Alex Carrick’s Blog

Secrets! Sugar sprinkled on candy or arsenic mixed with nightshade. Are you in the know or flying blind? Delicious seductive power or unpredictable happen-anytime pain. Who to bring into the inner circle? Who best left excluded? Where to extend the intimacy? An implication of purity that’s non-existent. Most secrets aren’t. Obscuring the truth, they rarely […]

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“Real” men know how to make and repair things. They’re even able to improvise. I’m always astonished when one of my friends assembles furniture out of ferns. I’m not feeling as bad about my shortcomings as I used to. Nowadays, most things are so complex that when they break down, the only recourse is to […]

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The following is essentially a monologue as two men face each other, standing on the sidewalk of a small town’s Main Street in Midwest America. The date is the present, on a beautiful spring morning, a time of year when some things need nipping in the bud. The burly one, dressed in a dun-colored uniform […]

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Twitter has a quaint tradition known as Follow Friday. This is the commendable practice, carried out during the last workday of each week, of recommending fellow tweeters for following. The means is to list names (the @ avatars) along with an accompanying hashtag description (#fridayfollow). The problem is that a mere listing of names quickly turns bland. In fairly short order, it […]

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Here are sixteen new highly-sophisticated road jokes. (1) Why did all the world’s politicians cross the road? The bridge? The highway? To take credit for the infrastructure work. (2) Why did Jack Bauer cross the road? He finished torturing all the terrorists on this side. (3) Why did Gregory House cross the road? To avoid walking under a ladder, […]

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Pedro Martinez had entered the United States illegally. There was no denying the fact. He was part of a group of 20 individuals brought over in the false back of an 18-wheeler from Mexico in early spring two years ago. To pay for the privilege, he made a cash contribution to his wife’s distant cousin, Jose […]

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It’s a terror nearly as elemental as the fear of dying. It can bring strong men to their knees and turn the smartest of women into incoherent babblers. Maybe you already know where I’m headed. It’s public speaking and there’s nothing else quite like its scary prospect. Many people would rather go through a spinal […]

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I have a story from my workplace I think encapsulates an awful lot of what is so crazy about the modern business world. It involves computers and automatic updating processes and the vast potential that exists for things to go sadly and sometimes hilariously wrong, despite our best intentions.

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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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The post-WWII baby boom generation is getting older and this means looming health problems. It is a prime reason for expecting strong medical-care and nursing home construction in the years ahead.

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