University of Useless Information:

Let me tell you about the Utility of Kiltz. If anyone asks me why I wear a kilt I tell them that kilts are extremely comfortable and utilitarian. I broke both of my legs 'falling off the roof of the barn' the summer that I was sixteen. That left me casted all the way up to my groin for a whole summer. That was ten long weeks wearing gigantic casts. It was impossible to wear pants and too hot to wear a housecoat. So for the sake of decency I covered up by wearing my sister Kate's old school uniform kilt. Trying to wear jeans after that felt like being in casts again. One thing about a kilt is that one size fits all, more or less. Being a wrap-around type of garment means that it could be fitted easily and pinned together or held in place with a belt. The thing is, I couldn't walk around in the city wearing what was obviously recognizable as a girls' school uniform. Each school that has a uniform dress code has a recognizable colour or plaid that identifies which scho...

Monday January Fifteenth, Twenty-thirteen: Twenty-One Today. Been celebrating all weekend. Friday night my boss Tony MacDonald and the rest of the gang at work ordered in Pizza and Wings for my birthday. The busy winter season is still going strong at the shop and we're knee deep in Christmas Movie set props. Cranes and rigging too. Toronto is 'Hollywood  North'. Low budget movie houses that can't afford their own shops come to us for building and maintaining their sets and equipment. We worked late to have their stuff ready for their Saturday Morning re-shoots. They kept us busy through Saturday too. One of the camera operators slipped and fell on some ice. Bashed the stabilizer on the hand-carry rig. I repaired and rebuilt it. Delicate aluminium parts needed replacement. I milled the new parts from titanium steel so they're more durable and will survive the next bash. I rebuilt it lighter and stronger.It was nice to work on something more challenging than the usua...

Hank and I really enjoyed the independence and self sufficiency that we learned the summer we were eight years old. Over the next couple of years, we build bigger and better shelters in the woodlot on my family’s farm and also near Hank’s family cottage in Southampton, Ontario by Lake Huron. We also loved to explore new places and enjoyed tenting in other campgrounds with our families or at least with one or more responsible elder sister to supervise us. We had to cater to them, to appease, even though it meant that they got more independence too. That usually meant that they could spend time on the beaches chasing boys… To pass the time, Hank and I kept busy with different outdoor activities. We played on beaches and swam in Rivers, lakes and streams. One of Hank’s sisters, Kelly, worked at a summer camp and became certified as a canoeing instructor. So, the summer we were ten, she taught us how to properly paddle a canoe and how to recover from an accidental (or intentional) roll-o...

My Dad had a shelf full of old Boy Scout Hand Books that he kept at the farmhouse. Including the original ‘Scouting for Boys’ book by Lord Baden-Powell himself; the fellow who founded the organization as a tool of indoctrination of children and young men into the military. A new version is printed almost every year and Dad had almost all of them. His father and grandfather were leaders in the institution but Dad had a ‘falling out’ with the organization which he won’t discuss. However, that didn’t stop him from collecting all those books. These manuals had held my fascination ever since I can remember. They contain all the ways to survive in the wilderness with only a pocket knife and gumption. They also contain various lore and oaths bordering on ritual and infused with nationalism. I think, perhaps, that as an organization it practically borders on being a religion. Along with these were classic works by Rudyard Kipling, Jack London and Farley Mowat to name a few authors that w...

The Smythe Farm is the next property just East of our family farm. The Smythes have stables filled with horses. Their own and many more that they board. They teach equestrian, both English and Western style. The Smythe Family were a couple and their two boys Hume and Pete. Hume and my sister Lorraine have been dating steadily since forever and are married now. It’s weird to me how sexism pervades every aspect of life. Pink or blue, dolls or dump trucks and girls get figure skates but boys get hockey skates. With HorseBack Riding, the girls are usually taught English Style and the boys ride Western. That’s the way it was at the Smythe Farm. I think there must be something about gender, though, that makes girls horse crazy. Both Hank’s and my sisters took riding lessons and had horse pictures pinned up in their bedrooms. Both my best friend Hank and I took lessons too but we didn’t write love letters to our mounts. Riding’s okay, but I prefer to spend time grooming and exercising the hor...

Congregation on Sunday mornings is actually pretty good. When I was a kid, most Sundays started with a song and then the kids were invited to the front dais for a story. After that we went off to classrooms assigned by age. We did arts and crafts and played games while the youth leaders tried to explain how the world worked. The doctrine is that there is no doctrine. It wasn’t until later that I now understand that the Congregation takes a mainly Humanist view. One of the core curriculum for the children is something called Holidays and Holy Days which takes us through the calendar year and each week we learned about different world religions, what they believed and how they celebrated. I don’t attend most Sundays anymore, but I like to hang out with the youth group there from time to time. Ultimately, I was taught to Obey the Golden Rule. The good one, not the greedy one…. When I think about most modern religions, I can't accept that my ancient ancestors are condemned to s...