Terry Etam

Here’s a question, a cross-Canada, border-independent question, that might resonate with some: Have you ever pulled up to the pumps and put in ten dollars’ worth of gas? Or five? Or maybe you can recall a time when there was an unusually good payday or a tax return, and you decided to live a little, telling the gas jockey to fill it right up (in my historical instances, my eight-year-old Nissan bare-bones rust-bucket), right to the brim? That was feeling on top of the world; a full tank was like … [Read more...]

Dress your best on your execution day… try to leave a good impression on the death squad by standing erect and proud…Be extremely courteous to your assistant when you lose money. Try not to blame others for your fate, even if they deserve blame. Never exhibit any self-pity. Nassim Nicholas Taleb In reporting on the energy scene, it is wearyingly necessary to monitor the news flow to see if there is anything notable or comment-worthy happening. It’s not easy, because news is no longer … [Read more...]

People often comment to me that, with respect to the energy/hydrocarbon debate, we can get somewhere if we just “have a conversation”. Surely, the reasoning goes, if reasonable people sit down and discuss, we can move the needle in a positive way. I don’t know if that is a realistic scenario. The majority of rational people simply don’t care about energy for the same reason you’re not presently concerned with whether you’ll starve to death next month. Food (and energy) will be there … [Read more...]

A few years ago, a new publishing phenomenon exploded onto bookshelves, an exciting development for music fans. A wave of books from aging rock stars appeared, oddly similar recollections of squalid and sordid lifestyles lived by a “lucky” few who pursued misbehaviour with a vengeance, to the extent their record sales allowed. This circle of musicians seemed to compete with each other to show how badly one could live their life, each reminiscing about the glory days of being shuttled through … [Read more...]

“Adding more milk to the milk already in a pail just gives you more milk, but adding another cow to the one you already have does not give you a larger cow. In the same way, pouring half the milk you already have into a second pail gives you two smaller amounts of milk, but dividing the cow in half does not give you two smaller cows. You may end up with a lot of hamburger, but the essential nature of ‘cow’ – a living system capable, among other things, of turning grass into milk, would be lost.” … [Read more...]

You know the feeling you get when you’ve completed, say, a woodworking project, maybe making a deck chair or something, and it took forever, and screws and nails are embarrassingly sticking out in random directions, the legs are wobbly, right angles are scarce, and generally, the thing looks like it belongs in Picasso’s Guernica? Even with my “standards”, it takes forever to finish a project. And that's doing it at my leisure; imagine needing approval from all your friends and family for every … [Read more...]

Not everyone is like us, folks. Not like us Canadians, that is. Or even North Americans. Take one interesting example. Imagine a country where children are taught not to smile in school. Where beer wasn’t recognized as an alcoholic beverage until 2011. Where one region registered a voter turnout of 146 percent in a 2012 election. A country that spends $50 billion to host the Olympics, with a slogan of “Great, New, Open” then, within a month of the end of the games, invades and annexes part of a … [Read more...]

Way back in the early 2000s, shortly after the complete and utter Y2K letdown, I met a guy at some corporate golf event. He was polite and kind to both my disturbing golf game and my 50-dollar Canadian Tire bag of scarred up irons, even though he was a president of an oil company. Perhaps his humility and down-to-earth manner was due to the humble origins of his company: he’d started it with a $25,000 loan from his mother. I can only imagine the scoldings at board meetings ("No more equity … [Read more...]