Terry Etam

“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]

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” Mark Twain That masterful Twain quote, one of a million or so he has, is a generational thing. Certain cycles are, in broad strokes, predictable. It’s a part of growing up I suppose; at a certain age, everything seems simple and obvious – parents are stupid, for starters. As one moves through [Read more]

One winter while in high school, I landed a short-term job. A neighbour was going south for a month of respite from a Saskatchewan winter and asked if I’d come over daily to feed his cows. Having done this for years at home I was up to the task and jumped at it. Before he left, he asked me to come over to “show me how to do it.” He had his own special technique of manipulating the front-end loader with a huge hay bale, and he wanted to make sure I did it his way. As I sat in his tractor, trying [Read more]

It may be hard to believe in these crazy times, but day in and day out, there really isn’t a lot happening to liven up news streams. That’s the price of having live news feeds; eyeballs will wander somewhere else if there isn’t a new starburst of eye candy every ten minutes. One oddity to fall out of this is how we get all excited about certain numbers, even if they don’t mean anything. Sometimes it’s when numbers cross a certain threshold. The Dow Jones hits 20,000, and it makes headlines – but [Read more]