I have had the privilege of attending two lectures by Wade Davis, and he knows how to hold the attention of an audience. I have also read several books and magazine articles by him, and they are all excellent. Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory, and the Conquest of Everest is especially good.

The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World originated with a CBC Massie Lecture, delivered in 2009. This book was published about the same time. If anything, the message is more important now than it was 15 years ago.

Now, Davis is a scientist. He doesn't believe that the Earth rests on the back of a very large turtle, and neither should you. He also doesn't mention that ancient cultures had some traditions such as human sacrifice and pedicide that most people find abhorrent. That's because the cultures Davis describes have managed to exist for thousands of years without killing each other, starving to death, or destroying their habitat, things that our society hasn't figured out yet. As he put it, "to acknowledge the wonder of other cultures is not to denigrate our way of life but rather to recognize with some humility that other peoples, flawed as they too may be, nevertheless contribute to our collective heritage, the human repertoire of ideas, beliefs, and adaptations that have historically allowed us as a species to thrive."

I was listening to CBC Radio Monday afternoon, and the topic was the proposal from the Federal Liberal Government to increase Canada's capital gains inclusion rate from 50% to 67% for individuals earning more than $250,000 in capital gains in a year, and on all capital gains realized by corporations and most types of trusts.

Mike de Jong, a former British Columbia cabinet minister who is now a candidate for the Conservative Party of Canada nomination in Abbotsford-South Langley, was brought in to comment on it.

What de Jong said was very predictable. He's against it, as is Official Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre and the rest of the CPC. He started off by saying that the Liberal Government is spending too much money, and should be cutting spending instead of increasing taxes.

At that point, I was wishing that I was the one asking the questions. The obvious question is, what would the CPC cut?

This is a story of two men on road trips toward Woodstock, New York in 1986. This is not the Woodstock made famous by a music festival; that was actually near Bethel, 90 km. away. This Woodstock, including nearby towns Bearsville and Saugerties, was the sometime home of Bob Dylan, Van Morrison, Todd Rundgren, and Albert Grossman. Also located there is the Big Pink house, which served from 1967 to 1973 as a home and rehearsal space for The Band.

One of these two men, Klokko, is fictional. He is directionless, except that he loves music and Beatrice, his cat. He drives a 1971 Oldsmobile Delta 88. It has an old eight-track tape player (if you’re under the age of 60, Google this), and his tape collection of excellent music is a big part of his life. He especially likes the ones by The Band. He would like to have been a musician, but he never got the opportunity, or perhaps didn’t have the talent.

The other man is Richard Manuel, pianist, sometime drummer, and singer with The Band; one of the highlights of his career was “I Shall Be Released”. He had very serious drug and alcohol problems, was in several serious car accidents, and made several suicide attempts. The last one, in 1986, was successful.

There are some stories I never get tired of hearing. One of them is the formation of the Jefferson Airplane; how they were rehearsing twelve hours a day and seven days a week, because they knew that they were creating something brand new.

The early history of The Beatles is another example. How John, Paul, and later George originally got together, their apprenticeship in Hamburg, the influence of Sir George Martin, and on and on. Philip Norman has written several books that cover this territory and much more. The best known one was Shout!: The Beatles in Their Generation, originally published in 1981 and revised in 1996, but he has also written two biographies of John Lennon, one of Sir Paul McCartney, as well as Sir Elton John, Mick Jagger, Buddy Holly, Eric Clapton, and Jimi Hendrix. George Harrison: the Reluctant Beatle is his most recent work.

The prologue gives a detailed account of the “Concert for George”. If you haven’t watched this, do so. While you're at it, give “The Concert for Bangladesh” a watch, too. (More on this later.) Then, watch this rendition of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”.

I was 13 years old, and in band class when the announcement came over the PA system that President Kennedy had been assassinated. Ever since then, I have paid an above-average amount of attention to the facts and theories surrounding that assassination.

I used to love listening to a good conspiracy theory, but the herd of nutbars and Russian trolls who surfaced in 2016 ruined it for me. So I’ll start off by dismissing a couple of them.

• The New Orleans gay community, led by Clay Shaw, was part of it. Another event during my teenage-hood was the case organized by New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. It was regarded at the time as a media circus, and deservedly so. So what if Clay Shaw, David Ferrie, and Lee Harvey Oswald knew each other? Garrison was trying to make something out of nothing. Unfortunately, 24 years later, film director Oliver Stone turned Garrison’s nothing-burger into another nothing-burger.

• The CIA did it. The same CIA will tell you that two people can keep a secret, if one of them is dead.

The unfortunate reality is, the trail has gone cold. One of those dead people with a secret was Jack Ruby, a man with organized crime connections as long as your arm. I have always been skeptical of his story that he just happened to be near the Dallas police station to wire money to one of his strippers, at the time when Oswald was being transferred.

The obvious question here is, why have I written a review of a book that was published 14 years ago? The answer is, it’s the best sports book I have ever read. I am not alone in this opinion. It reached #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and was selected as Best Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Forbes, and the San Francisco Chronicle.

One of the reasons why it’s so good is, Agassi got some help from J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar. However, Moehringer’s name does not appear on the cover, because he insisted that it was Agassi’s story.

This book covers a lot of territory. We learn about how he was forced into a pro tennis career by an overbearing father. That he had only an eighth-grade education (that’s an amusing story), but later funded a charter school in Las Vegas. There’s another amusing story about how he was able to continue to use Prince racquets after his manager, without his knowledge, signed a contract with Donnay. We learn that he hated the “image is everything” Canon ad campaign. And that he referred to clay court specialists as “dirt rats”.

This book (available here) was written by a remarkable and courageous woman, Alexandra Morton of Echo Bay, British Columbia. It has 335 pages (not including notes), but it took me a long time to get through it. That’s because it contains several stories. Two of them are Morton’s personal history, and the picture she gives of life in the remote coastal communities of British Columbia. It’s something that most people who have spent most of their lives in Vancouver and Kelowna know nothing about.

Mostly, though, it’s the story of her battle against salmon farms in the Broughton Archipelago off northern Vancouver Island. It began in 1989, and didn’t end until February, 2023.

Things started to get serious in 2001, when large numbers of wild salmon were infected sea lice. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise, because of massive sea lice infestations in Scotland and Norway. Two years later, Morton and other scientists (including one from the Federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans [DFO]) observed massive die-offs of pink salmon. In 2009, there was a collapse in the Fraser River sockeye salmon return. As time went on, Morton and her allies observed fish that were blind, had tumours, and were missing their lower jaws. In 2013, pink salmon and chinook turned up that were yellow all the way through.