Alex Carrick’s Blog

Prologue: 1987 “What’s $100,000?” she asked flippantly. “It’s $95,000 more than I’ve got,” was his answer. She was starting to drive him crazy. She had two pre-occupations, money and her research. On neither score, was she in any way practical. They’d been living together in a basement apartment for seven months while attending Queen’s University [...]

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For all her flustered outward appearance, Jilal was a deep thinker. Single, aged 32, a brunette well-above average in appearance and living in an eco-friendly home halfway between the citizens on ground level and those perched high above, she was having a typical day off. Mid-morning and her heart was already pounding. Too much to [...]

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Pug-nosed Pat and gum-chewing Chris, two long-time Irish cops, were back on the day shift after a month spent on the night rotation. Their patrol area ranged from the entertainment district in the east to the upscale shopping blocks downtown. Being a cop in these days was quite a different experience than it had been [...]

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Little Jimmy Flotsam, aged 10 and living in Tampa, had never known Christmas. The current year was 2025 and in 2015 Santa Claus and his wife had wrapped things up at the North Pole and skipped town, so to speak. In a sadly mimicking blow, Jimmy’s father abandoned his family when his only child was [...]

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I have decided to write about the year I lived in residence in Massey College at the University of Toronto because I have a bad feeling about post-war “baby boomers”. Having had some experience with human nature, and aging parents, I know the boomer generation is likely to become quite nostalgic as the years plod on.   [...]

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Where did Kate Winslet come from? I mean the actress, not the person. Kate Winslet the person comes from the United Kingdom and a family with a background in the theatre. Kate Winslet the actress started life in a small film called Heavenly Creatures as an almost mindless teenager who commits a senseless and premeditated [...]

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What’s with the Canadian obsession for categorizing our artists according to numbers? There is the Group of Seven, Painters 11 and the Regina Five, for starters. We’re not the only nation to do this. The Americans had The Eight and I am sure that there are many other examples around the world. However, we may be unique in not being able to count.

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Cities rise and fall. Currently in Canada, Calgary and Edmonton are bursting with commerce and energy as a result of the construction boom in the nearby Oil Sands. However, events can pass a city by more easily than might seem possible. The story of Venice presents a cautionary tale.

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This blog entry comes under the category of fascinating life stories. There are those among us who truly are compulsive and obsessive and others who think we might be. Whenever I start to go down this path, I remember the example of Caravaggio. There was a man who truly “lost his head” over a single [...]

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Faced with the rapid changes brought about by computers and the Internet, one can easily be fooled into thinking that leaps in technology are something new in the course of human events. In actual fact, there have been similar seismic shifts throughout history. These have often come in the area of military advances, to gain [...]

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