I direct bridge games and tournaments and create stuff for my bridge work which people seem to want. So I set up this web page to slowly put the things (essays, programs, information) I've created into the public domain. If I were a better writer or programmer I would not be giving them away, but since I am not, I trust you will not descend upon me in anger should they not interest you or work for you...
Nothing on this site has ads or asks for a credit card number (some of the external links might). Since I maintain this site for information and entertainment purposes only, there is no security layer and some browsers may get antsy. I'll do my best to ensure none of these pages is infected with something transmittable so you can safely ignore the warnings that today's browsers insist upon, and we can keep this all free and simple.
Among the things you may currently — or eventually — find here:
(July 01, 2021)
The Wikipedia article on Canada’s Indigenous Residential School Program is a good educational read. I don’t agree with those who want to cancel Canada Day because we’re now discovering unmarked burial grounds for children removed long term from their families on reservations by law in order to teach them English or French to help them assimilate, a program that was cruel and utterly ineffective, taking children at 5 or 6 and not returning them to their families for a full decade, at which point the parents and children were often unable to communicate in a shared language. During that decade in their lives that Indigenous children were sent to schools deliberately located far from their parents with visits discouraged, denied, or severely limited, they were abused in almost every way imaginable, housed in appalling conditions, and used for experiments or even malnourished deliberately to create a ‘control group’ that allowed other less unlucky kids to provide glowing comparative statistics for government reports. When they died, by the dozens, scores, and hundreds at any of five dozen residential schools across the huge country, they were buried and forgotten, records filed away and periodically tossed as the program went on for decades and decades. When (or if) they graduated, they faced a new hell, unable to go back to the reservation because they had been forbidden to use their language for a decade and could not communicate, and unable to get jobs in the cities because while they had learned English or French, they were far behind the educational levels of non-Indigenous job seekers, and faced racism as well. So for nearly a century in this country, we made it a law that children on reservations (often hidden when the government men would arrive) needed to be educated far away from Indigenous culture for most of their childhood, turning them into abused, confused, undereducated teens who could no longer even understand their parents, if they made it that far.
I find I have more curiosity about this now than I did before reading the Wikipedia article, and I’ll probably learn more from other sources. Patriotism sometimes means accepting that your country was very horribly wrong and understanding that progress in general is a great sum of good things we see and bad things we often don’t. We’re shocked at the recent discovery of bodies buried in unmarked mass graves on or near to the former sites of the residential schools, but we shouldn’t be: we spent seven years on a Truth and Reconciliation Commission and established a permanent library at the University of Manitoba to keep all the Commission’s records, findings, and new research. It’s been known for some time that many, many children went into these places and never came out: the only question is how many, with estimates from 3200 to 30,000 of the roughly 150,000 kids who attended the schools. That it is only now becoming an issue because ground-penetrating radar is being used to find the buried bodies only indicates that you can spend millions on a five-year Commission and educate nobody.
Canada Day celebrations today [this was written in 2021] are subdued because of these grisly discoveries that are finally getting the story out. I don’t support canceling Canada Day, as some places have done, but it is right and fitting that we recognize this part of our history. One of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (sadly, very few of their recommendations have been completed or even begun) was to establish a national holiday of remembrance, which has been done: September 30 (young Indigenous children were taken to the schools annually around this time) is National Day for Truth and Recociliation, better known as Orange Shirt Day, named for a story told by a survivor who said that her grandmother bought her a new orange shirt to go to school in. Upon arrival, the shirt was taken from her and she never saw it again.
Writing is something I do a lot of, editing not so much. If you are prone to the TL:DR* comment, go watch a video on YouTube, the stuff posted here will not interest you. I'd rather read something than watch something and I hate seeing sites switch to video.
* TL:DR stands for 'too long; didn't read.' For someone who struggles to get words and phrases and sentences to fit together, the only comeback to that lazy slam is DILLIGAF, which you'll have to look up on Wikipedia....
That's all for now. I'll put the date of the latest update at the bottom of this page so you can see what's happened.
Last update: September 23, 2024 (at least, the last time I updated and scrolled down to the end to change this line......)