Columns
More than a bottom line, The end is nigh, A true community
Abracadabra, just like that, The Chaff is back! Beaver Chaff has receded like a moonlit tide, and Werewolf Chaff feels like the distant howl of a wolven dreamer's dreamly and unseemly dream of a werewolf-centric newspaper column.
When did it all begin? Was it foretold in Genesis? On the seventh day, did God plop down with a copy of The Heaven Herald and paper cut His thumb? Or is it a more recent development? Does it go back to 1966 when The New York Times...
An item on the news one night recently caught my attention. It said that Christmas tree yards in the Toronto area expected there to be a shortage of trees this year because growers did not cut as many trees as they sometimes do.
Brain rot, dear readers, is not merely a term - it's a state of being, and Beaver Chaff is absolutely riddled with it. It's the only explanation for our behaviour, our decisions, and, frankly, the content of this column.
Among some friends and those on social media, last week was a big one, as it was the week that Spotify, the biggest audio streaming service in the world, released its annual "Spotify Wrapped"...
It was shocking enough to hear that Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was assassinated on a New York street last week.
You've got mail, Reign in blood, A long time coming
In the devious and sinister world of rising cost-of-living prices, with much of the focus being on the price of groceries, the even more devious and even more sinister bit of the whole debate has been shrinkflation.
Certainly, no one could have foreseen the tidal wave of tariffs now sweeping across Huron County. But here we are, living in a world in which Warden Jamie Heffer has enacted a series of harsh and unrelenting tariffs...
In the post-pandemic world, voters are angry. In country after country among the democracies, governments have been turned out, including by our neighbours in the U.S. where people seem to forget how scary Donald Trump...
We're all the same, The Good Fight, It's happening here
His name was Herodotus (484 - c. 420 BCE) and he went down in history as the first historian. He lived in the Greek city of Halicarnassus and wrote The Histories, a methodical record of the Greco-Persian Wars.
Over the years, I have had more than a few conversations with loyal readers of this newspaper about the sheer amount of work that goes into an issue.
Dare we dream of a future in which hockey pucks and hardcover books co-exist harmoniously? Where slapshots echo through the hallowed stacks of knowledge, and the hushed whispers of readers merge seamlessly...
A bit of my history surfaced the other night when I watched the local news on television. The story involved a historical monument in Listowel erected to remember those killed when the Listowel arena collapsed way back in 1959.
Real life comes calling, Money for nothing, Practice, practice, practice
Early in my column-writing career I would hear - not always, but also not infrequently - that my column was always all about sports.
Eagerly, we plunge into the waters of language, where meaning bends, breaks and splashes around in unpredictable ways. Today, let us embark on a most delightfully unimportant journey;
What a strange country we live in. On the same day that television featured many stories on the rush to throw money around pursuing Taylor Swift, I listened on the radio as a woman described how hard it was to get food to feed her children.
On the outskirts of the village of Bluevale lived two families: the Duncan King family at Lot 31 in Turnberry Township and the John Gardner family at Lot 31 in Morris Township. These two locations, though fairly close together, are separated by...
Tradition in jeopardy?, It's time to decide, The dawn of a new day
Every once in a while, for a different reason each time, I take the five minutes to do the math and find out which column in the lineage of my columns you're about to read.
Fancifully foraging through the forest of fully-formed formlessness, we find ourselves at the incredible crossroads of transformation and moonlit mayhem.