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When I lived in Ottawa back in the day I used to take my kids to visit the old Victoria Memorial Museum on Metcalfe Street. In those days (the early '80s) the museum shared its castle-like building with the Museum of Natural History but we were mainly interested in the First Nations exhibits in the history section. (Subsequently the museum moved to its impressive Douglas Cardinal-designed home in Gatineau and is now called the Canadian Museum of History.)

At the entrance to one of the...

I can't allow my pal Brian Busby to walk off into the sunset without an acknowledgement.

Six years ago Brian launched his website, The Dusty Bookcase, dedicated to what I think of as Canadian pulplit but what he calls "the suppressed, ignored and forgotten in Canadian literature." Always entertaining and witty, sometimes surprising, Brian's blog brought to light hundreds of books, mainly pulp fiction, that had been lost to posterity until...

Wierd. The CBC on its website recommends 10 books to read for Black History Month, yet as far as I can tell all of the titles are novels, not history.

So let me add to the list a few books that are actually Black history.

First of all, a couple of old chestnuts:

The Blacks in Canada, by Robin Winks: first published in 1971, this classic has a...

This past week the news media here in Vancouver have been reporting on the imminent destruction of one of the last, if not the last, squatter cabins that at one time dotted the shoreline of Burrard Inlet. Local jazz legend Al Neil has occupied the cabin out in the Dollarton area of North Vancouver since 1966, latterly with his companion the...

Years ago we were driving along the causeway through Stanley Park talking about what to name the new dog when my (then) young son piped up from his booster seat in the rear, "What about Stanley Bark?" It was his first joke.

What brings this reminiscence to mind is that a new issue of Geist magazine has arrived on the newsstands -- making 95 times that the Vancouver-based cultural quarterly has made its way into print since it was founded in 1990 -- and it contains my regular...