Randy | July 21, 2018
One fulsome morning in the late autumn of my 16th year, I was a student pilot at the controls of a Piper PA-28 “Cherokee” in the afterglow of the rollout from what had to be the best landing I’d ever accomplished. That took an epiphanous turn when I heard my Flight Instructor telling me to […]
Randy | July 1, 2018
You can keep your bit coin mining. It’s a well known fact that nickel mining is an important component of the Canadian economy. Less well known is that the one in Sudbury, Ontario, is the biggest we’ve ever found. This is Canada Day up here in the Great White North, on which all and sundry […]
Randy | May 27, 2018
“In 1866, a book was published titled Readings for Young Men, Merchants, and Men of Business. Fortunately for the world, this tome has been unearthed and scanned by Google bringing it back just in time to prove my point. “This is a world of excuses where everybody needs to have one foot over the safety […]
Randy | April 15, 2018
I first met Katherine (Kat) Finck back before the turn of the century in my capacity as an épée coach with the South Shore Duellists Fencing Club where I had the great pleasure both of fencing her, and contributing in my own small way to cultivation of her innate killer instincts. Of all the firsts […]
Randy | April 1, 2018
“How much do you trust your government? “It’s the eternal American question, but one Canadians should be asking themselves, too. “Because in a few months, we will presumably all wake up free — for the first time in any of our lives — to legally possess recreational cannabis. “And with that new freedom will come […]
Randy | March 23, 2018
When last we convened in the matter of musketry, I closed with reference to how, “The care and feeding, proper shooting, and maintenance of a wooden stocked rifle, particularly one of this vintage, requires dedication to what it means to be a Marksman.” As you will know from having read the first installment in this […]
Randy | February 26, 2018
If you ain’t from around here, you probably won’t know how many tweaks and revisions the national anthem of Canada — O Canada — has undergone since it was first performed, as a French poem set to music, on 24 June 1880. As with any popular patriotic song, it went through a series of translations, […]
Randy | February 19, 2018
The first firearm I came to own was a Lee Enfield No.4 Mk.1* service rifle built in 1942 by the Savage Arms Company as part of the U. S. lend lease programme in aid of the British war effort against Nazi Germany. In 1973, at the age of 16 and with the approval of my […]
Randy | February 4, 2018
The most fulfilling moments in my so far 37 year career as a security consultant have involved engineering nasty surprises for miscreants, mostly human but occasionally from other tribes, who thought they were smarter than everyone else but weren’t. Oh, sure, along the way we’ve saved a few lives, but that was just collateral un-damage […]
Randy | January 14, 2018
Our title today paraphrases G. K. Chesterton’s observation that, “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.” The poem was inspired by a combination of current meteorological realities here in Nova Scotia, and some reading I’ve been doing on daily life of British and Commonwealth soldiers in […]