Pique'n Yer Interest

All my friends were gone and I had to get to Brooklyn. This much I knew. By the time I had parted lips with whoever she was, the room had all but cleared out. I was alone, totally and completely, in a strange and foreign city.

Maybe it's just me, but I find it ironic that a copy of the BC Building Code is $210, about the same price my wife paid to buy me a big bag full of cordless power tools for Father's Day a few years ago.

Blasting through around 50 centimetres of 7th Heaven powder on Friday, sunlight sparkling off the knolls I hadn't shredded yet, I felt a little guilty.

Here's a very Canuck fantasy for tax season. Imagine you had a gold mine of your very own.

I f you don't know where you came from you won't know where you're going." I believe the great philosopher Bill Cosby said that in one of his comedy albums from the mid-70s, in a sketch about Fat Albert; there was probably a 'Hey, hey, hey...

I consider myself a smart person but there are times that I wonder. For instance, I have been on the periphery of some very serious black-market behaviour. I've seen Asian gangsters wield machetes for uses not related to horticulture.

From federal MLA pensions to provincial teaching wages to the growing cost of our municipal workers, a battle has been long-brewing between public servants and taxpayers over compensation. Things are about to get ugly, and in a way it's about time.

When last we met intrepid carbon merchant, Harpo Polo, he'd returned from The Orient, the promise of Pandas on his breath, pockets lined with "billions in trade agreements.

Let's see if I have this right. Vaunted Canadian carbon merchant Harpo Polo sets off on a trade mission to China and returns with billions of dollars in agreements and a pair of Giant Pandas in hand.

After 25 years of working to daily deadlines for newspapers, magazines and anyone else who'd pay me to tell stories, I knew that writer's block was simply something that never happened to me. Never. Well, I got it and I didn't like it.