"We just sold our 1996 Volvo for $1700! We had bought it in 2010 for $2200- so that means we paid only $500 for our car for fourteen and a half years!", my wife boasted in a WhatsApp text to her siblings. Minutes later I was doing the same to my parents. I guess that makes us both cheapskates. In his "Guess How Much" racial financial stereotyping routine, Jimmy Yang states "Asian people love to brag about how little money we spent on something...because the art is in the savi

He was tall and stylish. Eloquent and cultured. Clearly skilled at what he does. What a waste of human potential. But then this was Senegal. Dakar in 2005 to be specific. His name was Mohammed, and he was educated in France, or at least that is what he told us. It was morning time, and we had been out wandering for several minutes, looking for a place to eat breakfast, maybe something traditional.

In the aftermath of our recent election, referendums for possible provincial separatism are back in the news, this time led by Alberta. Having grown up as an anglophone in Montreal, I'm quite familiar with the tremendous stress and uncertainty that these cause. While I agree that the option for referendums are an essential component of modern democracy, I think the default rule of fifty percent plus one vote being enough to succeed to be nothing short of ridiculous. As far as