics affect our health and well being, customers get updates on how their genetic profile fits into the picture. The problems facing 23andMe have also raised numerous question about the privacy of genetic data and those questions remain no matter what happens next in this saga.

I personally have confidence in how my data will be handled, but like the other 15 million or so customers I will be keeping an eye on what comes next.

In 2018 Google dropped the phrase “Don’t be evil” from the opening of its code of conduct. It eventually was added to the very end of the document where it now says.

And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!”

Well time to speak up.

Earlier this year Google dropped its commitment to not use artificial intelligence technology in weapons or surveillance. According to an article in The Conversation it came after the current White House administration revoked a Biden order to create a “safe, secure and trustworthy development and use of AI”. The company defended its AI decision by saying it had “over corrected” in some instances including when it withdrew from its involvement in the U.S. Air Force’s Project Maven in 2018. Google and its parent company Alphabet have been accused of firing employees who have protested the companies involvement in defence contracts and students from 120 universities have pledged to refuse work at Google or Amazon because of their contracts to provide computing services and infrastructure to the Government of Israel.

A paper from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace said that companies such as Google and Microsoft have found the U.S. military to be a “willing partner”. Large tech firms have become so involved in military applications of their technologies that Time magazine said last year they have turned the war in Ukraine into an “AI War Lab”.

A paper in the March/April edition of Intereconomics: Review of European Economic Policy points out that large digital platforms are dominating global R & D and are cornering patents on new technology including artificial intelligence. They have managed to achieve a choke hold on the “digital-military-industrial-complex”. These companies have benefited from government and military technology (think of ARPANET which made the Internet possible) and were subsequently handed a free reign to develop them for their own profit.

As Big Tech and the military sectors become more dependent on each other and vast amounts of tax dollars are spent on companies using our data, we need reconsider what we give away every time we point, click, and download.

In the science fiction novel The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling a very different Industrial Revolution takes place in the mid 1800s after mechanical computers powered by steam engines change the world in unimaginable ways. The extensive use of steam power fueled largely by coal also starts to change the environment and most of the novel takes place during The Stink which was a thick smog made worse by hot temperatures.

The novel is a work of fiction (and arguably a kick start to the steampunk genre) but new research published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the real Industrial Revolution was already wrecking the climate. According to an article in Nature, today’s technology would have been able to link the burning of fossil fuels, the rise in CO2 emissions, and temperature rise as early as the 1860s. In the 1850s scientists were beginning to understand that carbon and CO2 could trap heat. The authors of the paper used historical data from these Victorian era scientists, new data from research on ice cores, and computer modelling, to pose what they call a ‘thought experiment’ to determine when scientists would have been able to realise “human-caused temperature fingerprints” had they possessed better tool.

I think I have the essence of my next short story!

“…if early warning systems had existed—and been taken seriously—society might have understood its role in climate change far earlier.”

Regular readers of this newsletter probably know that I like my coffee, especially first thing in the morning while catching up on the news.

A new study in the Journal of Nutrition has handed me a new reason to stick with my coffee habit. Better yet, a media release from Tufts University points out that it is my favourite black coffee that is associated with a 14% lower risk of mortality compared to no coffee consumption. The link was not seen in coffee with high amounts of added sugar or saturated fat. A separate study published in May in Nutrition, Metabolism, and Cardiovascular Diseases focused on adults with prediabetes, but seems to have arrived at similar results associated with total amount of coffee, sugar-free coffee, and caffeinated coffee consumption. Women fare even better when it comes to links between coffee and healthy aging. A New York Times article this month says that in a long-term study of 47,000 female nurses that began in the 1970s there was a lower risk of certain chronic diseases, and “healthy aging” associated with caffeine consumption.

Canadians drink an average of 2.8 cups of coffee per day and spend about $35.21 per month on coffee. The study found that at least one cup per day was associated with a 16% lower risk and that two or three cups a day to upped the number to a 17% lower risk.

Now the bad news. According to Dr. Roger Norton in this video, coffee prices are on the rise and are going to continue to rise. Demand is up and supplies are down and the market is making the decisions.

Drink up while you can!

The Strait of Hormuz has Iran on one side and the UAE and Oman on the other. It connects the Persian Gulf to the open sea. It is wide and deep enough to handle the largest oil tankers and in a post this week the U.S. Energy Information Administration said it is one of the world’s most important oil chokepoints ( narrow shipping channels that are critical to global energy security). Even a temporary hold up in the region will delay oil supplies and raise shipping costs.

As tensions in the Middle East escalate, the shipping lane is in increasing danger and this week two giant oil tankers collided and caught fire, adding to concerns. The Front Eagle, a 335-meter (1,000 foot) supertanker and a smaller vessel collided on Tuesday. According to Al Jazeera, the incident was not related to the war between Iran and Israel and was a “navigational” incident. Last week the UK Maritime Trade Operations issued a warning of increased electronic interference causing problems for vessels to report their position which could lead to more ‘navigational incidents’. (the UKMTO site also has a good interactive map of maritime incidents and warnings)

About a third of global oil supplies and a significant amount of LNG pass through the Strait and if the situation continues to deteriorate, we could see widespread energy disruption.

Deutsche Welle wrote this week that the waterway is only 33 km (21 mi) wide at its narrowest point making it a crowded passage open to disruption. The article also said shippers are tightening security or canceling routes.

We are already feeling the effects on gasoline prices according to GasBuddy which tracks gasoline prices and globally, oil prices jumped as soon as Israel and Iran began their open conflict. Keep your eyes on the news and your mouse hovering over your investments.

Even before he took on the role of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the United States, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was vocal about wanting to see artificial dyes removed from food products. While he was still being considered for the job, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration decided to ban Red No. 3 dye in food and medications. Red 3 is what gives your favourite cupcake or Skittles, a bright, cherry-red colour. Another dye, Red 40 is found in 36,000 food products in the U.S., and your kid’s bowl of Fruit Loops contains Yellow 5, Yellow 6, Green 2, and Blue 1. The list goes on.

RFK’s new job is starting to have an impact without having to pass more regulations. This week Kraft Heinz said it would remove all artificial colours in U.S. products by 2027 and would not be producing any new products containing “Food, Drug, and Cosmetic colors” (the official designation). The company said it would replace the dyes with natural colouring, create new colours or shades, or simply remove some colours.

In April, PepsiCo said it would “accelerate” its transition to natural ingredients to replace artificial colours, Tyson Foods is moving toward total removal of synthetic dyes, and following an investigation by the Attorney General of Texas, General Mills has agreed to remove artificial dyes from its products.

A Washington Post story this week quotes Consumer Reports’ director of food policy as saying we may notice a “slight change in the color of some products, but it would be one of those situations where you really have to be looking for it.”

Evidence of the harmful effects of food dyes is still inconclusive and here in Canada we are somewhat ahead of the U.S. in managing how they are used.

As we are often reminded, “check the label” before you buy.

Looking for some peace and quiet, a place to escape the apocalypse, or just a chance to unplug from the pace of life in the 21^st century?
How about your very own private island?

For £5.5 million (a lot in any currency, but about $10 million Canadian) Shuna Island off the west coast of Scotland is yours – castle and sheep included. Such a deal doesn’t come around often – the last time the island came up for sale was 80 years ago when it was bought by Viscountess Selby who passed away in 2023.

According to the real estate listing you will also get eight residential properties and “1,110 acres with 81 acres of permanent pasture, 640 acres of rough grazing, and over 300 acres of native woodland and foreshore”. The settled history goes back 9,000 years and there are Stone Age burial mounds and Iron Ages sites on the island which The Guardian once called an “overlooked jewel”.

Looking for something closer to home? Private Islands Inc has lots to choose from to buy or to rent right here in Canada.

Happy island hunting!

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I have a series of short stories based on Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories. The collection is now complete, and you can find them here on Substack.

This is another in a series of stories drawn from the 1975 Chris de Burgh album, Spanish Train And Other Stories. I have endeavoured to be faithful to the spirit of the stories and in some cases include lyrics relevant to tell the tale. As with any fiction, there will also be cases where some license is taken to create and complete a story line.

I don't know if the young boy had a plan for his future but I am sure he never considered the possibility of being killed before his time.

His father and I often worked together on carpentry projects - shared tools and helped each other transport heavier objects that someone had commissioned. This is how I gradually got to know Yeshua, Son of Joseph of Nazareth.

He was just like many young boys living in Palestine but had little desire to take on his father's trade. More interested in trying to make life better for himself and others, he was curious about the world around him and did everything he could to learn about astrology, alchemy, nature, the heavens, and medicine. He was also extraordinary in his talents which I put down to his love of science.

Like many other boys his age he could also be spiteful as I witnessed one day while walking through the streets and saw him running ahead of me.

"Hey, watch out!" he yelled at a boy who tried to rush by him in the crowded area around the market. Yeshua spun around as they collided and yelled, "You'll never get where you were headed with such haste!"

With that, the unfortunate boy took a few more steps then fell to the ground. Yeshua had been at the market and was carrying spice, herbs, and medicine as he made his way home. Yeshua stopped and looked briefly at the boy and then hurried on his way. Many thought the boy was struck dead by Yeshua but were afraid to say so. Others thought a weak heart at the centre of his vitality killed the boy as he ran. Yeshua was viewed with suspicion by those who witnessed the event and in the small community there was much talk about the incident. My thought was that some of those medicinal herbs in Yeshua's satchel had found a way into the boy and killed him on the spot. I forever kept those thoughts to myself lest more gossip tainted his reputation even further.

Yeshua still went to his father's workshop and learned some of the basics of the trade but he also visited the stone mason's regularly to learn how to cleave stones and use them in buildings. Realizing he would never get his full attention, Joseph saw a different future for his son.

"He will never take up our trade," he said to me one day. "He has unique gifts and I know he will find a special place in the years to come so I have found him a teacher who is a faithful friend as well. He must learn his letters and learn about philosophy and history and the world."

There was no question about the boy and his thirst for knowledge. At the age of twelve he was with his parents when they joined others on a family pilgrimage to Jerusalem. He became separated from the group and when they finally found him, he was engaged in deep discussion with the teachers at the Temple who were taken aback by the boy's eagerness to learn and understand.

By the time he was about fifteen years of age, I saw little of the young man who was becoming wise beyond his years, but who otherwise would never have stood out in a crowd. Much of what I learned came to me from his father and from travelers coming from Sepphoris, a town known for its art, culture, and as a place for learning. It was also a place where the peasantry was oppressed by the elites and priestly class.

The very same men Yeshua had gone to seek out as his teachers.

"He does not like what he sees among the people," one traveler told me. "And he is searching for answers to raise them up without offending others." Another noted that, "He does not work, but his many friends and followers from the craftspeople and merchants in the town ensure he has a roof over his head and food to eat. In exchange he teaches and shares his philosophy.

"What is the latest on your boy?" I asked his father one day after having heard no news in some time.

"He is no longer a boy, but a young man now and I hear little of him. A farmer returning from Sepphoris said he has left the town and is travelling far."

As I started to gather more stories it was clear Yeshua was wandering in search of more enlightenment. One story came from a stranger who spoke with awe of a man by the side of the road in the late evening wrapped tightly in a burnoose with the hood drawn around his head for warmth. When the stranger stopped to make sure the man was alright, he immediately felt the calm about him despite the cool air and the possible danger in stopping there.

"I myself have wandered for some time now and never met anyone quite like him. He shares his knowledge freely and though poor and with little to call his own, asked after my welfare and offered me something to eat from the meagre victuals he had in his leather purse. I have promised to join him in Jerusalem to speak out against the oppression we experience from the Romans."

"Forgive me, I did not get your name," I asked as he was leaving.

"Simon," he said. "I will be back this way many times and will tell you more of your friend."

And I did hear many more stories over the years. Some stories such as his outburst among the money changers in the Temple were concerning as Yeshua approached his thirtieth year, but as I heard more I was able to piece together a picture of his life and what eventually would become of him.

Yeshua had continued his travels and one night was attacked and beaten by robbers and left by the side of the road. He was found by a zonah by the name of Mary who took him in. Seeing no more than just a poor peasant needing help and a place to sleep, she tended to his wounds. A peasant on the road takes many challenging steps and Mary washed his hands and feet while he slept and applied oils to ease the physical and spiritual hardness of his travels. His sleep was interrupted several times by what must have been visions as he would toss and turn and cry out. Each time she held him tight and gave him love and comfort. By morning light he was much recovered and she prepared the daily bread for them both to eat. For several days they sat by the small fire in her home well into the night as he talked of his dream where all people would be equal and no one would be scorned by the priests and government officials. Each day Mary helped comfort him when he despaired of the future and she gave up the profession that had made her an outcast in the city.

Many of the people who passed through our town stopped to see me as word spread that I was a friend of Yeshua and they wanted me to know of his progress

As weeks and months passed, people observed that Mary and Yeshua spent their evenings together in reflection, but by day he would gather people wherever he could to talk about how all men could be brothers no matter their station in life. Mary brought her sisters and Simon his brothers. These followers soon saw the priestly class as the ones who would not admit the equality of all peoples. They spoke out against the scribes and the legal scholars and those associated with the money changers who sought to profit from their fellow men.

One traveler who went by the name of Matthew had been a tax collector but had left that calling as he learned more from Yeshua.

"I fear for your friend," he confided. "While wise and persuasive he is just an ordinary man, but people see more in him. They are inspired by his talk and believe they can break free of our Roman masters and worship who they wish. It is putting him in danger. If you have any influence you must plead with him to temper his message. He does not see what is happening. If he fails to control his followers, the Romans will do it for him."

I doubted that I would have much influence over him but as a favour to the aging Joseph I set out on a journey to Jerusalem. Over the next few days as my old donkey brought me closer to my destination there were more stories. Each one more alarming. Anxiety was taking hold of me when Jerusalem came into sight.

Once within the walls of the city it did not take me long to find him. He was seated on a stone, surrounded by people who hung on to his every word. There were Roman soldiers nearby including a Centurion who was also listening closely to what Yeshua was saying.

Though I had not seen him in at least ten years, he was little changed. Dressed in a simple tunic and exuding energy, he spoke of how all men could be brothers. A line of thinking that ran contrary to Roman rule and was undermining their social traditions. I spotted Simon in the gathering around Yeshua and he came over to speak to me.

"Yeshua will help us move past these years of Roman rule. He has the followers and courage; we have the numbers and the determination. We can win out."

I shook my head and warned Simon, "The Romans are too powerful my friend. Tread carefully. I must speak to him."

As the crown began to disperse Yeshua saw me and waved but he was swept along by those who wanted his attention and I heard some of them call him "Lord" as they sought his blessing. I decided to see him in the morning and found lodgings for the night.

I had troubled dreams about Yeshua all night long, awoke early, and set out to find him. I asked several passersby where he could be found and they all seemed afraid. At last, one man I recognized as a friend of Simon pointed me to one of the gates of the city.

"At the break of day soldiers came to take him away. They were shouting at poor Yeshua and accusing him of spreading lies and hate, and that he was a danger to the state. Mary was there and there were tears falling like rain from her and from the others. There was nothing any of us could do."

I hurried outside the walls and followed the crowd gathering near Golgotha. He was being dragged up the hill by soldiers and one of his followers was forced to carry the cross. Yeshua was to be crucified.

A woman I presumed to be Mary followed along crying out that he was just another man so please leave him alone. Just another poor boy who meant no harm to anyone. Tears covered her face as she watched Yeshua being nailed to the cross.

I saw the Centurion from the day before and begged him to put a stop to this. He was unsettled at what was unfolding, but said this had been ordered by Pilate himself. "Who was he anyway?" he cried and turned away.

Mary collapsed at the foot of the cross and screamed, "Oh Lord, what has this poor boy I found by the road done to deserve this? Lord, he is just another boy and I will never see him again."

I could not believe such an end was possible for a boy like him and as the sky turned dark, I prayed for my poor young friend that there would yet be a way forward. I had already witnessed some of the miracles that surrounded him and heard tales of many more. I prayed there would be more but I feared that in the end he was no more than just another poor boy.

There is a new kid on the COVID block. It is called NB.1.8.1 and it is getting special attention among the six new variants being monitored by the World Health Organization. But relax and don’t reach for your mask and hand sanitizer yet because public health officials say there is no reason to panic. In fact, despite a number of mutations seen over the last couple of months, none have moved from the monitoring stage to becoming a variant of concern.

The reason this new variant is getting additional attention is because while overall numbers remain low, there has been a significant rise in the proportion of the variant. It now accounts for 10.7% of the number of COVID genome sequences submitted to the WHO. It has been detected in 22 countries, but so far not in Canada though it has surfaced in the country south of us where recommendations for the COVID vaccine are being reduced. As we learned when COVID first hit, the virus doesn’t need a passport to find a new place to call home so we can expect to welcome it here soon.

Symptoms of the variant are the same as what we have seen in the past including a cough, fatigue, headache, change in your sense of smell, and diarrhea. Keeping it at bay is also the same as we have been advised in the past. If you have symptoms, stay at home until you feel better. Wash your hands, dig out your hand sanitizer, wear a mask if you are more susceptible, and get vaccinated because existing vaccine formulations will still help protect you against the variant. (A new Moderna vaccine has been approved in the U.S. and will be ready for the 2025-2026 respiratory virus season)

So yes, a new variant lives among us and we don’t need to be anxious about it. However the spread of the new variant is a reminder that COVID is now endemic, meaning that it is like the flu and will always be with is. It will also continue to generate new variants because that is one of the specialties of a virus.

Best way to keep it from becoming an epidemic again? A shot in the arm of common sense.

If you go to the corporate web pages for Meta – the owner of Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Messenger and WhatsApp – the company lays out its principles:

• Give People a Voice

• Build Connection and Community

• Serve Everyone

• Keep People Safe and Protect Privacy

• Promote Economic Opportunity

Open the pages of TechCrunch and it might surprise you to learn that Meta is now in partnership with defense contractor Anduril which specializes in ‘transforming the military with advanced technology’. According to the TechCrunch article, the two are set to venture into the “potentially lucrative” military VR/AR/XR headset market. I guess that at least qualifies at an economic opportunity.

Anduril was founded by Palmer Luckey who designed the Oculus Rift virtual reality head-mounted display and founded Oculus VR to develop and market the device. In 2014 he sold Oculus VR to Facebook for $2 billion US and by 2017 had founded Anduril which now has billions of dollars in government contracts. Breaking Defense news quotes Luckey as saying the new deal is part of his mission and long turn goal “to turn warfighters into technomancers”. For the uninitiated, the billionaire is referring to the idea of a magician who combines magic and technology. It has nothing to do with warfare or soldiers and more to do with video gaming, role playing games, and Dr. Who. And of course, a couple of rich guys who see warfare as an economic game to be won or lost. Perhaps even more disturbing about these boys and their toys is Luckey’s view that in the “world we live in, I'd say it's a lot scarier, for example, to imagine a weapons system that doesn't have any level of intelligence at all."

The Washington Post says one of the first projects for the partnership will be the EagleEye Helmut for soldiers in the field which will give them “increased lethality, mobility, and situational awareness”.

The new venture may prove to be the next generation in improving battlefield weaponry, but augmented reality has been in the field for a few years now. Augmented reality rifle scopes provide real time information such as range, wind drift, target tracking, magnification, and low light assistance. It isn’t just to help the military. Weekend warriors who need an edge over low-tech deer can purchase them over the counter.

Some of these high tech systems such as SmartSight come with built in GPS and wireless connectivity to share and distribute information, and situational awareness to limit shooting within safety zones and to avoid friendly fire incidents.

In the 1800s a muzzle loader was considered accurate up to 90 metres or 100 yards though half that was practical in the heat of battle. Today a high-tech soldier can expect to have an accurate and lethal shot at 1,800 metres or 2,000 yards, which developers of new field weaponry say has the benefit of reducing loss of life on the battlefield.

We’ll stick with high-tech for a hit of space news about the plucky little Voyager 1 spacecraft launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn. It completed that part of the mission by 1980 and in 1988 had travelled far enough to become the most distant human-made object in space. It is still out there at 167.24 Astronomical Units or about 15.4 billion miles. It takes 23 hours for a signal to reach the earth from the aging spacecraft and its antenna has to be precisely aligned to get the job done. However, problems with the thrusters needed to maintain the orientation put that communication in jeopardy. The cause of the problem seemed to be internal heaters (it is really cold in deep space) which were considered dead in 2004. With complete failure a possibility, engineers puzzled through the problem and recently sent a series of commands to the spacecraft to restart the heaters. It was a nail-biting 23 hours to get the command there and another 23 hours to get the answer back, but the fix worked and for the moment at least, Voyager 1 has had “yet another miracle save”.

Meanwhile, no miracle save for SpaceX when its Starship prototype had another “rapid unscheduled disassembly” (how they say that with a straight face is beyond me). The rocket made it off the ground, but its first stage Super Heavy booster section blew up instead of splashing down into the Gulf of Mexico. The upper stage continued as planned but failed to open its payload doors to deploy Starlink satellite “simulators”, but it carried on until it sprang leaks and spun out of control. SpaceX put on a brave face noting that the upper stage flew further than the two previous flights so it was a “big improvement over last flight!”.

Against the back drop of reports of drug use by the company’s CEO Elon Musk and back lash to his role in cutting US government costs, the last few weeks have not been kind to SpaceX.

To date, NASA alone has invested more than $15 billion in SpaceX and there are ongoing contracts with other agencies including $1.8 billion to develop a spy satellite. Ongoing rapid unscheduled disassemblies could prove to be a financial problem as well as a technology issue.

I go to the gym at the University of Calgary several times a week. Campus life ebbs and flows over the year and right now the University is deep into convocation and graduation season. The gym hosts high school graduation ceremonies and the university’s own convocation events and facilities are booked solid for 2 weeks as everyone dons caps and gowns.

The tradition of the cap and gown began as a matter of necessity. Central heating is a relatively modern convenience from the 1800s, so 12^th century universities were cold places for students and teachers. When it came time for the ceremonial procession of medieval scholars, caps and gowns were designed and worn as a practical way to keep warm in large spaces. The cap we see today evolved from hoods (now worn over the shoulders) which were warmer but as heating technology improved, the uniforms of academia became more symbolic of academic success. After the diplomas have been presented, graduates are allowed to move the tassel on their cap from the right to the left to symbolize the transition from student to graduate. The tossing of the caps into the air is a modern addition to the ceremony and is attributed to graduates from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1912 when graduates received a new cap to signify their new status and tossed the old ones away in celebration.

Individual institutions may have their own variations for colours and styles but in Canada we generally follow the North American Intercollegiate Code for Bachelors', Masters', and Doctors' degrees as you’ll see in this comprehensive list from U of C. Most schools use black as the base colour and customize the look off that base.

As the graduates arrive to collect their degrees the music you most often will hear is Pomp and Circumstance first performed in 1902 to honour the coronation of King Edward VII. NPR has a great podcast from 2003 that explains it all for you.

I barely remember my high school grad and my university celebration is a blur, but thanks to smartphones and social media, graduation day is never likely to be forgotten again.

For some of us, that might be a good thing!

Take a deep breath. Maybe you can smell newly cut grass or burgers cooking on the neighbour’s BBQ. Or maybe the exhaust of cars. What you can’t smell is environmental DNA. The air is full of it and a recent study says we can track everything from elusive bobcats to illicit drugs by analyzing airborne DNA. Researchers sucked up air in two study locations, one in Dublin and one in a forest in Florida.

A media release from the University of Florida said that with compact and affordable equipment, a researcher can capture air samples and using gene sequencing technology, have the results in less than a day. The Dublin samples yielded signs of human pathogens, common allergens, and drugs such as cannabis and magic mushrooms. The Florida samples found bobcats and venomous spiders.

The idea of collecting all-inclusive samples of environmental DNA (eDNA) from soil and water has become well established because living organisms are constantly shedding genetically rich bits of skin, mucus, waste, or pollen. Collecting water or soil samples can yield a treasure trove of genetic information about what species are part of a given ecosystem. An important aspect of eDNA is that it can be collected in a non-invasive and cost-effective manner. In some cases the sequencing can be so precise that it can identify individual animals – or people.

The Nature paper from the University of Florida researchers noted that eDNA can not only track genetic biodiversity, but offer advance warning of potentially harmful disease pathogens, monitor pest species, find evidence of antimicrobial resistance, and aid in narcotic surveillance.

In Canada, 12 new projects worth $11.3M were announced last month by Genome Canada to use eDNA technology to monitor environmental changes to help policy makers address health threats and biodiversity loss.

And while the technology behind it is complex, all it takes is a good sample of our air, water, and soil to start the process.

Telehealth was already showing it could improve health outcomes in people and when COVID struck, doctor visits by phone or video took a sharp rise in Canada and the United States. A new study shows that pet telehealth is also on the rise and can benefit Fluffy the cat and your favourite Fido.

Researchers at University of California, Davis worked with pet owners in Canada and the U.S. to see how beneficial video calls are for pet owners and their pets. The study zeroed in on a specific condition for cats and a UC Davis press release this week said that 95% of those who took part said they would pay for telehealth visits. Arthritis is common in cats and rates can be as high as 64 to 92 percent in cats over 10 years of age. The telehealth sessions were not meant to replace in-person visits and focused on advice, not medicine, so a registered veterinary technician could conduct the calls without a veterinarian. The results of the study were published in Frontiers in Veterinary Medicine and suggested pet owners preferred the video appointments to get advice and learn more about managing feline arthritis in the home. With 6.2 million Canadian households with a cat and 37-40 million in the US, the implications are significant.

The potential is not lost on the pet care industry.

In the US, the online pet pharmacy PetMed Express and virtual veterinary care provider Dutch announced a partnership to cover the country with a membership model service to diagnose and prescribe virtual care for pets. The idea of telehealth for pets has become attractive enough that it is becoming a popular and effective add-on to employee benefit programs.

With veterinary care costs rising, telehealth can help reduce the financial burden. Not surprisingly, the virtual pet care advice has also captured the attention of AI startups who want to further those savings. Vet-Ai for instance offers AI driven consultations, symptom checker, and online medication services. Google searches for “AI vet” and “AI pet care” grew by 143% and 107% respectively in just the last month according to a story in StartupHub this week.

In Ohio where veterinary telehealth is not allowed, legislators voted this week to change the law to make it legal. The committee discussion also revealed some of the downsides when a veterinarian said she had “encountered countless cases where verbal symptom descriptions pointed to one diagnosis, but physical examination revealed a different condition — or multiple concurrent problems “. Other potential downsides to the virtual vet visit include a breakdown in the trust factor that develops over time with in-person visits, more subtle signs of disease, and the possibility of higher costs when an in-person visit is still deemed necessary.

The future is more likely a hybrid model where virtual visits become just one part of an overall approach to keeping our four-legged friends happy and healthy.

Before getting into this story, I’ll declare my bias. A cute little orange goldfish swimming around in a little bowl with a couple of cute underwater features strikes me as cruel for the fish trapped in that limiting environment.

Releasing them into the wild however, is not an alternative.

A 9.2 hectare pond near Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island is in danger of being invaded by those cute little gold fish that likely ended up in the pond after their owners got as bored with the fish as the fish were in their little bowl. The problem is, goldfish are an invasive species and once in the wild can grow to 1 kilogram (2.2 pounds) and eat everything in sight including other fish, fish eggs, and insects while also digging up silt from the bottom of the pond. In short, they change the ecology of wherever they are and can end up in other waterways. A pond in Kitchener, Ontario is facing a similar problem, Sylvan Lake, Alberta has issued warnings about releasing goldfish, and in 2022 biologists said there were 20,000 goldfish in a stormwater pond near Toronto. Last year the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported finding a 4kg (8.8 lb) goldfish in Lake Erie they nicknamed Megalodon.

Goldfish or Carassius auratus are not native to North America. They originated in Asia and became popular as an ornamental pet and traded across Europe. By the 1600s they had made it into the wild in the U.S. (likely by European colonists) and in the 1800s found a foothold (or is that finhold) in Canada. They have the rather colourful reputation of being “suck, spit, and pick” feeders. They suck in quantities of material from the bottom of the water. spit out unwanted bits, and then pick at the remaining food. This disrupts the existing ecosystem and spreads disease.

Getting rid of them isn’t easy. Netting, electrofishing (stunning them with electric probes), introduce predators, or treating the pond with Rotenone are options.
Better yet if you really do want to get rid of your goldfish try these alternatives.

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Towers have always fascinated man and have been the downfall of many who have tried to build towers to reach the heavens and towers for people to look on for their greatness.

The Lord of the Castle in the forest was no less a man than these. He already had a Tower his grandfather had built to show his power and might. This Lord of the Castle wanted to assert his power over the forest and the countryside of his kingdom so, he hunted. He killed for the sport because the forest was his and he filled the rooms of his castle and adorned the walls of the tower with his prizes.

One day while riding through the forest he spotted a white bird flying over the trees. Just another bird among the many, but he had not yet claimed a prize for the day. He dismounted, nocked an arrow, followed the path of the bird, and with a practiced movement let loose his shot. The arrow was true but when he went to retrieve his prize there was nothing to be found except for a single white feather and blood on the ground.

The Lord cursed at his misfortune. "I could not have missed," and turned to go back to his horse to continue the hunt.

There, standing only a few feet in front of him, was a young woman dressed all in white lace. One arm hung with a bloodied hand hung loosely by her side and she was clearly in pain.

This was his forest and his forest alone where no one dare trespass but he was so overcome with her beauty that he dismissed the suddenness of her appearance and declared, "I must have her; she must be mine. She will be mine."

"You shall not." was her answer. He persisted and withdrew two pouches from the saddlebag of his horse.

"I have silver." He pressed a pouch into her uninjured hand. She dropped it to the ground.

"I have gold." He placed another pouch into her palm and pressed her hand tightly around it. She tossed the pouch aside.

The Lord of the Forest fell to his knees and begged her to come with him and live in his castle. "I promise whatever comforts and needs you might wish will be yours."

She replied, "Sire, I'll go if you put up your bow and spare the creatures of your forest. Leave them in peace. You have no need of them nor do you have many walls left on which to hang them."

The image of the woman as his Lady and his Queen was all he could see so her words were lost to him. His desire was not to be denied.

"You will come to be mine," he said. He lifted her on to his horse, quickly tied her in place behind him, then with a kick to the flanks of his horse, rode off to his castle. There he had his physician tend to her wounded hand and she was moved into the Lord's tower where he would have her become the Lady of the Castle.

No sooner was she thrown into the dark reaches of the Tower than the skies above the forest emptied of Song Birds and instead were filled with Storm Birds. One flapped its wings so hard it made the winds blow; other birds with tufts of red feathers rained down lightning; one with the head of a bear and the body of a bird caused it to thunder, while yet another Storm Bird caused it to rain. The centre of these strange events was the Tower and Castle, but the people of the kingdom witnessed the scene and could not utterly escape the mounting storm,

After seven days the birds disappeared and the air was calm and the Lord visited his Tower and once again asked the object of his desire to become his wife. All she would say was "leave them in peace," and once again her words were lost on the Lord and once again the Storm Birds appeared and cast their elements over the forest. After another seven days they disappeared, leaving behind destroyed vegetation and a damaged Castle.

The Lord of the Castle went to the woman where he found her singing a sad song. It was a song for the animals of the forest but it was lost on him.

"Are you ready to be my Lady and my Queen?" he demanded.

"Leave them in peace," was her quiet reply and she continued with her song which the winds carried throughout the forest and beyond.

The scene was played out in many ways until it was spring again. The swallows did not return with Spring in tow as was their role in the world, newly sown crops surrounding the forest would not grow, and the leaves on the trees were slow in returning.

Ever focused on his quest to win the woman, the changes happening around the Castle and to his Forest went unnoticed by the Lord. He continued to ask her the same question and still did not heed the answer that would have brought him what he desired.

Then one day the air was filled with a shrill sound that was coming in from far away. It drowned out the woman's sad song and to many it sounded like an ancient flute heralding an urgent warning. It approached the forest for days until finally the Seven Whistlers flew into view. These birds brought with them a despair that settled on the castle and everything around it. Still the Castle Lord could not hear her simple words, "leave them in peace."

When the Castle Lord came to see his future Queen one morning, he was horrified to see she was gone. All that remained was a white feather.

He looked up and saw a huge flock of Ravens. As the Tower walls started to crumble under their weight, he finally heard the woman's plea.

"Leave them in peace."

But it was too late. There were no birds and no animals left to leave in peace and as time wore on there would be no people.

All that was left of the Tower were piles of sand, a single feather, and — for the Lord — a memory of what he could not forget and could not attain.

We only have 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years left according to new research. (To save you from counting, there are 78 zeroes there) That is considerably sooner than previously thought. According to a media release from Radboud University in the Netherlands, about 10 to the power of 1100 (that’s a 1 with 1,100 zeros) sooner.
The researchers also concluded that the Moon and the Earth will evaporate in about 1 followed by 90 zeros years.
Those are mind boggling numbers but suffice to say it is a long time either way and no one reading this needs to fret about the end.

But it does beg the question, what happens then?

There are a lot of theories, and they will remain theories because no one will have their smartphone out to record the end and post it to TikTok.

Most of the theories lean into it not being an end as much as it is a transition into another state.

The one we might be most familiar with is the Big Bang (the science, not the TV series) where the universe started from a single point, but there is also a Big Bounce theory. That speculates that the universe expands until it reaches a maximum limit, then collapses back into a single point, then bounces back. Over and over again. This essentially replaces the Big Bang, which theorizes that the universe continues to expand forever but is so spread out that it becomes a cold, lifeless place lost in absolute zero temperatures. Then there is the Big Crunch. In that scenario, the universe continues to expand until it reaches a Big Freeze and then starts to collapse upon itself, perhaps resulting in another Big Bang.

Looking at it more philosophically, there is no mainstream theory which wraps itself around a state of absolutely nothing. Every ending still has something in it.

Enjoy your morning coffee while you consider that even the vacuum of space has, and always will have, structure!

While we are playing with numbers, lets go with 350 followed by 6 zeroes or 350 million years. That is the latest estimate of when reptiles first started to roam the Earth which makes it a full 40 million years earlier than previously thought.

Again, big numbers that are not easy to wrap your head around, but numbers that qualify as a significant change.

The new evidence comes from a site in Australia where clawed fossilized tracks are “most probably” those of a reptile according to a media release from Flinders University in South Australia. This was not a giant menacing creature, but more along the lines of a Komodo Dragon about 80cm (31in) long. The prints themselves are small, but were found by two non-professionals which the paper in Nature says is “a demonstration of the value of citizen science”. The two are included as authors in the paper as “independent researchers”. The full fossil track suggests that one reptile ran across the ground and two more ran in the opposite direction just before it rained. The ground later hardened and was covered in sediment, leaving the imprints intact. The new discovery makes these the oldest reptile tracks found – a claim to fame previously held by 318 million year old prints found in New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy.

To give you some context, the oldest known human or Homo sapiens footprint is about 153,000 years old and the oldest fossil ever found and dated is a 3.5 billion year old cyanobacteria found in Australia. UC Berkely points out that the oldest dated rock is only slightly older at 3.8 billion years.

And that I promise it the last story in this newsletter edition to tax your sense of time and space!

The idea of personalized medicine and the technology behind gene editing and gene therapy have been around for a couple of decades now, but last week the two came together in a giant step in the treatment of rare diseases.

A baby boy in the United States has been treated with a custom gene-editing therapy designed just for him and for his severe genetic disorder known as Carbamoyl Phosphate Synthetase 1 Deficiency. According to the National Organization for Rare Disorders, CPS1 is an inherited disorder where one of the five enzymes which play a part in the breakdown and removal of nitrogen from the body is either completely or partially absent. It requires a complex treatment to prevent the build up of ammonia in the body and half of all babies with the disorder die in the first weeks of life. Those that survive are faced with severe mental and developmental delays.

Unfortunately this is also where the economics of supply and demand come into play because what may keep goods and services moving, becomes a different equation in matters of life and death. Costs for gene therapies can be millions of dollars per patient.

CPS1 affects just one in 1.3 million babies, meaning that pharmaceutical companies are not investing large amounts of research and development money for a limited market and even at the pure research level, such rare diseases do not always receive enough grant money to find causes and develop cures.

In this case, baby KJ found a doctor and medical team willing to go out on a limb and the result may set the stage for treatment of other rare diseases. CPS1 is caused by a mutation in a single gene. Researchers used CRISPR, a precise gene editing tool, to correct that one gene in the baby’s liver cells. To borrow from the New York Times explanation it used a molecular GPS to crawl along the baby’s DNA until it found that one DNA letter among the possible three billion choices, and made the fix.

Highly specialized CRISPR is readily available, the procedure for infusing an organism with gene-edited material is well established, and research is ongoing for many rare diseases. If a qualified team can put this all together like they did for baby KJ, the need to wait for drug companies to create, patent, and sell a one size fits all treatment becomes less of a factor. Medical and research teams can create their own bespoke genetic repair tools.

Gene-editing and personalized medicine has been criticized as hype and hope over practice and cost. However, as a former official with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration said about this new development, we could finally view this as a breakthrough and transformational step.

A Bloomberg headline this week is another reminder of the obstacles facing efforts to reach net zero.

India’s Dirty Furnaces Threaten Global Steel Net Zero Goal

(If you have a problem accessing that link try a similar ABC News story)

The story goes on to talk about India as the biggest steelmaker at 350 million tonnes per year, produced mostly in furnaces fed by coal, making it a major source of harmful green house gases. Meanwhile in the UK former Prime Minister Tony Blair said net zero policies are losing support, and since the start of the year Shell has cut back on its emissions goals and BP has said it is refocusing on its oil and gas priorities. Canada Pension Plan Investments said this week it is dropping its net zero by 2050 targets, but says it will still incorporate sustainability into its portfolio. In the United States the new megabill which squeaked through Congress this week will “cripple the domestic green energy economy” according to Earthjustice. Oxford Economics tracked the impact that the Trump administration has had on US climate policy so far through executive orders and its “drill, baby, drill” attitude to energy production.

All this adds up to a lonely road to net zero.

As Tony Blair and others have noted, while the polls show public support for the goals of net zero, when it starts to take a chunk out of their income or cause personal pain, voters run for the nearest candidate promising to go slow or go nowhere at all.

None of this looks good for the planet but giving up is not an option because climate change affects “every person, in every household, in every town and every city, in every province and every country in the world”.

With warmer weather in most of Canada (Alberta as always not falling in line), ‘tis the season for mosquitoes. In fact from May until as late as October, we can expect the bloodsuckers to torture us wherever there is warm temperatures and standing water – even a small puddle will do according to a CBC story.

Mosquitoes can be found on every continent except Antarctica and apart from being a pest can carry diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, dengue, and West Nile fever.

But if you are in France, you may have noticed 40,000 extra Tiger mosquito males which were released recently, and there are plans to release millions more. There is a good reason however for the plan in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region. First off, these males are all sterile, and secondly, the black and white striped mosquito is an invasive species and in just a couple of decades has successfully become part of the French landscape. Climate change is contributing to the spread of disease carrying mosquitoes, so we can expect any of the 3,500 species of mosquitoes on the planet to keep spreading. Female mosquitoes only mate once in their short life and because these released males are sterile (done via x-rays), it will start reducing the overall mosquito numbers. A single female can lay as many as 300 eggs so the impact of the biotech approach to control the population is significant.

The “sterile insect technique” has been tried elsewhere in the world and this particular batch of sterile males are produced on the insect farm of Terratis, a start-up spun out of Université de Montpellier. The technique has been shown to reduce the overall birth rate up to 80% according to a Nature report this month.

At a cost of about 52,000 Euros (81,500 Cdn) the biotech approach is viable and less harmful than large scale chemical spraying.

In case you are wondering about an extra few million mosquitoes biting there way around the countryside, no need to worry. Only female mosquitoes bite.

It may have escaped your notice, but Tuesday was World Bee Day as designated by the United Nations. As Associated Press noted, it probably slipped past the bees as well, but it should be a day where we all pause and think about pollinators.

While the day is set aside to pay attention to the state of bees around the world, they are just one of many pollinators which include butterflies, wasps, bats, and hummingbirds. Insects of all kinds are in danger around the world, but pollinators are of the most concern, and the “plight of the bumble bee” is of particular interest. Too much pavement, too many pesticides, and too many extreme weather events are harming a pollinator that is responsible for one of every three bites of food you eat. Even our lawns are close to being a “dead zone for pollinators”.

Pollinator Partnership Canada says that pollinators drive $233 billion into the global economy, and honeybees are a significant part of agricultural productivity. According to Alberta Farm Express, the agricultural value of pollinators in Canada is in the three-to-seven-billion-dollar range. You may immediately start thinking about honey production but that accounts for only about $300 million in Canada. The rest of the value comes from crop production that relies on pollination.

There are about 20,000 species of bees in the world and 3,600 of those call Canada and the U.S. home. 28% of bumble bees, 50% of leave cutter bees, and 27% of mason bees are threatened. If you want to help preserve bee populations, Nature Alberta has posted Native Bees 101 on YouTube full of information and tips.

As political and cultural sentiment in Canada swings against the country below the 49^th parallel, Kicking Horse Coffee asked coffee shops to change the name of an Americano to a Canadiano. The Kicking Horse Café says it has been using that name for many years now and wanted to show some Canadian pride by getting others to join in renaming the mix of espresso with hot water. The Daily Coffee News says that “Tariffs May Come and Go but the Canadiano Seems Here to Stay”. According to the story, the idea has gone over well across the country and some coffee shops say that Canadiano orders have doubled since the name change.

The history of the Americano seems to go back to WWII when American soldiers in Italy couldn’t handle the strong Italian espresso. They were used to drip coffee and had to cut the stronger brew with hot water to more closely match their preferences. Depending on how strong you want it, you can vary the amount of water. I used to stop for a double Americano when I was commuting in the morning which I suppose defeats the purpose of the Americano. Occasionally I went in the complete opposite direction and got a Red Eye, a high-test mix of espresso AND black coffee.

According to Forbes magazine the renaming of food for politics goes back to WWI. Sauerkraut was renamed “Liberty Cabbage” to distance itself from its German origins and when France opposed the Iraq War, some American restaurants turned their French fries into Freedom Fries but it never caught on in the same way as the Canadiano has.

What goes into the mug first when making a Canadiano? If you want to keep the espresso crema on top, the water goes in first. For a smoother drink, the espresso goes in first, but otherwise it doesn’t matter too much.

Whatever your preference, join the “quiet rebellion” and order a Canadiano!

Old friend you seem to be having troubles again.

In our early days whenever you called and said it was time for a glass of wine you knew I would be there. I was never a wine drinker but it was your way of saying this was a chance to spend some time together and you would tell me so many stories. When you shared the troubles you were having making it through a day, I did my best to comfort you when you needed someone to share your aches, your pains, and to be a friend.

You were old and I was young, but when you needed to get out, I was there to keep you company and help you along. Our favourite outings were fishing. We walked for miles! You taught me so much on those adventures. I learned to swim in the lake and you would throw sticks which we would watch drift away, and skip stones which sank out of sight.

When you didn't feel like going out, there was always time to join you in quiet moments where our thoughts and dreams went unsaid. After so many years enjoying our company together, there was often little need to talk. When you were away I had lots of others to spend time with, to walk with, and to talk about things I did not always understand as I did with you. Never fear old friend; I always waited eagerly for your return.

But I was growing older too — and like you — not always ready for another adventure. On one of our last fishing trips I sat by your side and simply relaxed while you talked to me. It is so clear in my mind even now what you asked of me.

"When the years are heavy and my heart is growing cold my little friend, I wish that when the evening comes, there'll always be an old friend who'll miss me too."

There is no doubt I will miss you, so when you called to me and said time for a glass of wine, I came. I needed some help getting on the bed because I am almost eighteen and for me it is a difficult jump. I curled up by your side and felt those familiar hands stroke my fur and ruffle my ears. Your breathing was heavier than I remember but it is now late in the day for both of us.

We'll close our eyes knowing that to the very end we remained old friends.

That giant fiery orb we see every day is having a stormy week of sorts and that’s how we’ll kick off this week’s edition.

While we tend to think of the sun as being tremendously hot everywhere and all the time, it does have some cooler spots. Not cool, as in the ideal place for a vacation, but about 3,300C (6,000F) compared to the 5,530C (10,000F) elsewhere. These sunspots are caused by variations in the sun’s magnetic field.

Solar Active Region 4079 started to become active in April and is now 140,000km (87,000m) across which makes it is bigger in diameter than the Earth. It will be in a position this week where it will be directly facing us. If it erupts into a solar flare, we will take a “direct hit of solar energy and solar particles”. Never fear, this doesn’t mean we are going to be vapourized, as these geomagnetic storms are fairly common and are even part of the Space Weather report. It does mean however we may see some increased Northern Lights activity and if powerful enough, may disrupt your GPS signal and can even cause power grid problems.

Beyond the Northern Lights that it may produce, this sunspot is big enough that with the right equipment you might be able to see it.

I’ll include this caveat from Forbes magazine:

“Note: it is dangerous to look at the sun through anything other than a pair of certified safe solar filters (solar eclipse glasses) bearing the ISO 12312-2 international safety standard. Don’t make your own, don’t use sunglasses and don’t use welder’s glass.”

Forbes goes on however to give you some tips on how to safely observe the phenomenon.
If you have any doubts about it however, The Sky Live site has some good pictures of what 4079 looks like.

Staying up in space for one more story, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are set to take on Elon Musk’s Starlink service. I have written before about Starlink and its 7,100 (and counting) satellites circling the planet to provide Internet service. Starlink has a significant head start on the competition from home and abroad, but Amazon has deep pockets and hopes to make a dent in Starlink’s hold on satellite Internet delivery.

Amazon’s near Earth orbit Project Kuiper (named after the Kuiper Belt which by definition has nothing at all to do with near Earth orbits) launched its first satellites in late April with the eventual goal of 3,200 satellites providing broadband service around the world.

Also circling us in Low Earth Orbit are 600 satellites belonging to OneWeb, which is part of the Eutelsat Group, but it is facing some financial challenges and this week appointed a new CEO.

Internet satellites are an important part of bridging the digital divide facing people in rural, remote, and underserved parts of the world. They provide low latency service which simply means there is no significant delay between sending and receiving data. Without reliable high speed satellite services, video conferencing is nearly impossible. While streaming audio and video may not seem crucial, without a reliable and fast internet connection filing your taxes or applying for a passport online are important and many rural communities live in a digital canyon.

But our reliance on Internet services comes at a price. Scientific American points out that Project Kuiper and Starlink will fundamentally alter the “appearance, and usability, of the night sky—and we still don’t have solutions”. We will be in uncharted territory if Starlink ever reaches its goal of 30,000 satellites, which already need to perform 50,000 maneuvers every six months to avoid collisions with other objects (including its own satellites) every six months.

In 2009, a U.S. commercial Iridium satellite collided with an inactive Russian satellite resulting in thousands of pieces of debris which will remain in orbit for decades. As if we don’t have a big enough problem here on Earth, this fact sheet from the Secure World Foundation gives us a glimpse into how we are polluting the vastness of space.

Seems we have not learned our lesson yet.

Robotaxis are becoming more common in many parts of the U.S. and China, but look out, here come the robo-trucks.

According to TechCrunch, Aurora Innovation has a fleet of driverless trucks on the road in Texas. In a media release, the company says it is operating regular routes between Dallas and Houston with driverless trucks and will expand the service to El Paso, Texas and Phoenix, Arizona by the end of this year. The system that drives the trucks is called ‘Aurora Driver’, and the media release says, “In over four years of supervised pilot hauls, the Aurora Driver has delivered over 10,000 customer loads across three million autonomous miles”.

Aurora is not alone in the driverless truck business. Kodiak Robotics was founded in 2018 and made its first autonomous commercial delivery the following year. It has been making steady progress in its ‘Kodiak Driver’ system. In 2022 it started a pilot project to operate autonomous freight deliveries for Ikea and has a contract with the U.S. government to develop a Robotic Combat Vehicle. Being able to operate off main highways is a special challenge for autonomous vehicles because Google maps does not lend itself well to off-road terrain and the landscape is not clearly marked as it is in cities and highway.

In Canada we have a few projects underway. Loblaws has a daily 25km run underway in Etobicoke and Canadian company, NuPort Robotics has a pilot project to move goods for Canadian Tire in Toronto.

A Bloomberg News story says these latest developments signal that “autonomous trucking may have arrived”. It goes on to point out that driverless trucks do not have to worry about driver fatigue, can operate without rest breaks which means better range and delivery times, and are more fuel efficient.

What does this mean for truck drivers? For the moment at least, the American Trucking Association says jobs are safe and the Truck Driver Institute sees a hybrid future for the industry. In the U.S. there is also a shortage of truck drivers and driverless vehicles may only fill the gap over the short term. Canada is also facing a shortage of nearly 40,000 drivers by 2030, and the driverless truck fleet is a long way from making up the shortfall.

The robots are also coming to your surgery – and they are SuPER.
Specifically, to help with surgery at the Surgical Performance Enhancement and Robotics Centre at McGill University. A media release from the University Health Centre last week says it is Canada’s first robotics and artificial intelligence centre that can take basic research and move it into the clinic to improve our health and well-being.

A journalist from the Montreal Gazette was at the inauguration of SuPER and reported that it was a glimpse into the future of surgery “that, in some cases, is nearly here”. Robotic surgery can cover a range of uses such as realigning broken bones with better speed and accuracy than human surgeons to simpler but important tasks such as high-definition cameras to give the surgeon an enhanced, 3D view of the area being worked on during an operation. From a patient’s perspective robotic surgery can get the job done with smaller incisions, less pain, and a faster recovery. As you’ll read in this story from Global News , a robotic surgery has the surgeon sitting at a console while a team are at the patient’s side looking after anesthesia and ready to intervene if needed. A 2023 paper in the Journal of Thoracic Disease found that patients who had cardiac surgery using the system mentioned in the Global story shortened the ICU time and hospital stay, and improved patient satisfaction and their quality of life after the surgery. In a CTV story from last week, a surgeon says that using a robotic system has enabled her to perform surgery they simply could not have performed before.

The SuPER Centre at McGill brings together clinicians, engineers, researchers, students and trainees to collaborate on the design, development, testing and refinement of robotic surgery and is changing how surgery and arguably medicine itself, is carried out.

McGill is also home to an online hub for researchers, students, and professionals to connect with each other and share resources and research on climate change and sustainable development. The Sustainability Academic Network (SUSAN) was created six months ago and recently added a new objective to the volunteer run platform according to a story in the Montreal Gazette this week. It is now part of the effort to save important climate information and research from being lost because of new policies and orders coming from the White House. For instance, https://climate.nasa.gov/ is now https://science.nasa.gov/ , the USDA has removed website sections referring to the climate crisis, and portions of the United States Forest Service referring to climate change and the climate crisis are gone. A Guardian story says scientist are bracing “for the worst” as research data, studies, and papers are taken down to echo the Newspeak expert Syme in the novel, 1984.

That’s where sites like McGill’s SUSAN come in to try and save the destruction of words about climate change.

A BBC story describes the rush to save information as a global effort ranging from rescuing data, to replicating entire websites covering science information related to climate, environment, pollution, energy, greenhouse gases, weather records, ocean monitoring, and carbon dioxide monitoring.

By some measures the U.S. was already starting to fall behind some countries and the latest science purge will only make the situation worse. The cuts and changes to science funding will also trickle down to Canadian research according to Evidence for Democracy. Canada is involved in many collaborations with U.S. funded research agencies and institutions and often rely on access to U.S. data. We also benefit from jointly funded research projects and if one half of that funding disappears or is significantly stifled by ideological driven decisions both side of the border will feel the impact.

There is a danger that the “destruction of words” is only the beginning.

If you have a cup of coffee in hand while you read this, you are holding a pretty volatile product. It is subject to weather and climate change, the taste of the day with consumers, and now the whims of the 47^th president of the United States.

And of course, where you live. Already the line up for a latte in the U.S. is getting shorter according to a BBC story. The reason for the current jump in prices down south is largely due to the tariffs imposed by the current administration. Independent coffee shops are less able to absorb those tariff costs and consumers are reacting accordingly. The story says that coffee drinkers are buying smaller drinks, choosing a less expensive plain coffee instead of a specialty drink, or simply brewing more coffee at home. If you live at the edges of the supply chain such as in Yellowknife, your costs go up even more.

In Canada price increases are less affected by tariffs because we buy from countries that are not entangled in a trade dispute. That doesn’t mean we are off the hook. General inflation increases, minimum wage increases in some provinces, and in some cases sales volumes which never came back to pre-COVID levels, says Toronto Now. Tariffs become a factor when coffee shops or roasters buy their coffee through a U.S. based importer so we are facing a new look to the North American coffee trade according to The Perfect Daily Grind.

Apart from tariffs, inflation, and demand, weather is a major factor in the price of your daily caffeine fix. The July price for arabica and robusta coffee is up this week because of “lackluster rainfall in Brazil” and a drop in production from Vietnam because of drought. Brazil is turning to irrigation to keep up production levels, but that adds to the overall cost of doing business.

In Canada, 74% of us knock back at least one cup of coffee every day so drink up because by June or July, you may be drinking less.

On May 7^th, 1953, Hooker Chemicals sold a piece of land that had been originally envisioned as a canal by William T. Love, for water and hydroelectric power to the City of Niagara Falls, New York for $1.00. It turned out to be the worst environmental disaster anyone could imagine.

Work started on digging the canal in 1890 to link Lake Erie and Lake Ontario but never became more than a ditch and was described by at least one case study as a “useless hold in the ground”. For a while the locals used it as a swimming hole in summer and an ice rink in winter. A hole in the ground however is good for something after all – it is a good place to dump all manner of municipal and industrial waste. In the case of Mr. Love’s ill-fated canal, ideal for chemical waste, and in 1942 Hooker Electrochemical Corporation took over the site and started to fill that big hole in the ground with toxic waste from its manufacturing activities. By the time the company sold the land the hole was filled up with an estimated 21,000 tons of chemicals.

In 1953 the Niagara Falls School Board bought the land for one dollar. Hooker Chemical told the school board what was underneath, and that one-dollar bill protected the company from future liabilities.

By the late 1950s there were about 100 houses on the site and of course the school that had been the reason for the land purchase. All the construction activities however breached the containment measures and chemical leached into the ground. Rain helped the chemicals spread. By 1978 the problem had become an environmental disaster with “abnormally large cases of birth defects, miscarriages, chromosome damage, and cancer” and 800 families were evacuated from the area. In 1979 the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said, “Quite simply, Love Canal is one of the most appalling environmental tragedies in American history”. In May of 1980 President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a national emergency.

Environmental regulations that could have prevented the tragedy of Love Canal were non-existent before the full extent of the problem was understood.

There was little in federal or state legislation to hold polluters financially responsible for cleaning up toxic waste, and the site met Environmental Protection Agency standards at the time.
That started to change with the 1980 Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (informally referred to as Superfund). The disaster was a major factor in the rise of environmental activism beginning in the seventies.

The National Environmental Policy Act in the U.S. was adopted in 1978 in part as a response to Love Canal and other similar sites. In February, the current administration published an interim final rule repealing all of the implementing regulations for the Act.

Today, Love Canal has been classified as a safe place to live, though not everyone agrees. Either way it is worth remembering what happened and why we need to take care of the environment around us.

Being a Duke has its benefits, but it also comes with obligations. Some of them seemingly frivolous, but necessary to keep up appearances. One of those obligations was making sure all the Dukes and Duchesses were hanging somewhere in the manor. Not the actual Dukes and Duchesses of course, though mind you there were some rogues, pesky old maids we called tabbies, and better forgotten ladies who had lost their treasure in foreign laps, who all probably deserved to be hung somewhere at least. But those were not the ones I was obligated to preserve. That was already done.

No, these are the portraits specially commissioned to preserve the family history. An obligation going back to the late 1500s.

My portrait was already on the staircase leading up from the main entrance. Next to me was my late wife. Gone now for nearly two years. Taken by a strange malady the doctor and the coroner were never able to determine.

Now it was time for the new Duchess to hang on the other side of me.

I remember the commission so incredibly well. He arrived in a horseless carriage. This was no poor struggling painter my wife had me engage.

"Greetings your Grace" he said as he exited from the French Prunel which had become a symbol of some status for those who could afford a horseless cab. It was also the last time he addressed me as "your Grace" and it marked his insinuation into our household.

I nodded in his direction. "Greetings to you as well. Someone will be with you shortly to show you to your rooms."

He carried only one satchel but also had his easel, sketch pads, a worn and stained wooden box presumably full of his paints, and another wooden box engraved with his initials, CJK.

"Per our agreement, in addition to your fee we will provide you with one month's room and board. Unless you are specifically invited to dine with the Duchess and myself you will take your meals in your rooms or with the staff. I have designated a studio area with good natural light where you may work for the remainder of your stay."

The Duchess came out in her usual long skirt and ruffled blouse. She and the painter exchanged a kiss on the cheek.

"Welcome CJ," she exclaimed. "I can't wait to get started."

So began the month that dragged on and on with so many sketches and seemingly too little painting.

"You will join us for dinner on your first night here." She said and then turned to me to ensure it was to my liking.

He had the manners of a gentleman and was gracious that first night. He and my wife had met at an art show and over a few weeks met for tea, discussed art, and eventually he offered to paint her portrait. She had begged me to have this painter of "modest means, but rich talent" as she described him to receive the commission that was necessary for her to have her illustrated place in the family history. "Please," she had said. "Please. He is so nice and ever so talented. His work will not compete with the Masters on your walls, but this is a new century and he lives and breathes that new modern air. Please?"

I relented because she did indeed need to find her place. A decision I regret to this day.

I could hear them in his studio space. Him charming and being all too familiar by asking for Madam to please do this, and please turn this way, or Madam please hold still while I capture the moment on my sketchpad. Her laughing and asking him just how she should pose and was the light all right because she wanted to look beautiful for the family gallery. I knew the smile she was offering. It was a smile I loved when courting her and have seldom seen since.

We kept separate bedrooms except when the mood overcame us but as a light sleeper, I was always aware of her comings and goings no matter what the hour. One night I heard her come up the stairs and enter her room exceptionally late. Over breakfast I questioned the hour and with near imperceptible hesitation she brushed it off. "The light dear. We needed to experiment with different light to capture just the right moment so I can hold my own with many generations of your family."

This needed to end.

Then it did.

My Duchess was not at breakfast one morning and her painter was nowhere to be found. My first thought was that they had once again ventured out in search of new light and settings. When some hours had passed the local constabulary were called in to help. They observed that her bed had not been slept in, nor had the bed of the painter. They brought in their specially-trained bloodhounds to search the grounds. Sometime around mid-afternoon a police sergeant came back to the house with the bad news. She had been found hanging in the woods. Her clothes had been torn. There was still no sign of the painter he added, except for his smashed paint box.

Days went by and the search for the painter continued. The police had no doubt that he was the culprit because of course I and all the household staff had been sound asleep and unaware of any comings and goings. Constables were posted at the train station and the nearest ports. I dutifully ordered posters to be put up with the likeness of the painter to help apprehend him.

It has been a year now since the tragic events took place. There was an almost completed portrait of her in the painter's studio and using his many sketches as a guide I had another artist, a much more reliable chap I should add, complete the work. It is now hanging in our grand house, as I prepare to re-marry. The new Duchess will soon hang among my many ancestors. My portrait is flanked by my 2 dear wives and they will soon have company.

As for the lost painter?

I can promise you he will remain forever lost.

I am lousy at identifying colours. I’m not colour blind. I just can’t seem to differentiate between shades of any given colour. And it is about to get more complicated and that’s where we will start this week’s newsletter.

Scientist from University of California, Berkeley have discovered a new colour. ‘Olo’ is an “intense blue-green” according to a paper published in AAAS Science Advances. You are not going to see it in your next box of Crayola crayons or featured on a designer t-shirt because it lies outside the usual range of our lowly human eyes. A story in EuroNews said it is artificially created using laser pulses fired into the eyes of the five people involved in the study. (Three of the participants were co-authors of the research paper.)

That begs the question of whether it is a true colour.

A BBC article said some experts have said it is “open to argument” because the laser pulses are selectively stimulating the light perception cone cells in the retina. Without that direct stimulation, the colour does not exist independently. While the participants also described the colour as an “off-the-charts saturated’ greenish hue” we know that colour perception has a subjective component meaning my red, may not be your red.

Even the critics seem to agree however that it is a technological breakthrough. Scientific American quoted one expert who said that it could be used to stimulate different photoreceptors on human subjects to discover “really what a dog would see, what a mouse would see, what a goldfish would see…“Now this would be interesting”.

Last week if you wanted to catch the season opener of the Halifax Wanderers soccer club of the Canadian Premier League you could swap your blood for a free ticket. It was part of a joint effort between the team and Canadian Blood Services to get new blood donors and maybe new fans.

As of this week, Canadian Blood Services says they have a 23-day supply of AB+ and only a 4-day supply of O- to meet normal demand. Those numbers are not bad compared to some countries but overall, our global blood supply is facing some difficult times, in part because of climate change. A story from EuroNews says that natural disasters affect both the supply and demand for blood. In Europe, 25 million blood units are used every year. One unit of whole blood is approximately 450 mL (a little less than a pint) and can be used for whole blood transfusion or broken down into components such as platelets and plasma for specific needs. An article in The Lancet, Planetary Health points out that climate change emergencies can vastly increase demand for blood while limiting supply, challenge transportation, and disrupt distribution of new supplies and that we are not prepared for these changes. Bloomberg News pointed out for instance, that during Tropical Cyclone Alfred in Australia more than 3,500 blood donation appointments were cancelled.

One way to deal with threats to global blood supply is artificial blood. We have been searching for an artificial replacement for donated blood since the mid 1800s but have still not perfected an “artificial oxygen carrier” that can be used when donated blood is not available – especially in trauma-related emergencies. Often considered the “Holy Grail” of trauma medicine, artificial blood could held deal with the roughly 2 million global deaths every year attributed to the shock of blood loss. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in the U.S. invested $46 M in a blood substitute research last year but imitating the function of human blood remains elusive and there are no approved products available.

It's easy to donate blood in Canada so give it try.

I try to buy eco-friendly products and like many Canadians right now I am trying to buy Canadian-made products, but it isn’t easy being green. Even planet friendly products often come in packaging which can only be disposed of in the garbage, and take-out food packaging can be especially challenging.

Enter a Canadian company featured on the Globe & Mail’s Decibel podcast this week, that is doing its part to produce greener packaging and that may turn out to be a company positioned to thrive during the trade war.

Founded in 2004, Eco Guardian produces packaging for the food service sector that is compostable. Much of it is made from re-purposed sugar cane and bamboo waste from other manufactured products. The company was importing many of its products, but the challenge of tariffs has been the impetus it to start up Canadian production lines for its products.

My biggest pet peeve and one that doesn’t seem to have an alternative at Eco Guardian or elsewhere is cellophane. I have abandoned Starbucks for a variety of reasons, but the sheer waste that comes out of a typical location is one of the main factors. Ordering a croissant for instance means getting a product that is made elsewhere in the city and delivered in bulk packaging that is mostly non-recyclable. Inside that bulk box are individual cellophane wrapped croissants. When I order one, the staff very carefully take it out of the cellophane package, throw that in the garbage, and put the croissant into a small paper bag. They then print out the little label with my name on it, stick it on the paper bag and hand it to me. Cellophane is not compostable in municipal composting programs or even biodegradable. Even though it is made from cellulose, it is coated after production and like other so-called bioplastics still contains petroleum-based ingredients. The Sierra Club says that studies have shown that bioplastics contain thousands of “chemical features”.

There are a few cellophane alternatives for home use, but from what I have been able to find, nothing to replace consumer packaging products.

Time for a food packaging re-think around the world. This BBC podcast looks at some possible solutions, but ultimately it is up to you and me as consumers to push for change.

While I’m in the subject of getting rid of waste, here is a new alternative to dispose of organic waste – the larvae of the black soldier fly. These tiny bugs can eat four times their weight and send it out the other end as a sustainable fertilizer. They larvae will mature in a couple of weeks and become a high-protein source of food for fish and livestock.

They are so good at their job that more than 200 billion are farmed around the world and in Canada the market could be worth $62.93 million by the end of the decade. What make this particular bug so attractive for commercial use is that it is native to North America and does not bite or sting.

Oberland Agriscience is a major producer of black soldier fly larvae and its byproducts in Canada. The company says the larvae are high in calcium and a good source of protein so can be used as a quality food supplement for “backyard, broiler, and egg-laying hens”. It also produces dehydrated larvae that are incorporated into pet foods. The poo that the larvae produces is called frass, and can be used as a soil amendment or fertilizer. According to the company’s website the frass has been successful in fertilizer trials with strawberry plants, bean plants, and vines for wine production.

The soldier fly may be the latest poster bug for breaking down organic waste but it certainly isn’t the only bug being put to use. A 2024 paper in ScienceDirect said that crickets, yellow mealworms, superworms, house flies, the flesh fly and blow flies were already in common use around the world.

The paper did note however that social acceptance of bugs as bio-converter is still an issue. Let’s face it, if you saw ‘black soldier fly larvae’ on the list of ingredients for your pet’s kibble, you just might but the bag down and move on.

Globally, the cost of solid waste management is about 375 billion dollars and if we can put bugs to work to reduce the cost and produce beneficial by-products, we are doing the planet a favour.

It took a large team of scientists and more than 30 authors for the resulting paper, along with a major contribution from the Mars Curiosity rover, to discover iron carbonate on the Red Planet and proof of an ancient carbon cycle. The SUV sized rover has an onboard drill that can drill down 3 or 4 centimetres (1 to 1 ½ inches) and analyze the chemical and mineral composition of the samples. The iron carbonate was in the form of siderite, a brown, yellow or gray mineral made mostly of iron and carbon. On Earth, siderite can be found in places where hot water moved through rocks a long time ago, leaving behind minerals as it cooled.

The discovery suggests that the Martian atmosphere contained enough carbon dioxide to support liquid water on the surface at one time. Ben Tutolo is an associate professor with the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment in the Faculty of Science at the University of Calgary. He was the lead author of the paper and is part NASA’s Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity Rover team. In a media release from the U of C he said the results show that the planet was habitable at some point. Exactly when and why that changed requires more research.

The Curiosity Rover is climbing a mountain inside the Gale Crater on Mars, about 34 km (21 mi) from where it landed in August of 2012. It has collected 42 rock samples with the drill on the end of its robotic arm. The original life expectancy of the rover was 2 years and it is now expected to last into 2026.

As the U.S. – Canada trade war continues, ‘Buy Canadian’ is becoming a force to combat tariffs. Sometimes however, buying Canadian is a challenge, especially in your weekly trip to the grocery store. You’re never going to find a grown in Canada banana and some produce like strawberries are seasonal fare in Canadian fields.

Modern technology and the buy Canadian spirit is starting to change that.

A story in the Globe & Mail this week looks at one company trying to change how the humble strawberry is grown by harnessing AI. Plant genetics are complex to and it is no small task to identify the molecular markers needed to grow a strawberry under greenhouse condition that can produce quality fruit all year round. Traditional breeding techniques can take years to sift through all the traits and select for generation after generation of plants. Artificial intelligence can parse the data and predict what plants or seeds meet a grower’s requirements in a short period of time.

Like strawberries, lettuce grown in farm fields is seasonal and subject to the whims of weather. According to a Maclean’s story 90% of our salad greens are imported. The story goes on to point to a new, fully automated greenhouse facility north of Toronto which could produce 4,500 kgs (10,000 lbs) of lettuce per day. The lettuce does not see a human hand from seeding to harvest with irrigation, climate control, and lighting handled by a central computer system.

Meanwhile out in the traditional fields of soil, sun, and weather, automation and AI are having a similar impact. AI is working to improve plant genetics and automation handles irrigation, seeding, and fertilizing.

According to a CBC story, Canada did a better job of producing its own fruit and vegetables before the Canada-U.S. free-trade agreement. Since then, it has been not only easier to import from the U.S., but many growers in Canada simply moved south where it year-round production was possible.

Might be time to re-think those decisions.

Ready for coffee and cake?

We’ll start with coffee and how physicists have found a way to make your morning Java Jive better and cheaper. With the price of coffee beans going up, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania embarked on a project to make good coffee with fewer beans (I’m also guessing they wanted to improve the quality of the coffee they drank in their lab!). The results of the team’s work were published this month in the journal, Physics of Fluids. They experimented with the pour-over filter coffee method which is probably the easiest way to make coffee. It simply means the water is poured directly over the ground coffee and filters through to your cup. According to a UPenn press release they started with silica gel particles and a glass cone and using a laser and a

\high speed camera were able to observe how the water flowed over the particles. After studying the fluid mechanics of the process, they moved on to using real coffee.

They concluded that the most efficient and best tasting results came from using a gooseneck kettle and pouring the water from a height that creates the strongest mixing effect. Pouring from too high breaks the water stream apart and pouring from too low reduces the ‘avalanche’ effect which is key to stirring the coffee particles and water together to extract the flavour. The gooseneck kettle ensures more control over the flow of the water, so you do not pour too quickly. The overall goal is to increase the contact between the water and the coffee grounds, so you’ll need to experiment a bit to perfect your own technique.

As for the cake?

French pastry chefs used 4,000 eggs, 150kg (330lbs) of sugar, 415kg (914 lbs) of cream and 350kg (771 lbs) of strawberries to make the world’s longest strawberry cake. It was 121.8 metres (399 feet) long and weighed 1.2 tonnes.

Should pair well with your coffee.

I was nineteen when the Mods and Rockers tried to beat each other up at Margate. I was more of a Teddy myself but hell, I couldn't afford a scooter, a motorcycle, or an Italian suit so maybe I didn't fit anywhere.

Music was all I was interested in and I was going to make it my life.

After a few years of playing local gigs, doing covers and a few of my own songs, I started to hear about everything that had been going on across the pond in the US during the Summer of Love. A summer of music, of hippies, of young people celebrating what they called good vibrations. Stuck here in Kent, those events were a lifetime away.

Jilly meant the world to me and it took me weeks to work up the courage to tell her what I was thinking.

"Jilly, I may not be Sarstedt good yet but I'm just going to fade away here. And I have more to say than just getting caught up in who's better. The Mods? Rockers? Ton-up Boys? Teddy's? Who cares. I don't even think they care. Innit just them wanting to get in someone's face? I need to take my songs somewhere away from this place."

She didn't seem surprised.

"At last. The last time you played in the pub your heart wasn't in it. You're restless. Ya, you have lots to say and this little piece of England isn't much of a stage anymore. Go."

She leaned in and whispered in my ear, "Better days are ahead whether you are here or in London. I'll wait until you are ready for me to share them with you."

Within a few weeks I was standing in the rain at the train station. Fleetwood Mac's "Albatross" had been playing on the radio as she drove me, my bag, and my best guitar to the station. Even on the tinny radio of her little VW the brushing of the cymbals brought back the sound of waves on the beach where we spent so much time together. It was autumn now and a chilly wind stirred up the leaves as we drove through the countryside. I would miss it all.

Jilly still had the smile in her eye as we said goodbye but the smile wasn't as bright as it usually was. I was leaving my home and leaving my Jilly alone.

When I finally arrived at Charing Cross Station in London I still hung on to Jilly's smile and hoped I would never let it disappear. I caught the Tube to Piccadilly but as I stepped out into the street there were few smiles in sight and even fewer trees shedding their leaves to mark my arrival. It made me feel like I was late for one party but still ready to follow the die-hards on to another party. The Beatles were on the edge of packing it in as a group and Brian Jones was dead but we had been led into the Court of the Crimson King and Fairport Convention was asking us to walk a while with them as they brought the alien worlds of folk, rock, electric, and acoustic together for a new sound. That would be my new home.

I didn't have a lot of savings so the first thing to do was find a cheap squat, a street corner to busk, and a pub to play in.

I made it through the winter. Just.

Shortly after 1970 rolled in I had a regular slot in The Greyhound. Money wasn't great but I always got a bite to eat, a pint or two, and tips.

Jilly came every couple of months to visit.

"I still have a bed for two," she reminded me every time she walked into my cramped studio flat. "I mean it is cozy in here and all, but . . ." Her voice trailed off every time.

"How much of this do you smoke?" was often the next question as she picked up my stash.

Not that she minded and if there was a rolled joint handy she was quick to light up. She was crap at rolling her own. We'd smoke, have sex, and soon it would be time for her to head back to Kent. When she wasn't visiting, I tried to focus and follow a routine. Mornings were for writing songs and tweaking the ones I already had. Afternoons were for busking so people could hear what I had written.

It was frustrating. Oldham was managing the Stones, drove a Porsche, and never had to play outside waiting for coins to be thrown in a hat. He wasn't even thirty!

The only time I felt like I was headed in the same direction was when I was in a pub or club. The Greyhound was the best. It had three floors, each with a different stage. Usually, it would be a mix with jazz on one level, rockers on the top 'cos they were the loudest, and the folk experimenters like me somewhere in between. Sometimes it felt like I was back at home when fights broke out. They were like tribes. Rockers vs anyone who gave a two-fingered salute to their music.

Soon it was autumn again and I would be missing the golden colours of home and the warmth of Jilly. City nights were cold and it wasn't because I didn't have shillings for the heating. Once out of the warmth of wherever I had a gig, I was walking in the London that could be bleak in winter. Dense fog brought its own cold creepiness and deadened sounds around you. I would call Jilly on the telephone when I had some extra money just to hear her voice as she sat by the fire in her home that overlooked the channel. It took away the city chill. A chill that was wearing me down.

The winter came and went and it was back to busking. I had earned enough to record a couple of demo tapes. One a folk-rock cover, the other one of my own songs that pushed folk into the psychedelic. For weeks I spent my days going from producer to producer with no success. I had to go back to busking part of the day to earn money.

I still had a chance to play in the club where a man named Leaf was a barkeep. "Hey man, you need to try this. It's a real trip. Turns on a whole new path to your creative soul. This stuff is destined to melt the Cold War."

The 'stuff' was LSD. He held out a quarter inch square paper tab off a piece of blotting paper. The liquid drug was mixed with sugar and a perforated sheet of blotting paper printed with the dealer's logo was dipped in the mixture. This one was Blue Cheer. "Like the detergent", he grinned. He swore by the quality of his product.

I put the tab on my tongue and let it soften and dissolve. My music dissolved with it and was reborn in my head with more tones and colours than I ever knew existed. I was seeing the songs and hearing the colours. It took a full day before I started to come down from the first experience and Leaf told me to wait a few days before the next one.

My routine changed. A tab every week. I tried Unicorn and Horus, but Blue Cheer was the cleanest. And Leaf was ready to sell when I wanted to buy. Those weekly trips brought new life to my music but a new realization of the world around me. While my brain buzzed, the streets I was walking through were grimy and without a hint of the colours that resided in my head. Dick Wittington had gone to London because he thought the streets were paved with gold. The only gold for me was from the sunset I saw when busking along the river. Sun didn't come into the picture when you were in clubs and pubs. Another autumn was passing me by but there were no golden leaves like there would be at home right now. Unlike Dick Whittington, my fortunes weren't changing.

By the autumn of '73 I was hanging out with other musicians and artists disillusioned by London being ground down around us. I gave up my flat and moved into a squat in Camden. With jemmy bars in hand, we had carefully pried open the doors of a derelict old house. Derelict because a developer was buying up houses in the area for office buildings and evicting the existing tenants. Gone were the Mods, Rockers, and Teddys. We were part of a new sub-culture out to bring life back to the crumbling corners of the city. Though faded, the area was still home to colour. The signs over now closed shops still had life. Old flowerpots on stoops and balconies still bloomed with colour in the spring. There was a community garden maintained by the squatters and the few renters who were still hanging on to what they could. Artists had painted murals on empty building walls.

"Come on, give me a boost." Said a young woman holding a small can of paint and a brush. She was painting all the old streetlights around the square: green shades, red posts, and bright yellow bases. I helped her complete a dozen that still had bulbs and could be flicked on at night. There was a carnival in the spring as we emerged from a winter marked by unreliable heat and lukewarm tea by candlelight. The carnival was a re-awakening with more colour in the square than there was in the surrounding parts of the city where I had to busk and try to sell my songs. Leaf kept the acid supply bubbling.

Jilly quit coming to see me. She didn't judge my life but never embraced it either.

As another autumn approached the thought of another year surrounded by the greyness of London while my thoughts were a swirl of colours was more than I could bear.

I had been away from my home for too long and its pull was now too strong to ignore. Unlike what I tried to sing about, the colours and sounds of home were real. I found a call box and phoned Jilly.

I wasted no time when she answered because I needed to get on the road before I could change my mind.

"I'm coming home. I know the leaves are falling Jilly and the wind is calling me. I can hear the rhythm of the rain on your cottage right now. It's silly how much I miss that sound and how much I love you and your bed just right for two. I know I've left you alone and I hope I haven't made you cry. It's alright I'm on my way."

All I could hear on the other end of the line was the rain.

"Jilly? It's time I was going home. Hold on darling."

Oh Lord, how I have missed that country rain and it was plain to me that it was time to be at home.

"Jilly?"

Only the wind and the rain were left for me to hear.

Okay, time to address an existential question - are we alone? The SETI Institute has been tackling it for years and that is the starting point for this week’s 1 Week, 7 Stories.

The SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) is a California based non-profit organization which was incorporated in 1984 and began its search for life beyond Earth the following year. NASA already had a similar small-scale project on the books, but having a dedicated non-profit doing the work was considered to be more efficient and the Institute has been searching ever since. Its website says there are “potentially billions of locations outside our Solar System that may contain life”.

So far, its own work and the data accumulated from advanced telescopes and other scientific instruments sent into space have not found any signs of life.

In an Open Access paper in the Astronomical Journal this week, the authors ask the question that we may need to face some day.

“What if we Find Nothing?”

The paper tackles the question through a mathematical analysis of the number of planets we need to study before the absence of detection becomes statistically meaningful. The paper uses Bayesian statistical analysis which I don’t even pretend to understand, but a media release from the SETI Institute lays it out nicely.

“If scientists examine 40–80 planets and find no signs of life, they can confidently conclude that fewer than 10–20% of similar planets harbor life.”

From there they can start to draw conclusions on upper and lower limits to findings.

All this with a few, ‘but wait there’s more’ statements.

First off, the statistical analysis is based on similar planets to the ones studied. To date, scientists have found many planets orbiting their own stars but have not found a truly Earth-like planet.

Then there is the matter of what we are looking for. We are generally looking for water and gases like oxygen and methane that indicate biological activity, which means we are only searching for something like us.

Finally, we need to be 100% confident in our measurements. Uncertainty in data collection over millions and millions and millions of miles needs to be taken into account.

And now we arrive back at the existential question. If the answer over the coming decades continues to be a “null result”, what are the implications of us being truly alone.

The Big Think and Ars Techinica both say we should embrace the fact and allow it to spur us on to explore even more of the mysteries of our universe.”

Mount Spurr is on code yellow according to the Alaska Volcano Observatory (AVO).

A volcano is the landform that occurs when magma from the Earth's interior rises to the surface and forms a cone which can erupt with molten rock, ash, and gas. Think of it as a giant pressure cooker which needs to release its built-up energy. Mount Spuur appears to be ready to release that energy. The 3,350 metre (11,000 feet) volcano is in the Aleutian volcanic arc and on a good day is visible from Anchorage. As of this writing on April 11^th the AVO says that “unrest persists” and seismic activity is elevated with hundreds of small tremors over only a few days.

The last eruptions were in 1953 and 1992. According to the Daily Sitka Sentinel in July of 1953 eyewitnesses in Anchorage who “stepped outside to get a glimpse of the eruption were covered in fine ash within a few minutes”. The 1953 eruption was a one-day one-off event, but the 1992 eruption lasted several days and was preceded by several weeks of seismic activity – much like the current conditions. (If you want an ‘out there’ analogy to today, a psychic counselor quoted in the Anchorage Daily News after the 1992 eruption said it was “one more example of worldwide shifts in the fate of earth and its inhabitants” and that emotional lives were in “as much flux as the guts of Mount Spurr”. Make what ever you want of that!)

The volcano is in a remote region with the closest community of Tyonek being 64 kilometres or 40 miles away. However as the likelihood of an eruption increases people in the Anchorage area are stocking up on buying goggles and masks for themselves and their pets to help protect themselves from any ash fallout as you’ll hear in this interview from NPR.
For a close-up of the volcano here is a short helicopter tour and if you wondered about preparing for the ash fallout the checklists are already appearing online.

In the movie, The Graduate, Dustin Hoffman’s character Ben is taken aside by a friend of the family who says he has one word of advice for him: “Plastics”. It has a double meaning in the movie, but in 1967, plastics were indeed the future. Today that family friend might have a new one-word piece of advice.

Copper.

The average car has about 29kg (65 lbs) and there can be 181kg (400 lbs) of the metal in a new home. When I worked at the CBC, we often joked that if we needed to raise some cash all we had to do was mine the miles of copper out of the ceiling and in the studios. Copper prices and demand has resulted in a 400% rise in copper wire thefts since 2022 according to the Canadian Telecommunications Association. As Bloomberg News said last year the world needs more copper. Lots more.

Despite the current focus on the rare earth minerals, the world ‘needs rewiring’ and because copper is only second to silver when it comes to conductivity, it is vital to the process. Those rare earth minerals may be needed for microchips, but 90% of a completed circuit board is copper and current copper production is struggling to keep up with the demand according to an NPR report last month. As we watch the stock market gyrations right now, copper prices this week may be sending an economic signal. Last week the price of copper was at nearly an all-time high. This week it is an all-time rout.

It may well be a mixed signal.

Demand over the long term is not going away. Last year the world used 20 million tonnes of copper and despite some renewable energy slowdowns in the U.S., the demand for copper in electrification, plumbing, construction, communications, and renewable energy is not abating.

I am not an economic pundit, but new advice for Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate might yet prove to be copper.

Colossal Biosciences knows how to generate hype and how to raise money.

In 2021 Colossal said it had raised $15 million USD ($20.5 million CAD) with the aim of bringing back the Woolly Mammoth within 2 to 4 years. Then in 2023 it said they had raised a further $150 million USD ($206 million CAD) in Series B financing to bring back the Dodo. Then in October of last year it announced the formation of the Colossal Foundation, a US 501(c)(3) charitable organization to stop the extinction crisis. It also said at the time it wanted to bring back the Tasmanian tiger from extinction which had nothing to do with stopping any further extinction.

This week the company says it has brought back the dire wolf species from extinction and has lots of cute white wolf cub pictures to prove its point. Because of its track record of hype over results, the Colossal claim is being met with skepticism.

The dire wolf lived in North America almost 12,000 years ago, but lives on as a character in the TV show, Game of Thrones. That was immediately incorporated into the Colossal announcement with a picture of the show’s creator George R.R. Martin holding one of the pups. The company touted its achievement as a rebirth of the extinct wolf and the “World’s first successfully de-extincted animal”.

To be a fully revived animal however requires a full genome sequence to be copied and reproduced. The 13,000- and 72,000-year-old DNA samples the company worked from were unlikely to have been complete. They then worked to edit the genome of the gray wolf, which the company determined was closest living relative of the dire wolf. Next step was to perform an embryo transfer as a surrogate to carry the genetically modified wolf pups to term. As a CBC headline puts it they have “sort of” brought back the wolf. ‘Sort of’ meaning it is probably just a “grey wolf with a few tweaks”. “

In an article in AAAS Science, one paleoecologist said the work was done with “such a casual disregard not only for the truth but for life itself is genuinely abhorrent to me.” In a BBC video, another expert says,

There is no peer-reviewed scientific paper to back the process which makes the company’s claim more difficult to prove, or perhaps to disprove.

What is also troubling for many scientists is what now? If it were to prove to be a real dire wolf, it has no natural habitat. That all disappeared tens of thousands of years ago. It could only exist in the wild by displacing an existing population which raises a broader question. Why go to such effort and expense to bring an extinct species back while we witness the habitat destruction and extinction of the animals we have on our planet today.

Jeff Bezos and his Bezos Earth Fund may be catching up to Canadian researchers. In a media release this week, the Fund pledged to put $19.3 million into a research initiative across North America, Latin America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania to help livestock herds emit less methane. Research grants will help develop tools to first identify the traits of low-emission cattle and sheep, and then manage breeding programs to select animals that are more “climate efficient”.

When it comes to greenhouses gases, methane has a shorter atmospheric lifetime but traps more heat per molecule so reducing methane emissions is key to reach our climate targets. There are about 940 million cows in the world and together they belch nearly 10% of the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

Canadian researchers have been leading the pack for years in both mapping agricultural methane emissions and studying how to control the problem primarily by the same method the Bezos Earth Fund is pursuing – natural selection. For instance, late in 2024 a federally funded project at the University of Alberta got underway to examine the genetics of beef cattle to help producers select for less methane production from their herds.

The advantage to using generic selection and breeding for climate friendly traits is that it does not raise a warning flag for consumers. It does not involve gene editing or genetic modification. It won’t bring methane production to a screeching halt but with some basic on-farm research, we already making headway in dealing with the problem.

Depending on where you live in Canada, tick season has arrived or is no more than another warm spell away.

As the Merck TickMaps site says, “Think thermometer, not calendar”. The result can be seen on its map showing elevated tick activity already found in many locations across the country.

According to the Canadian Lyme Disease Foundation, Canada has 40 tick species and a few of those species can transmit Lyme disease. The two most common disease carriers are the deer tick (which will still gladly bite people) and the Western black-legged tick which can carry a number of diseases, but Lyme disease and Rocky Mountain spotted fever tend to be the ones we hear about most often.

We have always had ticks in Canada, but warmer winter temperatures and environmental changes have made them more prevalent. The black-legged tick in particular has been able to increase its range northward and westward across the country. There is an economic cost that comes with that expansion and the subsequent higher number of tick-borne diseases.

A tick is a tiny insect, roughly the size of a sesame seed, though once they have filled themselves with a host’s blood, they are much bigger and more visible.

Now that tick season is here there are a few things you can do to protect yourself and your pets.

The are tick repellents on the market for people and dogs. Just in time for tick season, CBC had a story this week on research being done at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. Lemongrass has been long used as a ‘natural’ repellent and the new research bears out its efficacy. In tick prone areas limit the little beasts access to your skin by wearing long sleeves and tuck your pants into your socks. After coming in from a walk or hike check yourself, your children and your pets for ticks. The Weather Network has a good story outlining everything you can do to keep ticks at bay and CanLyme has a solid explanation of what to do if you find a tick embedded on your skin.

If you want to get involved in tick-related research you might want to become a citizen scientist and help out the eTick initiative from Bishop’s University. Not only will you be helping researchers, but if you use the App you’ll receive information back on the type of tick you found, its medical relevance, how to deal with the tick, and information tailored to your location. Information on the project and the relevant links are on the Bishop’s University website.

And lastly, a catch-up on space news, starting with news from terra-firma that will likely influence the future of where we are headed after leaving our own planet.

Elon Musk wants the U.S. to aim for Mars, Jason Isaacman the White House nominee to lead NASA said during his confirmation hearing this week that he would making returning to the moon a priority. As has become a common reading of the picks for key U.S administration positions however it may not be that straightforward. First off Isaacman is a billionaire business partner of Musk’s and secondly his opening statement to the committee made no promise to land on the moon and supported a crewed mission to Mars according to Politico.

This week we also got a look at the first X-ray taken of an astronaut while in space. Whether astronauts are bound for the moon or Mars, the ability to take X-rays in space will be important for diagnosing medical conditions and to study the effects of space travel such as decalcification. The X-rays were taken during the SpaceX Fram2 mission and was made possible by Canadian technology from KA Imaging, a spinoff from the University of Waterloo. CBC has the complete story and an interview with the founder and chief technology officer of KA Imaging.

And to wrap up this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories, data centres may be going to the moon. What could be more physically secure and with an unlimited supply of solar power than a stack of computers storing and processing data in a remote location, far from prying eyes. Lonestar Data Holdings of Florida said it sent a tiny data centre to the moon on the Intuitive Machines’, Athena Lander. It was really tiny – the size of a hard-back book – but it was considered a proof of concept. With no environmental concerns or nosey neighbours a moon-based data centre could be part of the future use of the moon. Also being consider are orbiting data centres. A feasibility study by a joint French-Italian aerospace group says a medium-sized data centre equivalent to 5,000 servers could be build in orbit using existing technology. No word on whether tech support will make an on-site visit in there is a problem. Read more from the BBC.

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The ship's crew existed on the very edge of time and travelled outside the order of the universe.

Their civilization had lived this way for as long as anyone could remember but their history and stories contained warnings to ensure their unique place in the endlessness of space was treated with care and respect. They knew that even one small error came with consequences for the travellers and perhaps for those who lived outside the crew’s own world.

As the ship approached the planet that orbited not too far from its sun, the crew made an error.

After travelling hundreds of light years in less time than this planet had taken to circle its sun, that one error, that seemingly minor mistake, would turn their presence from a dim curiosity to a light that would haunt the people of this world for thousands of years.

As the one responsible for investigating what occurred I need to offer some context to those trapped in the linear nature of time and who must follow the order of their own existence. There was little known about the place as the ship approached a world that had existed for only four billon years of its own timekeeping. The mission was to simply learn more and add it to the catalogue of what inhabited the cosmos. One could call the crew historians of the cosmos. They had only planned to circle the world, collect measurements, and capture a moment in time to preserve for future visits and enable study of the progress of the organisms that lived there.

Here is what was recorded from that time:

"We have come too close."

The Navigator noted the error for several of the planet's minutes and put a correction in place. Too late.

"We can be seen by the people below. They inhabit a very small place, even by the planet's standards. Hills on one side, desert on the other. With so few to observe our presence the difference we make should be negligible."

The ship's Principal noted the facts. "We will wait here then and observe," and he asked for all the data recorders to be engaged. "Send our Traveller closer."

The recording from that time captured and collated the preparations being made. With few inhabitants they felt safe in collecting more detail.

There was a Traveller aboard all of our ships as a specialized member of the crew. Bred, trained, and equipped with unique technology to examine a planet without causing damage, a Traveller could only venture out after receiving specific instructions from the Principal of the ship.

There was one more error for the crew to deal with as was recorded:

The Traveller left the spaceship and sought out the most active site on the ground. It observed a simple setting by the standards of other nearby settlements.

"I have found a seemingly busy area in a stable reserved for animals in an area below rooms where people live. There are more people in the stable area than above it and they are all gathered around an infant of their race. I am maneuvering to a better viewing angle and turning on lights and monitoring equipment."

Before the Principal could stop the Traveller from lighting up the night sky, all the equipment was engaged and a rhythmic electronic hum filled the air. The people below all looked up at the bright light.

"They will be frightened at your presence," warned the Principal. "It is too late to back away. Reassure the inhabitants in any way you can."

The Traveller moved in further and turned on its audio. "Do not fear, I come from a planet a long way from here and I bring a message for mankind to hear. We move in and out of time and can reassure you that we are here only in peace and bearing goodwill toward you."

The voice boomed through the stable and into the surrounding area.

"Patch me through to your audio," ordered the Principal. Once online, the voice carried over a wide area as well. “When two thousand years of your time has gone by, we will return to observe your progress and with the same message of peace will mean no harm to your descendants. Meanwhile we will stay here through your night so we can understand more about who you are."

The following morning the Traveller returned to the ship and they left as promised.

In my subsequent investigation of the matter, I have highlighted the two errors which may have changed the direction for those who witnessed the ship and its Traveller. First there was a navigation error which brought the ship too close to the planet. Even at such an early stage in its history, the ship could have been observed from a distance. Once observed, the error was compounded by the curiosity of the ship's Traveller who made the decision to move in for closer observation. The crew was reprimanded but was allowed to make the follow-up observation mission.

I have added a brief appendix to this report based on the data the crew collected on that trip:

What were generally considered to be minor errors at the time have had serious consequences. The population attributed the sighting of our ship and the contact with the Traveller as some kind of miraculous visit. Consequently, the civilization has broken itself into factions, each with its own interpretation of what the contact meant. The planet is far from peaceful and goodwill is in short supply. Intolerance abounds and the complex relationship between groups has led to endless conflicts.

While we exist on the edge of time, we cannot right past wrongs. We will continue to monitor the planet from a distance but do not expect to see any change or any future for its people.

In one of my communications roles in the biotech sector I had my genome sequenced by several direct-to-consumer companies including Navigenics, deCODE, Ancestry.com, and 23andMe one of the pioneers in consumer genetic testing. Navigenics folded, deCode was bought out, and now 23andMe may be disappearing and with it my genetic data.

Last week the Attorney General of California issued a consumer alert to customers of 23andMe saying the company was in “financial distress” and that there was substantial doubt as to whether it could carry on. The alert went on to suggest ways that customers could delete their genetic data and revoke certain permissions. By the weekend, the company had filed for bankruptcy and its co-founder and CEO Anne Wojcicki resigned. Last November, a media release from the company said it was re-structuring, but that turned out to not be enough to overcome its problems.

So where is my genetic data?

As an early adopter and because I used it as a communications tool to help explain genetic testing and all my raw data and subsequent consumer-oriented reports since then are on my computer. However, that data and even my original ‘spit kit’ is still with 23andMe. How that will be handled seems to be a bit murky. According to an ABC News report, in the U.S. at least, the privacy laws governing electronic health records and your doctor’s records do not protect “information that you gave freely to a private company.’

Direct-to-consumer tests are exactly what they seem to be. They are genetic testing services sold directly to people looking for information to help them in ancestry research or for health reasons. Once you lay down your money you have an exhaustive amount of privacy information to wade through that comes with an important caveat: You may not like the information you receive. For instance, you might come across health risks that frighten you, or in the case of ancestry data discover that one of your parents or relatives are not quite who you thought they were. Once you are clear on the risks and agree to the terms and conditions, you receive the testing kit that calls for either a cheek swab or spitting into a vial. I had to do my spit kit on camera for a local TV station and you would be surprised how fast your mouth can become dry! Then come your results and ongoing reports. Mine had no surprises though it did suggest I would have early male pattern baldness which has still not happened.

With the demise of 23andMe the question of genetic privacy is once again in the spotlight because the company was one of the first and one of the biggest. If you are a customer, check the California AG link in the first paragraph of this story and follow its advice.

Warning- creepy time ahead.

A story in TechCrunch says that a Norwegian startup company plans on putting test versions of its humanoid robots in homes by the end of this year. 1X is the name and “your personal assistant and companion” is the aim. Like something out of science fiction, the company says its Neo Gamma robot needs to “live and learn among us” and the company’s website features robots vacuuming the house (with a Dyson vacuum by the way) and washing windows.

But as an article in Quartz this week suggests, the world may not be ready for a helping hand from humanoids. The argument in favour of humanoid design is that our world is built around the human form so if we want to put robots to work for everyday tasks they need to live in that world. The counter argument is that it is preferable to adjust our world to incorporate simpler machines. (that are likely cheaper and less prone to failure)

The robots that are being marched out so far are clumsy compared to real life biological units such as you and me but that is not getting in the way of investment. Meta is working on the “Android of androids” and Agility Robotics is heavily into humanoid robots for the workplace. We’re familiar with videos of industrial size robots working in automobile assembly factories, but Mercedes-Benz is adding humanoid style robots to the mix and after ‘training’ from Mercedes’ employees they are able to work autonomously.

The times they certainly are a ‘changin and the CEO of NVIDIA said this month that the “humanoid robot revolution is closer than you think”. For a rundown of the top humanoid robots in use right now, the Built In tech website may surprise you with just how much we are changing.

I’ll start this story off by saying why would we want to remember being a baby. Let’s face it, those first couple of years are a bit messy and weird.

With that in mind, researchers from Yale University believe they have the answer to why we recall little from those early years. According to a media release from the University, the previous theory was that our still developing brains cannot encode those infant memories. In a research article published this month in Science, the researchers put forward a new theory for what is dubbed ‘infantile amnesia’.

When an infant sees an image for the first time their hippocampus (the region of the brain which stores memories) is more active. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with awake infants they were able to conclude that as early as three months of age we are tucking away memories. There are different factors that may be at play as to why we lose them. In our early years “statistical memory” is more important to help us learn about our environment and learn language and concepts. “Episodic memory” about specific events comes later. That episodic memory simply may not be converted into long-term memory. The researchers also believe that some of those memories may still be there, and it is just a question of accessing it. A Scientific American article about the study explains it in search terms we might be more familiar with – it is a mismatch between how the information was stored and the search terms our adult brains use to retrieve the information.

I for one am quite content to leave some bits buried in my neural filing system.

We may be facing another battle in the war of wills between Canada and the United States so brace yourself.

Who invented the fish stick?

I heard a podcast from the St. John’s Morning Show about William Hampton, the first president of the Marine Institute at Memorial University of Newfoundland in 1964. The Institute is celebrating its Centennial Anniversary and according to the podcast and Memorial’s website he was awarded the patent for the fish stick in 1955. At that time, he was working at General Seafoods in Halifax where he and an assistant developed a method for freezing large units of fish which could then be cut into sticks, deep fried, and frozen again.

I did not know Canada was home to such a basic staple of North American freezers so decided to dig a little further.

Quartz magazine said in a 2022 story about fish sticks that they were the invention of frozen food pioneer Clarence Birdseye and marketed by the U.S based frozen food company, Birds Eye. They made their way to the U.K. in 1955 as fish fingers.

Sorry to say that the more I read about the history of these breaded bits of fish, the less likely it seems that Canada can take credit for bringing it to market for the first time.

That’s does not mean there is not a Canadian connection.

William Hampton does appear to have been granted a patent, but it also seems that Clarence Birdseye got his inspiration while on assignment with the United States Agriculture Department in Labrador in 1912. According to Rigby’s Encyclopedia of the Herring (yes there is such a thing), Birdseye learned how to ice fish from the local Inuit and saw how fish froze quickly at -40C and that when thawed, the fish had kept its texture and flavour. Canada also had a hand in its marketing success by subsidizing processing plants and the building fishing boats and supported food processing technology. When the Trans-Canada Highway opened in 1962 (it was not completed until 1971) transporting frozen fish sticks across the country helped ensure its national availability.

Whether you have a hankering for fish sticks in North America or fish fingers or herring savouries in the UK or dress them up with hot sauce or ketchup, chances are you have some of “the ocean’s hot dogs” in your freezer.

Enjoy, and let the war begin over who really can take credit for their invention.

I am not going to wade into the politics of the SignalGate scandal taking up the headlines and grinding down the gears of the White House spin machine, but in a world of hackers and high tech eavesdropping there is one aspect of the incident worth an extra look.

Namely a SCIF or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility. A functional real life version to replace the Cone of Silence used in the spy spoof TV series and movie, Get Smart. You would need to be of a certain age to get the reference but suffice to say that the Cone of Silence and its portable version were meant to keep classified conversations, well, classified.

The Washington Post wrote about SCIFs in 2023, but in light of SignalGate updated its article this week. The SCIF is a secure room or compartment for top-level officials. Computers and cell phones are not allowed in and the communications technology inside the SCIF is designed to meet government security requirements and to be hack proof. When they are located in government buildings in the U.S. and abroad, they usually have high levels of physical security, much like a panic room. However a soundproof and secure SCIF can, and are, built into the home of officials and politicians who need to communicate at a high security level. SCIF Global Technologies will even build one in your own home or office if you feel the urge and provide consulting services to help maintain secure communications. Something which the Michael Waltz ‘Houthi PC small group’ could easily have used and or read about if they had really wanted.

SCIFs have been around for decades and as far back as 1988 they were used by government, the military, defence contractors, and even high level real estate brokers. The Center for Development of Security Excellence has self-directed courses for government SCIF users which starts out with this overview:

“Because the United States Government has placed its trust in you, you have been given access to SCI. Whether you’ve had access to SCI for a long time or just received it in the past year, you know that when you protect SCI, you are protecting our nation’s security along with the war fighters defending the American way of life.”

It is probably fair to assume that national security adviser Michael Waltz and his Signal chat group skipped that part of the get-to-know-your-new-job day at the office.

The downside of a SCIF is that you need to be physically present near one and sadly cannot play with social media at the same time, nor can you access a SCIF on the hands-free equipment in your car. JD Vance was apparently in Michigan, secretary of defense Pete Hegseth was travelling in Indo-China, and Ukraine and Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff was in Moscow (he claims he had no access to his personal devices until he returned from his trip).

Judging by the high school nature of the chat about a very serious issue, the participants had read the 21 Signal Hidden Tips & Tricks You Should Know but did not take to heart the motto of SCIF Global Technologies, “Results. Not Excuses”.

There is a new kid on the paleontological block thanks in part, to an associate professor at the University of Calgary. Darla Zelenitsky was part of a team of researchers working in the Gobi Desert in 2012 when they found the remains of a therizinosaur. As you may have learned from past newsletters, science can move exceedingly slow when it comes to verifying and announcing discoveries and the results of this find were only published this week in iScience.

One of the factors that may have slowed down the process is that only a partial skeleton was recovered because it was unearthed during the construction of a water pipeline and the team had both time constraints and a limited search area. What was recovered intact however, were two complete hands and a preserved claw which proved to be unusual and needed further study and confirmation. Therizinosaurs were dinosaurs that lived 90 million years ago during the Cretaceous Period. They are sometimes referred to as giant sloths that walked on two legs, had a long neck, small head, long arms, and usually three fingers with three claws. This new find only had two fingers and claws so is a new species that has been dubbed Duonychus. It probably weighed about 260 kg (570 lbs) and was about 3 metres (10 feet) tall.

The Gobi Desert in Mongolia is considered one of the planet’s richest areas for dinosaur fossils, in particular for the Cretaceous Period, however illegal excavation and poaching is becoming a problem.

According to a National Geographic story when the team made the new find one of the researchers said his first reaction was “holy crap”.

Good to know that even seasoned paleontologists can still get excited about new discoveries. “

And speaking of new kids on the block, the neighbourhood around Saturn is experiencing a population boom.

This month, astronomers confirmed that 128 more moons have been identified orbiting Saturn. The small moons were spotted by the Canada France Hawaii Telescope (located on a dormant volcano on the island of Hawaiʻi). Now that these new moons have been confirmed by the International Astronomical Union it brings Saturn’s official count to 274 natural satellites.

They are classified as "irregular moons," meaning they were captured by Saturn during its formation rather than forming in the planet's orbit like our own moon. It is believed the Earth’s moon was “born out of destruction” when something – perhaps as large as Mars - crashed into the Earth 4.5 billion years ago and hurled molten and vaporized debris back out into space. The debris then coalesced into a single orbiting moon. Our humble man-in-the-moon is the 5^th largest in the solar system behind Ganymede (Jupiter), Titan (Saturn), Callisto (Jupiter), and Io (Jupiter) and is considerably larger than any of the newly confirmed moons of Saturn. There have been 111 missions to the moon (with and without crews) since 1966 and only 62 of those were successful. If you pull out the numbers for missions with people on board, there is a 98% success rate because we take fewer risks with human cargo.

We won’t be visiting any of Saturn’s new moons any time soon and with our current track record of successful missions to our own moon, don’t expect any human footprints on Mars this decade – no matter what Elon Musk tells us.

When the war ended it was a relief for Patricia. She would not be losing any more boyfriends to the trenches or to lives that were forever altered by what they had seen or heard. She would never really know what it had been like for those who had lived through it, but that was 1918. Now it was 1924 and not only was life different, she felt very different.

She had a job during the war. Britain needed young women like her to drive trucks, become radio operators, do the clerical work, act as translators, or like Patricia, work in munitions factories.

"They called us Munitionettes." She said to yet another man at yet another job interview. Like all the other job interviews the answer would come back the same. "Sorry dear; we are not sure you have the qualifications or experience to work in this office.”

Her work in the munitions factory had given her money of her own and earned her some independence. She even had a little place near the wharf with a view of the Thames. The work continued for a while after the war but eventually munitions production diminished; the men had been demobbed and were back home clamouring for their old jobs. Patricia and other women like her were no longer needed beyond some of the temporary work she managed to find to keep body and soul together.

She and many of her friends were flexing their independence by starting to rebel against what was happening around them. They wore the latest closely bobbed hair styles. Where their dresses should have been cut high, they were showing off the neckline and shoulders. Hemlines were no longer cut low and instead showed off some knee, shocking other women and their husbands who pretended to be shocked as well, but who could not resist taking an extra peek as their wives dragged them away.

"We have no damn chance," she said to the woman sitting across from her. "There were millions of us working during the war. We kept England going. We'll be able to vote soon. But get a decent job? Keep us in the kitchen or the bedroom. That's it."

Maud rolled her eyes and said, "Yes. And Lord, I am so terribly bored. I really can't stand it anymore!"

"Come on Maud darling, time to fight back, dammit. Let's go."

Before they could pay for their gin and tonics and leave, the waiter came by and pointed to another table and said the gentleman had paid for their drinks. He was a thin man, hair brushed back and held in place by Brilliantine which had finally made its way into British shops from France. His pencil moustache had also been groomed and greased to shine. Scarf around his neck, he was not altogether unattractive.

There was a bit of Douglas Fairbanks about him so as they passed by Patricia stopped, twirled her long pearl necklace around her hand, leaned in, and whispered, "We'll be here on Friday night.”

They went straight to Marks & Spencer, shared their plight with the shopgirls, and bought the rouge, powder, eyeliner, and lipstick to complete the transformation into one of the bright young things of their generation. On the way to Patricia's flat to work on their new look they made one more stop. Neither had much money left to spend but they couldn't resist new stockings made from the hottest new material. Rayon. And of course, new garters.

They spent the week wafting about London. They listened to jazz, went to the cinema, eschewed tea time and drank coffee instead. They smoked in public!

When Friday rolled around, they were ready to meet with the gentleman who had bought their drinks. They headed to the wine house late in the afternoon, entered through the ladies’ entrance, and looked around for their gentleman friend. No sooner were they inside than the waiter asked them to follow him and they were taken through to a corner booth. He was there along with two other very sheik young men and several women, all about the same age as Patricia and Maude. All dressed in the latest fashion, drinking cocktails, and laughing out loud.

Patricia sat down beside their new friend and held out her hand.

“Patricia.”

“Patricia,” he said in the finest of public-school accents. “I am Dennis. They say I am a menace, and my dear, you are delicious.”

He stood up to get the attention of everyone in the booth, and announced, “This is Patricia and she is simply Delicia, and she will be our new best friend.”

Maud had seated herself at the other end of the booth and one of the young women she was sitting with took her turn to stand up, lifted her Pimms, and let everyone know their other new best friend was “Maud and oh gawd, she is divine”.

The next twenty-four hours were dizzying. First, they all went to a jazz club. The Cecil was unlike anywhere Patricia had been. Everything was pink, white, and gold. The 5-piece band had a piano, violin, saxophone, banjo, and drums. And a dancefloor! They danced the Charleston and drank from hip flasks the men had in their jacket pockets and the women had tucked under their skirts and held by a garter.

The world was turning fast for Patricia.

Dennis had a Bentley Red label touring automobile and two of the other young men also had autos. Soon they were all out of the club and headed to a party.

And it was one swell party. The house in one of the best parts of London belonged to a judge who was said to be away at his country place. No one knew who was home to host the party. As they piled out of the three cars, Dennis yelled, “Anyone for tennis?” and was begging, “Patricia, please do come and keep score,” then he and Maud took up racquets while the rest of the group scattered around the grounds and into the house.

No need for hip flasks here. Liqueur and brandy cocktails were plentiful.

Someone was sitting at the grand piano and playing decidedly unclassical music. Patricia loved to sing and joined the piano player to sing Second Hand Rose.

The music, the people, and the liquor were starting to consume Patricia. As she sang, she glided around the piano waving her pearls and letting the fringe of her dress swirl around her. A group of partiers gathered around and started clapping. Patricia took off her cloche and threw it out into the room. Off came her long, lace, fingerless gloves, and up they went before drifting gently into the hands of a boyish-looking young man in his striped blazer. Then the feather and rhinestone headpiece went high in the air and everyone scrambled to catch it.

Before anything more hit the floor, Maud sidled up to Patricia, who was by now adding some weight to her Delicia moniker, and said quietly, "Better stop there dear. The men are tumbling down in heaps and gathering at your very feet. They are getting the message.”

Sometime around three a.m. they managed to find their automobiles and Patricia and Maude were deposited at their flats with the promise that they would all meet again that night. As the roadster sped away Dennis yelled, “Something special for you Patricia Delicia! A teaserama of an evening ahead!”

That evening was chilly when Dennis arrived for another night out and he was wearing his raccoon coat. He offered a creamy-coloured fur coat to Patricia to keep her warm.

"Remember love, I am the menace and you are certainly no dumb-dora. Tonight, we meet in Piccadilly and you shall get your lips wet from a glass of 1924 you have never sipped from before."

The auto was soon parked; Dennis put on his flat-brimmed hat, tossed his raccoon coat into the jump seat, and they walked down the street to meet the rest. Maud was already there in the company of one of the men dressed in a patterned vest and his own brand of sporty hat with a wide and wild hatband.

They entered the club after Dennis slipped a pound note into the pocket of the doorman. The jazz was loud, the room was dark, and the tables were lit with candles. They found a table close to the stage which was empty and only dimly lit. Champagne appeared as did another one of Dennis' acquaintances.

He looked at Patricia in a way that should have made her feel uncomfortable but it was 1924, she wanted all the attention she could stir up. Like all young women, she was looking to her freedom and like all young people wanted more distance between her and the war.

"Dennis you are a menace indeed for keeping her hidden away so," and turning back to Patricia, "men must hang around you in groups my dear, like battle-weary troops. Home from war and looking for comfort and peace."

A small jazz combo had made their way to an area next to the stage and the lights were up, but the new addition at the table kept looking at Patricia. Finally, he rose from his chair, straightened the jacket of his tuxedo, adjusted his bowtie, took a drink of Patricia's champagne, and walked onto the stage.

"Ladies and gentlemen, flappers and sheiks, men and women, darbs and dames."

A solo clarinet had started to play.

"Welcome to the show of shows on another night of nights. Please remain in your seat, do not rush the stage, and if you feel faint at the sights you are about to see,” he paused, surveyed the room, and yelled, "have some more champagne!"

And as the crowd loudly expressed their agreement, the rest of the band joined the clarinet, a spotlight played around the room, and a chorus line of dancers appeared. They were a precision team of dancers. Almost military to Patricia's eye. Matched in height and hairstyles, they hopped with the music, arm-in-arm sideways across to centre stage, then stopped and did their tap and kick routine. Arms still locked; their legs kicked high as did their dresses which had the audience roaring at the sight. From one side of the stage a lone woman moved gracefully behind the line. Without missing a beat, the line of eight dancers dropped to the floor and continued their routine with feet moving and legs kicking. The lone dancer was now more visible and doing her own routine behind them, bending into shapes that brought sighs, gasps, and applause.

The line of girls in front of her rose up until they were bent at the waist and continued to bob, weave, and kick while the star performer — now only half visible — threw her dress out and onto the stage in front of the dancers. Then with a flourish the chorus line did their sideways tap across the stage, shielding the now dress-less dancer off and into the wings.

The evening continued with more dancers, skits, and songs and the show began to wind down.

"My honoured guests this evening," said the show's emcee. "I have one more treat for you.”

With exaggerated movement he peered around the room as if hunting for that treat until he was looking straight at Patricia's table.

"When I first saw this young lady perform for a very private audience last night, she brought the whole room to their knees and I would like to call upon her to bring you that same gift of song and dance she brought to me. Ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce to you: Patricia.” He paused, then said deliberately, “Also known as Delicia.” Another pause. “And soon to be known as the best stripper in town!"

Patricia did not lack confidence and she was not afraid to show off her body, but being in the spotlight was a shock. The band had obviously been told what was coming and struck up the same song from the party. And Patricia performed with the same flourish. When she finished there was a hush across the room and for a moment her confidence fell away as easily as the lace gloves had gone. Then a wave of clapping spread across the crowd and everyone stood and cheered.

Patricia, now The Stripper, was not sure of the next move. She saw Maud in the wings and with a swish of her hips she moved off stage to join her. She was flushed from the experience and Maud was ecstatic and squealing "Oh Lord, I am certainly not so bored anymore!"

The emcee who happened to own the club had been waiting with Maud as well. He gave Patricia an envelope.

"We have to pay everyone who appears on stage Patricia, and you earned every shilling."

Over the next few weeks on and off the stage and with Maud's help, Patricia honed her act.

Like all good school girls, they had learned to sew and with streamlined silhouettes being in vogue, dresses were simpler to alter and restyle. But as Patricia had learned from her appearances so far, the body God had given her made fat men want to be thinner just so they could be with her.

"I know, I know,” lamented the newly minted dance hall sensation. "Even in Photoplay they want to flatten our busts. Not for me. Everyone wants to see what I have to offer, Maud."

They set about their alterations with a purpose. Easy-to-open clips were strategically put in place. Step-in chemises were taken in at all the right spots to add emphasis where emphasis would get attention. Brassieres were nipped and tucked and more clips, snaps, buttons, and bows created some extra allure. The fur coat Dennis had let her wear the night of her surprise show was now hers to drive the men mad when she took it off AND when she slipped it back on as she exited the stage.

There was a fine line for Patricia to walk and the owner of the club warned her, "You need to be the good girl in stockings and arouse men without arousing the law. It may be 1924 and some of our", he rolled his eyes as he said, "Patrons" then went on, "May well be judges, lawyers, and even bobbies, but others have conniption fits."

Patricia knew where the invisible line was in front of her and she was good at walking it.

Saturday night was always the best night. The best skits and musicians were held for that night. The room was always buzzing and the chorus line fed off the buzz. The regulars were always there and always brought along friends, wives, and lovers. It was also the night when some of those new faces did not always appreciate what was in front of them and walked out. Patricia never understood why their hosts for the evening had not prepared them. Or why they ignored the poster that said, “This show is not suitable for your aunt from Little Bolton!”

In the dressing room, Maud helped her with the makeup and to get dressed. Patricia's eyes were ringed to perfection. Her lips scarlet so that even those at the back of the house would see them glisten when Patricia rolled her tongue around her mouth. The hair on each side of her face was curled meticulously. Tonight, there was a curl falling down right on the middle of her forehead. Two strings of extra-long pearls. A stylish felt hat. Lace gloves that hooked over her fingers and carried on up to her elbow. Silk stockings.

Patricia Delicia was ready.

The jazz band was ready.

It was always good to start with a slow number and the band had mastered their own version of Second Hand Rose. It was a chance for Patricia to manoeuvre out of her hat and gloves and offer a glimpse of legs. Then they would have a middle bounce and finish with an up-tempo flourish. They had rehearsed and re-worked and rehearsed the act some more. They had hit the point where it attracted a crowd who often queued right down the street on Saturday nights. All eager to see the show.

So, like all her Saturday nights recently, when Patricia (or should we say Delicia), heard the music she gave a kick from the wings for everyone to see and worked her way across the stage.

And with a swing of her hips, she started to strip.

The straps of her dress slid off her shoulders and she shimmied and shook until she could step out of it.

And with a lick of her lips, she undid all the clips, the buttons, and the hooks.

Then to tremendous applause she took off her drawers.

She threw it all in the air and everyone stared.

And the room roared.

The music hit the final tempo and as her last piece of clothing fell to the floor, suddenly the police were banging on the door of the club.

Fourteen plain-clothes officers led by a uniformed sergeant had descended on the premises. No one tried to stop them as they threw open the doors and rushed in.

Patricia left the stage, rather in a hurry of course, grabbing her full-length fur coat as she fled. In no time she found herself face-to-face with the uniformed officer.

The Sunday Mirror report the next morning said the police had converged in taxicabs from different directions. Immediately on arriving the report continued, they "united in a body and rushed the entrance before their identity could be suspected.” It was said they dashed into the room to find a "fashionable throng of fifty people including several well-known in the social world" and soon had apprehended the talk of the city, Patricia Delicia.

The newspaper report for that Saturday night in 1924 was not complete however.

As they took poor Patricia and several of the influential patrons away, many protested while others said a summer in gaol should be the punishment for the gorgeous sinner.

They all arrived at the Cannon Row police station where the judge had already been summoned.

He recognized her immediately and exclaimed to everyone waiting to hear his decision,

"Patricia, or may I say, Delicia. The facts of this case,” and with a wink and a nod. “Stand before me."

He banged the table three times.

"Case dismissed."

He looked around the room before he continued, “She has done nothing wrong. This girl was in her working clothes!"

And with a lick of her lips and a swing of her hips, Patricia's fur coat fell to the floor and all the while the police were now yelling out for more.

Another Saturday night in 1924!

We are facing a deluge of information and news. Conflicts, tariffs, environmental scares, shock at the rising cost of groceries, and global political upheavals. I am not quite ready to turn off the news, but we all need to find a way to cope and that’s where we will start this edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories.

TechCrunch is not where I would expect to find some advice on how to avoid doomscrolling because the sites thrives on addictive tech, but this week they have some tips to helps us all “stop staring into the all-consuming abyss”. One thing we need to understand is that unless you have managed to find a world of sunshine and lollipops, your newsfeeds can have a real effect on your well-being says Harvard Health. TechCrunch says that isn’t your fault. Technology is purpose built to get you hooked, because without your constant attention many of these companies would not be profitable. Like some sort of dystopian science fiction world, we are at the mercy of corporations.

As with many addiction recovery programs, admitting you have a problem is the first step to kicking the habit. As my weekly screen time crept up and I was finding it harder to work on my short story fiction, I started to cut back. Since the beginning of the year, I have cut my screen time between 10 and 13 minutes every week. Not even close to where I want to go, but screen time is dropping. TechCrunch says one way to stop the scroll is just do something else. Read a book, play a word games, go for a walk, or go to the gym (and workout without your phone in front of you).

Getting hooked on news headlines can lead to a “feeling of learned helplessness” as we are overloaded with bad news we cannot change. It began during the pandemic and has not let up since. We all need to step back from social media as well. Apart from the firehose of information, just trying to sort out what is true, what is false, and navigating the area in between is exhausting.

Since I started writing fiction, I had to deal with information overload and simply alternating this newsletter between news and short stories has made a difference.

Forbes magazine says many of us are stressed and afraid and that we can’t be our best at anything if we are overwhelmed. The article suggests a few reasons why it is happening and how to deal with it. Give it a go – who knows what you might discover in the process.

Sometimes the Government of Alberta gives me a gift when it comes to preparing a new edition of 1 Week, 7 Stories, and on Thursday I received this gift from Todd Loewen, Alberta’s Minister of Forestry and Parks, when he said in a CBC Radio interview:

“… anything we can do to improve the opportunity for hunters to aim and take game in a safe and responsible manner is something we should be doing…”

In a media release, the proposed amendments to the Wildlife Act outlined in Bill 41 are dressed up as improving wildlife management and even suggest it is also about accessibility for hunters with disabilities. In reality it is about exactly what the minister alluded to in his interview. Shoot and kill.

For instance, the permitted use of laser aiming devices have been expanded. In that CBC interview when asked about laser sights, Minister Loewen said:
“they are purely an aiming device, it does nothing else other than helping the person aim”.

Does he seem to think that we imagined engaging in Star Wars level laser killing devices? The statement made little sense other than to highlight the use of laser sights for one thing and one thing only. Shoot and kill.

The new amendments also allow children as young as age 12 to shoot and kill without adult supervision. Of course, they too must have a legal hunting permit which is hardly reassuring.

In the media release and in the CBC Radio interview the minister talks about how we lived in Alberta 500 to 1,000 years ago and relied on hunting, fishing, and trapping. He went on to say, highways and high rises are the unnatural state of things, and appeared to be suggesting that these regulations would restore us to those days of yore when we shouldered our high-powered rifles with laser scopes, hopped onto our ATV and bravely scratched out a living from the land.

A living off the land which has been very beneficial for Minister Loewen. Until he became the minister he was listed as one of the owners of Red Willow Outfitters. He disclosed that conflict of interest and the company is now owned and run by family members, including his wife. Every decision he makes around hunting regulations affects the family business whether he is on the masthead or not. The ‘stakeholders’ he often refers to when he justifies expanding hunting and trapping include his family business and very likely the business associates he came into contact with before getting his current portfolio.

The argument being made over the last several months to loosen regulations and increase wildlife kills are becoming increasingly weak given his connection to the very industry he regulates. Unless you are someone who makes a living in the hunting and guiding business.

In its regular feature on federal lobbying in Canada, iPolitics noted that the Canadian Federation of Library Associations (CFLA) had taken on a consultant to help the organization advocate for additional support and investment for libraries because they are essential parts of the social infrastructure of communities.

Even with the uncertainty around when there will be a federal election and which party will emerge on top, many organizations, including the CFLA have prepared their pre-budget 2025 submissions. In its submission, the CFLA is recommending more funding for libraries as an essential part of communities, more investment for accessible reading services, and increased support for Indigenous libraries and Indigenous library workers. There are over 3,350 libraries in Canada and according to the submission, for every $1 invested in Canada's urban libraries, $6 is generated in community economic impact.

Somewhere along the way, the simple act of making books available for people to borrow at no cost has become a political issue and as Public Square Magazine suggests, librarians no longer wear the mantel of a benign profession. Now, says an article this month in The Walrus, libraries and librarians are caught in the middle of “quiet and systemic” book banning. The idea of banning books is not new. What is new about removing books from library bookshelves is the role played by well-funded special interest groups and the prevalent role that misinformation and disinformation plays.

In the United States a survey found that about half of Americans did not read a single book in 2023. About half of all Canadian either read print books or listen to audiobooks in their leisure time and only 6% of Canadians read no books at all.

Libraries and librarians are there to provide books. All books, not just those deemed to be in the public interest. Canadians visit libraries more than one million times every year. How much impact federal funding can have on ensuring library users can find the book they want to read without political influence might be open for debate. Keeping them open and a viable part of their community should be a given.

What goes up, must come down even when you send it into space.
Just asks the folks over at Elon Musk’s company Starlink.

According to a story in TRTWorld, in January alone, 120 satellites re-entered the earth’s atmosphere and burned up. Most of them belonged to Starlink. The lifespan of a Starlink low earth orbit satellite is about 5 years and with 7,086 satellites in orbit today there are lots coming down and replacements going up. (I recommend this Space.com link for info on Starlink satellites) If the company reaches its goal of 42,000 orbiting satellites, there will be no shortage of satellite fireballs in the sky and each of those fireballs are releasing metallic fumes into the atmosphere. The Meteored website calls it a gigantic, uncontrolled experiment in atmospheric chemistry. According to a study published in June of 2024 the main byproduct of these burn ups is aluminum oxide which is a catalyst for ozone depletion. The study found a typical 250 kg (550 lbs) satellite produced around 30 kg (66 lbs) of aluminum oxide nanoparticles on burn up which can hang around in the atmosphere for decades. The result is ozone depletion – a 1970s and 80s problem we thought we had dealt with as MIT News noted last week. Ozone is an important part of our atmosphere. It absorbs a portion of the radiation from the sun in particular the UV portion which has been proven to damage crops and lead to higher skin cancer rates. The Royal Aeronautical Society says the potential damage from satellites burning up could “trigger climate change 2.0”.

And as we are talking about burn up, I should point out another source of atmospheric pollution. SpaceX’s latest Starship test flight ended in another explosion last week which grounded flights at Orlando International Airport.

What goes does indeed come down. Sometimes in a “rapid unscheduled disassembly”.

As we mark the 5-year anniversary of COVID and the subsequent lockdown I came across a gem buried in in the research around the effects of COVID that is worth noting as we get closer to hockey playoff season.

There is an advantage to playing before a home crowd.

Scenes of sports teams playing in empty stadiums with cardboard cutout fans gave researchers the chance to study real life natural experiments. There was already plenty of evidence that the home team had an advantage over the away team but take out the fan factor in lockdown era games and home field advantage dropped by up to 64% according to a paper in Journal of Sport Economics. The research was based on European soccer games, but are likely transferable to North America. Another study in the Journal of Physical Education and Sport looked at Euro League basketball and found that Home Audience Advantage (HAA) resulted in home teams winning significantly more games with an audience in comparison to away teams. However, they lost that edge when there was no audience because of the lockdown.

Researchers seem to love these natural experiments so there is more.

Back to the Journal of Sports Economics which compared results across the professional soccer tiers. In the lower tiers where teams were more likely to play before smaller crowds, teams were better able to weather the lack of a home audience because the fan factor was less dramatic.

In March of 2020 the NBA hit pause on its season because of COVID before coming up with an alternative to have some sort of end to its season. Starting with exhibition games in July, 22 teams played in a “bio-secure bubble” at Disney World in Orlando, Florida. With no travel and no fans a report in Nature said there was a natural experiment where the “impact of travel and home-court advantage could be systematically examined”. Those researchers concluded that it was likely that travel disruptions were responsible for the away team’s reduced performance during regular season, non lockdown games. It all comes down it seems, to “circadian disruption”.

As they used to sing during the 7^th inning stretch more than a hundred years ago:
“Let me root, root, root for the home team” because it turns out that it may just help them win.

Last week, commuters in France had a surprise when traffic was stopped because of a 500 kg (1100 lbs) bomb. No, it was not a terrorist threat - it was an unexploded WWII bomb containing 200 kg (440 lbs) of explosives. Even 80 years after the war, Unexploded Ordnance (UXO) are found regularly on construction projects in the UK and Europe sometimes resulting in injury and death. In Okinawa this week, Japanese troops detonated 24 WWII U.S. shells which was the third disposal this month. (You can read more in Stars & Stripes but you may need to register) Even here in Canada, the Okanagan Indian Band said in early March that there are still large swaths of its land that are off limits because of the danger of UXOs left over from live-fire training years ago.

Apart from the immediate danger from old bombs and shells exploding, there is a toxic side to UXOs as well. A paper published in February in the journal Chemosphere says the south-western Baltic Sea has about 3,000 kilograms of dissolved toxic chemicals released from UXOs. The levels were below health risk thresholds, but the authors say it highlights the need for clearing UXOs around the world because the current levels in this one area could last another 800 years. In some parts of the world, oysters have become the “canary in the coalmine” when they are tested for residues from UXOs.

The Government of Canada lists about 800 “confirmed or potential UXO legacy sites” waiting for us when we are out for a walk.
That just might scare you into staying on the couch instead of enjoying the warmer weather.

Megalodon.

The very name sounds ominous. It has been portrayed in fact and in movies as an enormous prehistoric great white shark.

New research published in Palaeontologia Electronica however says the perception is all wrong though I still doubt you would want to encounter one. The prehistoric predator was more comparable in shape to a lemon shark and weighed about the same as a blue whale. According to a media release from University of California, Riverside, that puts it at about 24 metres in length (80 feet) and weighing about 94 tons.

The oldest fossil of Otodus megalodon dates back 20 million years and it is believed to have become extinct 3.6 million years ago. When the climate of our planet started to change the megalodon was not able to adapt. It needed close to 1,000 kgs (2,000 pounds) of food every day and as their food sources moved away the apex predator was left without enough prey.

There are no complete skeletons to measure, so its size and shape were best guesses based on tooth size. The latest research added in studies of the vertebral column and comparing it to living and extinct shark species. The new body size and shape is believed to create a more accurate picture of how it hunted as well. The previous image was conducive to short bursts of speed while the new profile is more efficient and able to cruise at moderate speeds for longer periods of time.

Despite the new research conclusions, megalodon was still a force to be reckoned with. A newborn megalodon pup was nearly 4 metres (13 feet) long and was “taking down marine mammals shortly after being born”.

Cue the music from Jaws!

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I found it hard to believe how time fell to bits and pieces once I was being readied for battle.

The war started in 1914 - I cannot even remember which month - and I was called up in 1917. I certainly remember that month because my girlfriend and I had spent Christmas together knowing that it could be the last. Then almost to the day of my birthday in January my little grey card arrived. "In accordance with the Military Service Act you are to present yourself for military training", it said, complete with a railway warrant card so I did not have to pay for the journey that could end up with me being killed.

What does a writer and a poet know about being a soldier?

That would be answered as soon as I stepped off the train and found myself surrounded by teachers, bakers, shop keepers, lorry drivers, musicians, and just about any other profession I could imagine. All asking themselves a similar question and arriving at the same answer.

Nothing.

It would take my remaining strength to piece my time back together.

A hulking Sergeant greeted us, yelling above the hissing from the steam engine that had delivered us for our 3 months of training.

"Alright lads, look lively and welcome to the British Army."

I was to present my papers showing I had already passed the physical and that I was at least five feet six inches. At five feet eleven inches there should had been no doubt about my suitability, which I suppose would also make me a better target for enemy fire. One look at my background and education was all they would need to send me to join the storied Artists Rifles. The regiment had only been around for 50 years and most of the Tommies were like me. Not physical lads. Writers, musicians, actors, painters. We were to be part of The London Regiment for the rest of war, which they said would be over by Christmas. They said the same thing when the war started and in 1917 we were still waiting, hoping, and fighting to make the prediction finally come true.

After a month or so — time continued to elude me — I felt less the poet that I had started out as, but not yet a soldier. I would still keep writing and thanks to a ukulele I found in the barracks, thought a few musical notes to go with the poems I jotted down would be a good idea. Even if it was just a few lines or a half dozen pages of my thoughts, I never missed a chance to shove them together and get them in the Post. I would capture the time I was living through and the moments I was experiencing. My own chronicle of the war. For me, my future children, or whoever found it on the battlefield.

Dear Patricia

How are you? Missing you as always. Remember when we were younger and making up songs all the time? I’m trying to add some music to my poetry and that song about whether your memory of me will fade away or will it always be is taking some shape. I’m no Mozart, but he did music notations by hand so I’ll try as well and send my music scribblings to you.

Our Sergeant is a tough one, but fair. And Patricia you have never seen anyone as ugly as him! He’s regular army and been around a while. Weather-beaten and wrinkled as hell. Even when he smiles — which is not often — his mouth is turned down like your neighbour’s bulldog, though not nearly as cute! The fag he always has in his mouth seems to gets lost in those bulldog jowls of his. My friend Bill says he has a bullfrog smile and will be enough to scare off the Bosch when we finally join the rest of the BEF across the channel. We tease Bill a lot because he is 30 years old, making him the oldest in our unit, next to the Sergeant.

Have you been fishing? I miss our fresh fish. They tell us that a full belly means we are fully ready, but well dear, it is not good. There is plenty of meat, potatoes, and bread in the Mess, but you can only take so much tough mutton and overdone beef, and I’m sure the occasional roast of horse.

After this is over my letters and notebooks will be an account of my time of war.

Take care and think of me.

All my love, your favourite soldier

One day, Bill will turn to me after another drill, screw up his face, and tried to grimace like our Sergeant.

“He gets uglier every day. Think he will be with us when we make it into the fray?”

I will take a pull on one of the pipes a local benefactor had given to any man in the outfit who wanted one and wonder how many of us would remain together after training.

“Hope so. He treats us well and I trust him. Besides, we need him to scare all the Germans."

I would laugh at the image of our Sergeant scowling at any enemy soldier who dared come close, yet still felt a chill inside at the thought. It would take more than our grizzled bulldog of a Sergeant to get us through our battles. The urgency of writing in my diary often rose up from my gut, sending more words onto paper. No matter how hard I tried to get down my thoughts or craft a line of poetry, there will never seem to be enough time. Our training will soon be over and the poetry, music, and feelings needed to be jotted down before it was time for the bullets to come my way.

Three months of training will be a blur. I could march, I could shoot. In my sleep I would go home for nights on end but when the reality of morning struck, I will always wonder if I could shoot someone.

After a few days — or was it weeks — our once young and exuberant bunch of wet behind the ears recruits will get the word. The excitement of taking it to the enemy will become a stomach-churning reality me and for my new mates.

"Oi. Listen up lads. You are now members of the British Expeditionary Force. We are heading across the channel."

Our army, dear Patricia, is not yet fully mobile, so our 650 or so strong regiment piled into civilian lorries and buses requisitioned to get us to the ships this morning.

Our Sergeant said "we" would be going across the channel. He will be part of our deployment, Patricia! Bill looked at me when we heard those words and said we would be okay.

I will stock up on paper and envelopes and as we bounced along in conveyances not built for soldiers with their gear, write frantically, not knowing when I would be able to mail my missives. We will arrive at our ship to join thousands upon thousands of men and millions of tons of supplies.

I see men coming off the ships Patricia. They look beaten down. I fear I may never see you again my dear, even with the help of our Sergeant.

I will stuff a letter and a thin notebook into one of the addressed envelopes I always kept with me, and shove it into the hands of one of the nurses helping wounded soldiers off the ship. "Please mail this," I will yell to her as I headed to the gangplank to take their place, "You are holding parts of my life!" I will have to hurry along to keep Bill and the Sergeant in sight.

Once onboard we will learn our destination: Boulogne-sur-Mer. Then on to a camp for another two months of training and limited action to make sure we will be sharpened for battle.

Our training has finally come to an end my dear and we are headed to Belgium. I dream of you in your home so far away and sitting in the evening stillness reading my letters and leafing through my diaries. July is almost upon us and I am sure you will enjoy the sun and find time to go sailing. It is raining here. We have our ponchos to stay dry but that makes our kit even heavier. You would not believe how fit I have become! My gear weighs almost 50 pounds!

Mess time here and I must go. I don't know if your letters will catch up with me anymore but if I finally pass, Is it fair of me to ask again, Will your memory of me, Fade away or always be?

Do not forget your beloved soldier and poet.

Our next two months will come with highs and lows. The Artists Rifles had a short but distinguished history of turning young men from public schools and universities into crack shots, hard workers, and high calibre officers. This bunch I will become so close to will be no different. We will join the rest of the regiment already stationed in France and with the regulars got a dose of real life. It will be into April and we will wait for the initial joy that comes with April showers. Except they will never seem to stop. We will be put to work repairing water logged trenches. Trenches full of mud and depending on which trench and how long it had been since seeing its last battle, the occasional body would be dug up.

Patricia,

I was glad to hear from you last week, even though it took more than a month for your letter to reach me. Yes, I am as well as can be expected in a time of war. We have been learning how to dig, repair, and live in trenches. My darling they say trenches reach from the North Sea all the way to Switzerland! So many Tommies struggling to slice a 4-foot gash through the earth and dig 6-feet down. One of the infantrymen was an architect before he volunteered and he has helped us improve shoring up the trench walls. We scavenged sticks and cuts branches and saplings to weave together to make walls. It has been back breaking work. Remember that fellow we met at the music hall a couple of years ago in Dover? He was playing in the orchestra. He was here when I arrived with Bill and the boys. Anyway, he got shot as we were out collecting trenching supplies. I helped carry his body back. He was still alive when we started out but nothing was going to save him. There was blood everywhere. I felt sick but the rain and the mud hid my face so no one noticed when I wretched. Why does humanity do this to itself?

I miss you every moment and have been putting some of my music into another lined notebook which I shall send soon.

Remember our time together,

Your poet soldier.

April will soon turn to May and it will not rain as much. Or maybe I will no longer feel the changes in the weather. Or maybe I will stop caring. Bill will be there to keep my spirits up. He will always have a joke and be a cracker when it came to imitating the Sergeant. He won’t mind being Old Bill, even though he was barely older than the rest of us. He could really carry a tune and at the end of the day when it was time to mug up, he will quietly sing to himself. I will make a special effort to sit close to help calm myself before trying to sleep.

Patricia, it is the end of May and our training has finally come to an end. We have been in a few skirmishes and though I have fired my Lee Enfield at the Germs, I never really know if any of my bullets struck home. Over a few days we lost Thomas, Owen, and Lakeman who were mates in my squad, but overall, we have been lucky.

Our regiment is known for turning out fine officers but they say we have earned a reputation as fine bayonet fighters as well. I have trained on the dummies and been stabbing at hay bales, but I cannot imagine plunging my bayonet three feet into a man. Can you ever love me once I have killed in such a manner?

With June there would be more rain and our journey to Belgium will begin. The Yanks will enter the war but will not be in time to help with any of the combat we were going to see over the next couple of months. We will arrive in West Flanders in late June, a few weeks after our British boys had launched an attack near the village of Messines. They took the ridge which gave us the advantage of higher ground. Word travelled surprisingly fast along the line with all our trenches connecting up, and we heard that 12,000 of our soldiers and about the same number of Anzacs were killed in the fighting. The enemy lost at least twice as many. Many soldiers on both sides of the battle were missing. We will move into place to relieve the soldiers left knackered by the battle. We will cross a lot of lowland as we work our way up to the ridge, where the drainage systems have been destroyed by constant bombardment. I will find myself sinking in the mud only to hit something solid to regain my footing. That relief will come at the expense of the body of a horse or a Tommy we will never be able to dig out from the thick clay, mud, and silt. I will not stop thinking that if this war ever did end, what would the men and women who would farm these fields find as they ploughed the land and again drained the low areas. Once we will finally make it to the ridge it’ll be drier and we’ll have a commanding view of Ypres to the north and in the distance, sitting on another ridge we’ll see the village of Passchendaele.

We’ll fight numerous skirmishes, be relieved, and come back to fight some more. We won’t be subjected to a full-on assault. Rather our snipers will fire at them and the Bosch snipers will fire back. Sometimes at night we’ll crawl over the edge of the trench with pieces of metal in hand — painted black on one side and polished up as best as we could on the other. We’ll stick them into the ground close to the enemy trench with the shiny side facing our trench. The artillery will use the reflection to judge their range. We’ll shell the Germs. They’ll shell us. It’ll go on without end. I’ll continue to write in my notebook and on scraps of paper. Sometimes I’ll start with the date, but most of the time I won’t have any idea what day it is.

Patricia,

It is such a quiet night that I find myself disoriented. We are on leave in Little Paris which is really just a village that has so far seen little shelling and is surrounded by our troops as well as French, Belgium, and some New Zealanders. It is safe here and there are real shops and a brothel. Never fear darling Patricia, I have not visited the brothel!

I spent part of the afternoon with a mug of quite good tea just sitting on a bench and looking at the sky. There were also birds singing Patricia! Now it is dark and I am looking at the autumn sky and the stars. We are probably only one hundred miles apart right now and can see the same stars. Look up when you get this letter and think of me. There is Post here for the service men so I am also sending one of my notebooks, some parts hastily written when we were hunkered down under cover last week waiting for the shelling to end. Some pages will be wrinkled and smudged. We are once again enduring endless rain. Look at my music and try it out on your piano. You must tell me how it sounds.

Forever your lost and lonely soldier.

After a rest and relaxation break, we’ll march back to the front line and pass a squad of men digging in the soggy ground. I won’t understand what trenches were needed as we’ll still be several hours from our advance lines. I’ll notice the wooden crosses piled high. There will be at least a hundred of them. While we will have been safe on our down time, German shelling will have found its mark. This will be a burial squad. Our job when we reached the line will be to repair the trenches, raise the parapets, and make breaks in the barb wire defence so that we can pass through when it is time to cross the three hundred yards or so of no-man's land and confront the Germs. And live in the mud that will suck at your boots and at your very soul.

While we will wait for the Canadian assault troops to arrive, we will prepare for our first push towards the village of Passchendaele.

When the time comes for the Captain to blow his trench whistle for us to go over the top I will have an image of me frozen for minutes on end, watching men as they pass by me.

It will be early when the whistle blows and those of us lucky enough to have a watch synchronized with our Captain's timepiece will know exactly when it is our turn. The first wave will go fifteen minutes before us with our Sergeant in the lead. Bill will be not far behind him. Our Observers with periscopes will be passing information back down to those of us waiting.

Hello darling Patricia, this is your army boy. I've just got the time to write, because today we attack,

There's no turning back and the boys, well they're all ready for the fight.

Yes, I'm well but this place is like hell, they call it Passchendaele.

It's 1917. God the war must be ending!

The General said this attack will not fail.

I've been writing down this simple little melody.

When you piece all the letters together and play it my love, think of me. We'll be together in this song for you.

They got old Bill, and the Sergeant is still out there. We're certain he is wounded in some shell hole.

They say this war will end all wars, Oh God Patricia, I really hope it will,

How's old England? Are they still singing in the pubs? All those songs that we loved to sing. I miss them so.

When all this is over, we'll go sailing once again off Dover and catching fish like we used to with nothing more than a string and hope.

Oh, I miss you, I miss you, I miss you, if they get me my love you will know… We'll always be together in this final bit of song for you...You know how it goes. I have to go now...

Take care of yourself my love for my words may very well outlive me. Share them so people will know.

Your favourite soldier,

My last note is safe in my breast pocket. The whistle blows. My nerve proves to be steady.

Move forward. Aim. Shoot. Move forward. I have no idea how many times or how many shots, but I am ready to deliver my best. Then, the sting of a bullet followed by a second painful blow, knocks me over. I’m cold but it is not the cold from our wretched conditions. It is the cold that comes with death. Everything is muffled around me except the sounds of wounded men. Soon the battle around me fades, but Bill and the Sergeant are there to help me to move on for we are ghosts in this game of war and have made our final moves. I will miss writing.

------------

"Sold to the gentleman on the telephone for 14,000 pounds.”

The gavel came down to close the bidding on the package of slim, tattered notebooks, letters, and scraps of paper sent home from a soldier fighting the war that did not end all wars.

Thanks to technology and entrepreneurs the ‘Buy Canadian, Bye America’ movement has been made a little easier and I am starting this edition with my experience using a new shopping app.

A story from the University of Calgary about an app called Maple Scan sent me on the hunt for the app because as we have discovered over the last few weeks, buying Canadian is not easy.

For a start, what is and is not Canadian is not entirely straightforward. To qualify as a "Product of Canada" at least 98% of the content must be made in Canada by Canadians with little in the way of imported elements. “Made in Canada” has the same criteria except the threshold is at least 51% up to the 98%. Then we have “Assembled in Canada”, “Packaged in Canada”, “Distilled in Canada”, and of course because we don’t grow coffee in our home and native land we have” Roasted in Canada”. And good luck in the case of fresh produce such as apples when you have to look at the teeny, tiny writing on that irritating little label. I have seen people in the fruit section carrying magnifying glasses to see what the country-of-origin label is.

I got the chance to help beta test the Maple Scan app (anyone can sign up, check the story link above). Like similar apps you need to have it on your phone, then scan the product you are looking at. In the case of this app, it provides relevant information about the product and company so you know where it stands on the continuum of Canadian content, includes a ‘tariff potential alert’ where applicable, and suggests Canadian alternatives. The developer also has a sense of humour. While it is processing the scan it flashes up messages such as “toque compatibility”, “checking for leftover snow”, and “does it say ‘eh’”.

The app recognized everything I tried in my local Co-Op but the limitation to any app is that they are only as good as the dataset informing the scan.

I have not tried out other apps yet, but here are some suggestions:

• Buy Beaver – iOS only so far, but there is a web version to help you compile your shopping list.

• O SCANada – available for Android and iOS

• Shop Canadian – Android and iOS

• Buy Canadian – Android and iOS

• Is This Canadian – Android and iOS

• Made in CA – a searchable website which is updated regularly.

If you have tried out these or any others, please let me know or share your thoughts by leaving a comment.

On the surface this story doesn’t look like a bad idea and given looming tariffs, one that could be on our own to-do list here in Canada. The United Kingdom is throwing its procurement weight behind British food products. It has more of a political motivation than our current ‘Buy Canadian’ push, but it could still have a positive result. The UK government imposed an inheritance tax recently which the National Farmers’ Union says could adversely affect 70,000 farms. The criticism of the tax is not letting up, so the government had a political reason to announce it would be revising public procurement rules to favour higher-quality British food produced to relevant standards. There is up to £2.5 billion (about $4.5 Cdn) at stake for products destined for public institutions such as schools, prisons and hospitals.

According to the media release from the UK Government this is the first such effort and the plan is to go beyond the procurement initiative and include more competition across the supply chain and support for food production at the farm level. This notion is not new in the UK however. In 2023, an MP from a rural British constituency launched a campaign for a ‘Buy British’ section on supermarket’s online stores, but having it become policy makes a difference. Similar calls to action have also been linked to building a more resilient food system that is less subject to disruption across the imported food supply chain.

There is also an ethical consideration to how we spend our food dollars. Imported food is often less expensive but behind that lower cost may lie a production system that is less well regulated, pays lower wages to its workers, and uses more chemical inputs.

The past week has brought us some news from space, starting with a Perfect 10. Not the movie, but the nickname name for the 10^th Blue Origin flight with people on board. It was a lightening suborbital trip for the paying passengers launched into space by the New Shepard booster vehicle. About 12 minutes. The ticket window for a Blue Origin flight doesn’t exactly post its prices but it is believed to be in the $600,000 range for a few minutes of weightlessness and what is still a rare view for most of us - the Earth on it journey through space.

Another rare sight that comes much cheaper than $600,000 is a planetary parade with Mars in the lead followed by Jupiter, Uranus, Venus, and Neptune, with Mercury and Saturn bringing up the rear. My description is oversimplified as they are not all queued up in a nice line, but the appearance of all 7 of our planetary neighbours is still a rare site. It is called a “great planetary alignment’ and occurs because the planets in our solar system occupy roughly the same orbital plane and on occasions such as this are all on the same side of the sun. Science Alert has a good explanation of how it happens.
You’ll need to get away from city lights and hope for a clear sky, but you can see Mars, Jupiter, Venus, and Mercury with the naked eye and a pair of binoculars will bring in Uranus and Neptune. You’ll need a telescope to see Saturn but because of its closeness to the sun it may still not be easily seen. Time and Date will help you pick the best time to venture out to catch a glimpse of the alignment. An even better option is to look around locally for sky watching events like this one in Calgary hosted by Mount Royal University.

And lastly, Intuitive Machines, another private space company, launched a new mission to the moon with help from a SpaceX rocket. Last year the company put its Odysseus lander on the moon, but it settled into rough terrain and tipped over which severely limited how much data it could collect and transmit back home. The new launch has gone without a hitch so far and is scheduled to touch down on the moon on March 6^th. There are several scientific instruments on board the Athena lander and a “hopper” rover which will hop around the surface to test the idea. All they need to do now is stay upright!

Bad news continues to pile up for the transition away from fossil fuels towards green energy.
BP (formerly British Petroleum Company) said it would cut its renewable energy investments and increase its investments in oil and gas by 20%. In a media release on Wednesday the company called it “Growing shareholder value: a reset bp”.

Shell reduced its renewable energy spending in 2023 which Mother Jones magazine said would end up with us “paying the price” and earlier this year Norwegian based Equinor (originally Statoil) announced it would be cutting its renewable spending in half. As those two energy giants reduced their green spending, BP share prices were falling behind its competitors which made BP’s decision inevitable.

Given the size of these 3 companies, it certainly feels like a chill is setting in on the renewable energy sector which will eventually trickle down to regional contractors and suppliers specializing in renewables. Behind the shift is a focus on creating shareholder value which Sustainability Magazine points out is a problem when value is “defined only in monetary terms”. The move away from green to black gold has also received a boost from U.S. President Trump who has used executive orders to boost oil and gas production and reverse green energy policies.

Decisions by energy companies involve billions of dollars to pull more resources out of the ground, but in the end you and I have our hands in the decision-making process as well. We burn fossil fuels in huge quantities resulting in equally huge emissions. We burn it in our cars, use it to heat our homes, and rely on it to generate electricity to power up the very device you are using to read this newsletter. Our energy consumption here in Canada is among the highest in the world with three quarters coming from coal, oil, and gas and only 24% from carbon-free sources.

As long as we continue to buy it, energy companies will continue to drill it, refine it, and sell it.

A headline from the Saint John Telegraph Journal in 1998 held good news for the future of childhood diseases. “Progress against measles spurs hope for global eradication”. Thanks to vaccines it was declared eradicated in Canada that year and by 2000 the United States was measles free.

25 plus years on we seem to have forgotten what an achievement that was and have started to take steps in the opposite direction. There have been 95 cases in Canada so far this year and we are well on track to exceed the 147 total cases last year.

The main reason for the uptick is also the most obvious one. Vaccination rates have been falling according to an open access paper from last year in the Canadian Journal of Public Health. In a CBC article on Wednesday, Dr. Theresa Tam was quoted as saying, "The fact that … the numbers are growing this year demonstrates how this virus can spread if people were not vaccinated". That same story went on to note that in the U.S. about 1 in 5 unvaccinated people who contract measles ends up in hospital because of the complications that can arise. I found it interesting that despite all our medical advancements, there is no specific treatment for measles according to the World Health Organization. Instead, we seek to relieve the symptoms with plenty of fluids, rest, and fever medications and do not bring antibiotics into play until secondary infections such as pneumonia develop. As I write this, a child in Texas has died. The unvaccinated child was one of 124 cases in Texas which Associated Press is reporting as the largest outbreak in 30 years. Robert F Kennedy Jr., the new head of U.S. Department of the Health and Human Services has dismissed the outbreak as “not unusual”.

A Global News article pointed out a contributing factor to the recent spread of measles. As we learned during the COVID epidemic, we live in a mobile world where travelling is easy. (at least if you don’t mind long lineups and flight delays!) The virus exists all over the world and can linger in the air for a couple of hours leading to an increased likelihood of coming in contact with the virus which one infectious disease specialist said, “has a knack for finding unvaccinated or under-vaccinated people and under-vaccinated communities.” In 2023 the number of measles cases around the world was up 20% to 10.3 million cases with 107,500 of those being fatal. It is not hard to imagine your chances of coming into contact with the virus if you, a member of your family, or a close friend have travelled recently.

Beating back measles is not really that difficult. Just ask people in Brazil. After a severe outbreak in 2018, the country stepped up its vaccination efforts, virus surveillance measures, and rapid response protocols and by 2022 was back into the measles free category according to the Pan American Health Organization. All it takes is a couple of shots in the arm, a dose of common sense, and a dash of science.

In Canada more than 6,000 people are living with sickle cell disease and in the United Kingdom there are 17,500 plus patients. The disease is caused by an inherited mutation in hemoglobin which carries oxygen throughout our bodies. The genetic mutation causes an abnormality resulting in the red blood cells becoming rigid and sickle-shaped. This restricts blood flow because the cells cannot bend and move freely, leading to pain and other complications including heart, kidney, and liver problems, and an increased risk of fever and infections.

There are approved gene therapies available in Canada to treat the disease, but costs can run up to $3 million Cdn per treatment and requires a high dose chemotherapy. A media release from Johns Hopkins Medicine says a new bone marrow transplant procedure has been developed which could prove to be effective, less costly, and requires lower chemotherapy doses. It has undergone 10 years of clinical trials at more than 20 centres in the United States. Of the 42 people with severe sickle cell disease who were part of the trial, 95% were alive two years after the transplant, and 88% are considered cured.

Richard Jones a professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins says the new transplant results are “every bit as good as or better than what you see with gene therapy”. He also estimated the cost of a transplant at about $467,747 (almost 675,000 Cdn).

This was a Phase 2 clinical trial so the next step will likely be a Phase 3 involving many more patients before it goes forward for U.S. FDA approval.

There is a shakeup ahead for James Bond and we are not talking about how the Ian Fleming character likes his martinis.

When did you last see a new James Bond movie?
It was 2021 when Daniel Craig played the role in No Time To Die. A review in Time Magazine noted that it appeared Mr. Bond had come to an untimely end, and that Barbara Broccoli and her half-brother Michael G. Wilson who controlled the Bond franchise, could now step back and rethink the character and its legacy.

That re-think could be more than we expected, and it will not be coming from the Broccoli family which has controlled the franchise since 1962. United Artists had sole distribution rights to the films until 1981 when UA disappeared into MGM Entertainment. MGM’s fortunes suffered some ups and downs until shortly after the 2021 Bond movie when Amazon bought out MGM for $6.5 billion. No need to translate that to Canadian dollars, we’ll just say it is a lot. That deal gave Amazon some lucrative properties, but when it came to the Bond franchise it only had distribution rights – not creative control. That missing piece led to an impasse between Barbara Broccoli and Amazon which was pushing to make the most of its acquisition. Ms. Broccoli said Amazon was not a great fit for 007 and reportedly told friends that the people at Amazon were ‘F***ing idiots’.

As of this week, those ‘idiots’ have creative control.

Ms. Broccoli and Mr. Wilson said they are stepping down to focus on other projects but will remain as co-owners of the franchise. According to a BBC report, the pair referred to their “trusted partner, Amazon MGM Studios” as ready to lead James Bond into the future.

A change of heart?

Or maybe because Broccoli is 64 and Wilson is 83 and with no new leading man, scripts, or film in the works they feel like James Bond did in the 2006 Casino Royale movie when he said, “Does it look like I give a damn?”

Hats off to the Broccoli family for entertaining us over many years!

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