William Bedford

Paradise now

The morning mist hanging eerily on the remote Ontario lake completely shrouds the small pine-covered isle in its midst. As I sip my morning coffee on the cottage verandah, I watch the mist being slowly burned away by the waning October sun, revealing the Ontario fall in all its flaming glory.

Warning signals!

T.S. Eliot called April the cruelest month. If Eliot were alive today he might see things differently. August, according to the history books would appear to be a lot crueler than April. The roaring guns of August 1914 opened up the carnage that became World War I. The" Devils Pact" in August 1939 between the Nazi Germany's Joachim Von Ribbentrop and Communist Russia's Vyacheslav Molotov laid the groundwork for World War II.

Holy Hockey

When Paul Henderson scored the winning goal in the first Canada-Russia hockey series the whole country went on a high the like of which no drug could induce.

Restoring Toronto’s glory

Somewhere between the old, but solvent, Toronto of beer parlors and closed-down Sundays and the current Toronto of littered streets, homelessness and a strapped City Hall, there was a Toronto known far-and-wide as “The City that Works.” A city that the late, great raconteur Peter Ustinov called “ New York run by the Swiss.”

Super Canada Day

As we enjoy Canada Day at cottages, beaches, backyard barbecues and in various other activities, we could do worse than reflect for a minute or two the great country we are celebrating. In fact there are so many complaints about just about everything these days that we are apt to forget how well-fed, well-shod and well-housed we are compared to most of humanity.

Canada’s Big Train

I was watching an old movie recently on TV about the legendary American athlete Jim Thorpe when it struck me that Canada once had an all-round athletic champion who would have left Thorpe in the shadows.

An Adult Maturity Test?

The current debate on whether 16–year–olds should be considered mature enough to vote, while at the same time urging the government to lift their drivers licenses if they refuse to stay in school until they are eighteen, is causing us, once more, to ponder the definition of adulthood and the appropriateness of treating juveniles as adults, especially in the law courts.

Newspeak

It's a true fact that a language would wither and die if it were not kept well fertilized with new words and phrases. On the other hand, at the end of the day, the bottom line is, when words like gay are given new meaning and nouns like parent are used as verbs, we tend to use them ad-nauseam.

The Game of the Name

The two guys ahead of me at the food court counter were discussing a friend of theirs whose name I recognized as that of a local politician (let's call him Buddy).

Coping with the Rat Race

The 50ish looking guy sitting next to me on GO train looked like any other frazzled commuter who had put in a hard day's work. "If only I could score on the Lotto," he said to me, "I'd get the hell out of this rat-race so fast they'd never know that I was here in the first place."

Dirty Talking

The two teenage girls in the seat behind me on the bus were discussing the shortcomings of their supervisor at the burger joint. "The bottom line is," said one of them, without even trying to lower her voice, " he's a &%##@ son-of-a-#."

Fall Guy

If spring is the budding season, summer the season of sunshine and roses, and winter, except for snow-bunnies, the season that drives us southward, or indoors, then, autumn, dazzling in its cloak of blazing colors, is a season for all reasons.

Mark my words

Kaavya Viswanathan, a 19-year-old Harvard student, created quite a stir in literary circles when her novel, for which she had received a reported $500,000 advance from publisher Little, Brown, turned out to contain plagiarized passages from two books by Megan McCafferty.