Jun 02 2009
Novelist Anthony Trollope left England in 1861 for a grand tour of North America. He wrote a travelogue and Prescott, Ontario, Canada was not the highlight of his trip. Today Prescott is an exit on Highway 401 that I’ve never used. I suspect it’s changed a bit in the past 148 years.
From Ottawa we went [...]
May 12 2009
 While some of us were experimenting with drugs in 1972 Canadian airline CPAir was experimenting with sexism in the skys.
CPAir’s April 1972 schedule promoted their new Executive Jet class as having…
Playboy magazines for relaxation…brought to you by great looking stewardesses and by stewards trained in European hotels.
Apparently there was a backlash from stewardesses and from [...]
Apr 04 2009
The Baby Name Mapper graphically shows the most popular baby names by year and by US state going back to 1960.
The examples below show the Kyle craze of the 1980’s (centered in the northwest) while the popularity of Jesus mirrors the expansion of the Latino population.
Jan 15 2009
At the height of the Great Depression when jobs were scarce, and quitting one was ill-advised, Reg Smith quietly took out his frustrations at work by writing this on the underside of his desk:
140 King East
Toronto
Reg Smith
3 November /34
a hole of a place to work
The scrawl is on the underside of a printer’s drawer (see [...]