A Closer Look: Jody Paterson

Sharing an opinion piece I wrote this week that was published today in the Times Colonist , sparked by the sentencing of a serial assaulter of women.  Tyler Mark Denniston is going to jail. An...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2024/03/life-sentence-for-victims-of-intimate.html

My new hobby of diving into ancestry information brings me many treasurers, including these four 1924 Chinese Immigration Act documents of my uncles and aunt back when they were little kids. They...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2024/03/how-racist-are-our-roots-so-racist.html

Opportunistic Canadian training institutes that over-promise and under-deliver are no doubt a problem for international students in Canada. The BC government's pledge this week to get to the ...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2024/01/the-icky-truth-about-international.html

I’ve been chasing my three grandmothers through history of late, awed by their resiliency. Their early adulthoods were in the 1910s. Then and now, it was a hard life for anyone without money....

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2024/01/grandmothers-i-see-you.html

On this night 50 years ago, I was preparing for my wedding the next day. I was barely two weeks past my 17th birthday. What was on my mind that evening? No recollection. I know I wasn’t sc...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2024/01/jan-5-1974-wedding-story.html

Image by Taken  from Pixabay I haven't worked as a full-time journalist for almost 20 years now, but people still pay me to go find things out. I have a habit of finding way more informat...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/12/in-case-you-were-wondering-surfeit-of.html

  My partner and I lived in Honduras and Nicaragua for almost five years doing Cuso International development work in the 2010s. I concluded very quickly that if ever there was an apocalypse...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/10/i-wish-you-central-american.html

Image by John Hain  from Pixabay Virtually every day, I go out on a dog walk and start putting together the start of a blog post in my head. But I never get them written. It’s not so m...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/09/can-we-talk-no-really-can-we.html

  Image by 愚木混株 Cdd20  from Pixabay My news feeds have been bringing me so many reports of missing persons in BC recently that I finally went looking for stats this month to cl...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/06/bc-leads-pack-by-long-shot-when-it.html

What will happen once social media cuts us off from sharing news stories with our connections? That strange development has the potential of sending us even deeper into our respective echo cha...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/06/curbs-on-social-media-sharing-will-only.html

"Don't talk about Trump/guns/abortion/covid/climate change," friends and family variously cautioned me as I prepared for a three-week road trip in the US last month. No worries. I rarely talk...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-civility-of-silence.html

Indri Robyy, Pixabay Doom-scrolling is real, and I know to try to avoid it for fear of entering that hyper-vigilant, chronically worried state that can set in when your adrenal system gets w...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/02/when-end-of-days-feelings-get-you-down.html

  This is me, age 66. The rock star Madonna is two years younger than me, and I am stunned to realize after her appearance at the Grammys on the weekend that I now prefer my face to hers, so a...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/02/dont-let-them-mess-up-your-face.html

Credit: No Name 13, Pixabay The BC government doubtlessly had to work very hard to get the OK from the federal government for a three-year test of illicit drug decriminalization.  It's a ...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/02/bcs-decrim-experiment-one-giant-step.html

It's hard to talk about Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond.  I fully believe that the right thing is happening to her as she is held up to the searing light that the CBC's Geoff Leo has shone on her ...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/01/sometimes-good-shaming-is-all-youve-got.html

Extinction Rebellion UK says it will prioritize "relationships over roadblocks" this year and move away from public disruptions as a prime strategy for getting the world's attention on climat...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2023/01/we-wont-slow-climate-change-with.html

Francesco Villi was an angry man who settled his differences violently . The fights he got into with his Toronto strata council were obviously like fire to the powder keg for a man like him. ...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/12/when-rock-meets-hard-place.html

The perfect is the enemy of the good, as Voltaire noted back in the 18th century. His wise words came to mind when I saw the Vancouver Sun's piece last week on the province's plan to fast-tr...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-crisis-is-now.html

If Pierre Poilievre was just some random dude with a Twitter account and an uninformed opinion, we could just leave him to it and shrug off his ridiculous view that providing safe consumption...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/12/haters-gonna-hate-so-dont-give-them.html

For a while there, we could all write about climate change as if it were still coming and might possibly be avoided if people were exhorted sufficiently to do x, y and z to reduce their carbon...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/climate-change-somebody-ought-to-do.html

When I was a kid and got too whiny about some little difficulty in my life, I'd get shaken back to reality by a parent or grandparent with a version of one of those Walked Five Miles to School...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/let-me-tell-ya-kid-back-in-my-day.html

BC's crisis of poisoned street drugs is hitting men in the prime of their working years the hardest. Three-quarters of the 10,000 deaths in BC from poisoned illicit drugs since 2015 have been...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/drugs-dont-kill-people-poisoned-drugs-do.html

  Clockwise from top left: My father David Paterson; my aunt Joan Hepburn, solo and with her mates; my grandmother's brother Jack Feica; my uncle George Chow and wife Fan from a newspaper ...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/i-will-remember.html

Few things visualize the impact of the pandemic and the sad slide of social wellness in Greater Victoria quite so pointedly as the 2022 Vital Signs survey results . Take a look at these chart...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/falling-b-grades-signal-community.html

I'm emerging from almost five years of largely ignoring this 15-year-old blog of mine with a plan to get back to more writing. Here's a photo of me and my partner on a bit of a crazy horseback...

https://closer-look.blogspot.com/2022/11/blog-site-awaken.html