Dig This

| February 20, 2017

The week just passed saw my part of Nova Scotia receive heavy snowfalls with high winds up to 110 km/h on Monday and overnight well into Tuesday, and another heavy snowfall with 80 km/h gusts on Thursday. We were ploughed out from the first one just before 06:00 Wednesday morning, just in time for the […]

A Long Winter’s Night 2016 – Day 11: Ode to Twenty Sixteen

| December 31, 2016

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the head of state for Commonwealth nations, including Canada, and now at 90, well past the finish line in the race for longest lived and still reigning British monarch (Queen Victoria died at 81). Now, at the end of this year of death and dishevelment, there is something that […]

A Long Winter’s Night 2016 – Day 10: Bifröst

| December 30, 2016

“Haakon Haakonsson (c. March/April 1204 – 16 December 1263) (Old Norse: Hákon Hákonarson; Norwegian: Håkon Håkonsson), sometimes called Haakon the Old in contrast to his son with the same name, and known in modern regnal lists as Haakon IV, was the King of Norway from 1217 to 1263. His reign lasted for 46 years, longer […]

A Long Winter’s Night 2016 – Day 7: Ice Capades

| December 27, 2016

“There’s an old joke about a Boy Scout who, one bright Saturday morning, puts on his uniform and declares to his Mother that he’s off to do good deeds all day long. When he returns a few hours later, with a black eye and looking like he just escaped from a dude ranch by being […]

You Rascal You

| November 6, 2016

Last Thursday, in response to our recent Dark Sentiments piece titled Exit Music, we were honoured by a quite literally heartfelt comment from trusty LFM reader Julian: “Only tonight have I seen this and the irony is rich and deep. I have suffered the early stages of another heart attack during the night; and a […]

Dark Sentiments Season 7 – Day 23: Exit Music

| October 23, 2016

“One of the world’s oldest songs isn’t about love, sex or power. It’s about death. ‘Dies Irae’, the Song of Death (performed in one take for this video) is one of the oldest songs in the world. It goes back to the beginning of musical time … about 1300 years. The mystery of this particular […]

Dark Sentiments Season 7 – Day 22: All Deaths Matter

| October 22, 2016

The rangy, solitary Eastern Coyote of my youth was not the animal that bears the name today. Hunted, trapped, poisoned, and otherwise hounded out of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick in the 1970’s, there came an interval of Human forgetting while the Nature of the Coyote and Man’s conceit forged something new. For in time […]

Dark Sentiments Season 7 – Day 21: When Death Declines

| October 21, 2016

It’s said that one who kills himself Just takes the coward’s way. I’ll grant this Truth for those who leave When Duty says to stay. But if you lack dependents That must look to you for strength, When all that’s good has fled your life Why look to it for length? ~ Dark Sentiments Season […]

Dark Sentiments Season 7 – Day 17: The Spirit of Things

| October 17, 2016

The Wendigo – I will call it that but there are many iterations of its name – is a malevolent forest spirit that comes in winter. It needs human flesh to feed but can only slake its hunger by possessing a human that it then uses to hunt, kill, and devour its prey. The Wendigo […]

Dark Sentiments Season 7 – Day 16: The Magick of Words

| October 16, 2016

The Magick of Words By LFM When I was but a stripling lad, Enthralled by tales of sword and sage, I dreamed of magicks foul and fair, And words of pow’r beyond my age. It saddened me that magick seemed A thing of fiction’s fantasy, To hold no sway upon the world, And least of […]