The Best News - For All World

We've all heard of a pride of lions and a gaggle of geese, but a parade of swans? Only in Stratford, Ontario, and only in the spring. It happens every April a few weeks before the opening of the theatre season, the festival that put this town on the map. When the Stratford swans are paraded into the Avon River to resume the life aquatic, it's no ordinary dunking. Because these are no ordinary birds. In a throwback to their elite heritage, Stratford's herd of thirty or so British and Polish swans lead a life of privilege and ease. In 1154, English King Richard Lionheart decreed swans were royal birds that nobody was permitted to own, hunt or eat without permission from the king. Apart from their kind of loutish disposition, there's not much medieval about these swans. They spend the winter in a modern barn behind the hockey arena (we're in Canada, remember) where they have their own pool, two squawk-prone Chinese geese as security guards, and a special high-protein ...

I remember in 2010, before I knew my future lay in Canada, I was in Scotland enjoying my Canadian friend's pride over hosting the Winter Olympics. One detail that twigged my attention at the time was the fact that snow was being trucked to the slopes surrounding Vancouver, because it was unusually warm that winter and they desperately needed it for the alpine events. When I asked whether or not trucking in snow was commonplace in Canada, I got a clear and uncompromising response: no, this was freakish, an uncommon practice born out of bad natural luck. In 2015, as a resident of North Vancouver, I climbed the very same slopes that hosted those Olympic Games. I marvelled at the beauty, the clean air, and the warmth. I was deeply at peace, except for one unavoidable reality -- it was mid-February, temperatures were in the high teens and the slopes were as bare as could be expected in high summer. The limited snowfall of 2010 has been bested by this year's total failure to deliver ...

When people say that love and hate are two sides of the same coin they aren't wrong. Intense feelings of love and of loathing have something significant in common: they both involve a powerful psychological attachment to the object of these emotions. When someone feels strongly toward another person -- be it love or hate -- it means that they're carrying the other person around in their psyche and can't let them go. Strong feelings of love or hate signify an intense connection, this connection being the result of one person having inadvertently stirred up some deep, primal emotions in the other person. When someone in the public eye chooses to engage in vitriolic attacks on another public figure, it reveals more about him and his character than it does about the supposed shortcomings of the person on the receiving end of the attack. In truth, whenever someone feels compelled to go out of their way to attack another person in a public forum, it's because this person carr...

At a time where we as a planet are often said to be disconnected, it is once again art that brings us back to remember what is important. We are a world filled with nature, humans, and animals. All of whom have a beating heart and magic the other can learn from. But the pace we are on to achieve, to make it happen, and to survive disables many to actually stop and breathe. To take stock of the living things and energy around us that can bring us the very happiness we all so seek. Do we need a reminder of this? There is a once in a lifetime experience happening now, and it is Cavalia's larger-than-life production Odysseo . Celebrating their 800th performance earlier this week, audiences are currently being wowed by a display of "horse human collective artistry" infused with jaw dropping special effects. Imagine 45 riders, acrobats, aerialists and musicians working in tandem with 70 horses in an environment that makes you forget where you are. Reviews have been stellar, and...