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In a recent article in Canada's National Post, Tristan Hopper looked at how, after the Second World War, Britain tried very hard to blow up the (surviving) German island of Heligoland. In 1947, Britain had a problem. It had thousands of tonnes of explosives left over from the Second World War...

I do not see Japan’s Karafuto Prefecture, including the southern half of the island of Sakhalin, surviving the Second World War. Simply put, Karafuto shared the island with the Sakhalin Oblast of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. With an...

A recent news item made me wonder: How, exactly, Corsica could have become Italian? One decent possibility might be in 1814-1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Perhaps France might trade Corsica for other territories--Nice or Savoy, perhaps? Or, perhaps after Waterloo, France might be...

Early in January, before my trip to Montréal, I went to the Royal Ontario Museum where I saw--among other things--the museum's copy of Benjamin Wolfe's painting The Death of General Wolfe. This famous tableau's depiction of the death of James Wolfe, the commander of the victorious British forces...

Today, after almost fifteen years of being active on LiveJournal, I finally shut down my account. I blogged about my decision. Briefly, like most of the other people still active there, I was motivated to leave on account of a new and highly restrict terms of service agreement which placed...

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's Golnaz Esfandiari recently covered the reaction in Iran to the prospect of a US ban on the issuing of new visas to Iranian citizens. Esfandiari is correct to note that these visa restrictions will not help the Islamic Republic's position and will in fact also...

My Feedly feed pointed me to a provoactive article by Gizmodo's Paleofuture blog written by one Matt Novak, "New Zealand Could Have Been Part of the United States". The title sounds sensationalistic, but Novak does make the good point that the young British colony of New Zealand in the mid-19th...

The other day, I came across an article by Samuel Osborne in the Independent, "CIA had secret plan to give Falkland Islands to Argentina and relocate islanders to Scotland." In it, Osborne describes American thinking on a settlement of the Falklands War assuming--as was entirely possible--an...

This weekend just past I finally made the trip down the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence system from Toronto to spend time Montréal. Among the things I did was see an acclaimed exhibition of the work of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, Focus : Perfection at the Musée de beaux-arts de Montréal. Robert...

In an article by CBC News' Sara Fraser looking at how Prince Edward Island has had its choice of Confederation-related anniversaries lately now that we're nearing the 150th--the Charlottetown Conference of 1864, the formation of Canada in 1867, the entry of Prince Edward Island into...

When I visited the Microsoft Store in the Eaton Centre at the beginning of December, I was interested to see that among the covers for the Surface Pro 4 that this store carried were some carrying the logo of the AFL's Buffalo Bills. Clearly, this store's inventory came from someone who knew...

The dwarf planet Ceres, as James Nicoll noted yesterday, was discovered by Italian astronomer Guiseppe Piazzi on 1 January 1801. At first thought to be a new planet, in the intervening two centuries Ceres was eventually shifted to the category of dwarf planet. Was it possible for Ceres to have...

"Tembo, Mother of Elephants" by Randy McDonald, on Flickr My only problem with Derrick Stephan Hudson's 2002 statue "Tembo, Mother of Elephants", standing in the middle of CIBC's Commerce Court complex in downtown Toronto, is that its unique presence reminds me that there is not one...

At Filipino news site Rappler, JC Punongbayan and Manuel Leonard Albis argue in their "Were it not for Marcos, Filipinos today would have been richer" that the Marcos regime had a lasting and very negative effect on the development of the Filipino economy. Although imperfect, GDP per capita is...

Yesterday evening I was touring the Toronto Christmas Market in the Distillery District just to the east of the downtown when I came across The Sport Gallery. There, I came across a $C 71 sweater emblazoned with the logos of the Original Six teams: the Montreal Canadiens, Toronto Maple Leafs...

Last night at my blog, I made a post, expanded from a Quora answer I wrote late in December of 2015, talking about Cuba's lost chances. Someone had written a question wondering if Cuba proves that Communism worked. Could it stand as an example for the Third World It could not, I argued, mainly...

It was last Wednesday, when I joined hundreds of other Torontonians in singing seven of the sadly departed Leonard Cohen's songs, that I regained my appreciation of Cohen as a poet. Cohen did wonderful things with language, writing smartly about the late modern condition and with a wonderful...

Earlier today an article by one Geeta Dayan in The Guardian, "San Fran-disco: how Patrick Cowley and Sylvester changed dance music forever", popped up on my feed. Patrick Cowley was an innovative producer, Sylvester was a singer with an unearthly falsetto, and before each died of AIDS in the...

Let's say that, for whatever reason, the Cajuns never come to exist. Maybe there is never an Expulsion of the Acadians and the Francophones of Acadie stay in their homeland. Perhaps the Acadians are resettled en masse elsewhere, in Canada or France or the Falklands. (True story.) Whatever the...

Last week, I posted photos on my blog of the Prince Edward Battery. This coastal battery, located to the west of the downtown of Charlottetown was built in the mid-19th century to guard the harbour against invaders--Americans, particularly, but perhaps also French. Nothing of course happened...