Maxed Out

Well, it's almost time to take a Monday off and celebrate the fact we'll all have to go back to work Tuesday instead.

Travel expands one's horizons, opens one's eyes, broadens one's mind. You bump into things when you're travelling you just might miss staying at home. Even if home is a cute, albeit overcrowded resort municipality.

Back in another lifetime, a large Canadian bank hired me as a strategic planner in their international division. One of the first things I did was comb through the division's loan portfolio. You see, bankers pride themselves on being deal doers.

Thomas Edison tested thousands of combinations of filament material and glass vacuum globes before successfully discovering the combination that led to the first practical electric lightbulb in 1879.

"The story of barbecue is the story of America. Settlers arrive on great unspoiled continent. Discover wondrous riches. Set them on fire and eat them.

I've quipped in the past about having left the rat race in Toronto to race with a better breed of rats in Whistler. Some days though, I wonder...

Jesus, it turns out, is toast. OK, perhaps not toast but most certainly wheat. So sayeth the Vatican, or more particularly, the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments, a Vatican body for which there is no acronym.

"'Cause when we ki... iss Ooooh, Fire" — Bruce Springsteen OK, British Columbians, that's enough kissing. More than enough fire. Way too much smoke. Not enough — never thought I'd write these words — rain.

That reality can tend to be relative, subject to the impressions and prejudices of the observer, becomes evident when, on rare occasions, the everyday, the prosaic, the achingly normal becomes, well, weird. Take skiing, for example.

"Hail, hail Tuponia, The true north strong and free. A nation full of whiners, From sea to sea to sea." I'm not certain how it would translate into French and I'm having a devil of a time finding something to rhyme with "notwithstanding.