Jeff
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“An Event, Perhaps” by Peter Salmon
I still remember the year Jacques Derrida died. I was taking a fourth-year continental philosophy class with some friends, and I don’t recall if we were reading Derrida at the time, but he was all over the texts and our prof took it hard. I had grown fond of him myself by then (despite having…
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The Radio Towers Down the Street
I have been interested in the history of the neighbourhood I live in for a long while. This subdivision, called “Meyonohk” (which means “an ideal spot” in Cree), is part of the much larger subdivision within Edmonton called Mill Woods. The history of Mill Woods is fascinating and certainly merits a post all to itself,…
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Misadventures with Malick
A couple years ago, my brother had the fun idea to try watching our way through the Sight & Sound Greatest Films of All Time with a couple other friends who enjoyed watching movies. The #152 slot on the Sight & Sound list is held by a movie called Days of Heaven, directed by the…
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Uncle Colin and the Crofters’ War
Family history is full of surprises, yielding new insights even in areas that have been gone over many times. I’ve looked at my Henderson ancestry before. My mother’s family, the Hendersons, came to Canada around the time of the First World War, settling in Toronto. The story of Alexander Henderson, her grandfather, is one that…
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Is Not This Thing in My Right Hand a Lie?
I made a video last year in 2023 after reading something in the book of Isaiah that felt weirdly prescient. After all, this was a book written anywhere between six and eight centuries before Christ (depending on who you ask), yet it had passages like this one…
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We All Wanna Be Rob Roy’s
One of the Scottish ancestors I have always been curious about is my great-grandmother, Maggie Roy. The rumour in our family was that she was related to the famous Scottish rebel, Rob Roy, whom Liam Neeson played in the 1995 film of the same name. This connection seemed unlikely to me after doing a bit of…
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A Longing for the World
I work in a city. Every day, I travel along asphalt roads, past soaring, steel skyscrapers. Life under these peculiarly modern conditions often leaves me longing for more – longing for the world, even, as if the day-to-day world I find myself in is concealing something deeper that’s become hidden from view. At times, I…
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The One Devices
When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007, he made a point of emphasizing that he was not presenting a phone or an iPod or an internet communication device: “These are not three separate devices. This is one device.”
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The Dry Thomsons
My great-grandfather David Thomson was quite the man, I’m told. He was born on the Isle of Skye in Scotland in 1895. Harold McCullagh wrote a book about him, which was published in 1978: The Man Who Made New Brunswick Sing. His legacy popped up in all sorts of ways over the course of my childhood. I…
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Edmonton’s Gold Bar Neighbourhood
My family has had roots in the Gold Bar neighbourhood of Edmonton going back over fifty years. My grandparents lived in the area, and my parents currently live there. I recently made a small booklet and poster for my parents describing the history of their house and the neighbourhood of which it is a part.…
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