Alex Carrick’s Blog

Washington has a huge debt problem and the Democrats, Republicans and Tea Party can’t agree on which comes first, increase taxes or lower spending. Here are some innovative answers I’ve come up with, combining both approaches and some “outside the box” ideas, to break the impasse. (1) Privatize the issuing of birth certificates to Donald […]

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There are three nations that have survived the recession quite well, thank you very much, due to their raw material riches – Australia, Brazil and Canada. It would seem to be a natural progression for these three countries to come together in a new economic bloc to be known as the ABC nations.   Canada […]

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Fortune telling is a profession that seems to have fallen by the wayside. When some old black and white movie finds its way onto TV, it’s great to see a wild-eyed gypsy lady pull out her crystal ball and start to prognosticate. In most of these thrillers, after telling the truth, things don’t turn out […]

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My wife, Donna, writes crime novels, five of them so far. It’s hard to get published these days, for a variety of reasons, and Donna is self-publishing.   She has an Internet site, but also knows how important it is to network. As part of this effort, she attends functions of Sisters in Crime and […]

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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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Please keep in mind this story was written in 2008, since it has a bearing with respect to the ages of our children, as noted in brackets.   Towards the end of May, our daughter, Tammy-Li (aged 5), needed ten dollars for the “book fair” at her school. This set off a chain reaction of serpentine financial […]

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A woman, working in a Tim Hortons donut shop in London Ontario, was recently fired for giving away one free “timbit” to a baby.   This has become a public relations nightmare for the company.   Timbits are the punched out centres of donuts – the empty holes, as it were – and, in some […]

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There are quite a number of reasons it might be “neat” to be the Governor of the Bank of Canada. Here, arranged in no particular order, are the Top 10.   (1) Guv’nor just sounds so great and fits in with this nation’s British heritage.   (2) You always win at Monopoly cause you can just print […]

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  There has been a major casualty of the digital age that you may be noticing only peripherally. Has it entered your consciousness that there are fewer punning headlines anymore?

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