The Highwayman:

When the last of the little chocolate bandits have finished their looting and gone home, I like to pour myself a soothing libation, settle down in a comfortable chair and read something spooky. It should be something that will spark my imagination.

Most likely to trigger the spooky mindset of Hallowe'en for me is a poem written away back before the turn of the 20th Century. It was nicely crafted by Alfred Noyes, a Brit with a dark and foreboding imagination.

For the benefit of those who have forgotten their high school reading assignments, The Highwayman is a tale of love and heroics from the days when robbing horse-drawn carriages and delivery wagons was a viable occupation. Apparently it was regarded with some measure of heroism by people like the Innkeeper's beautiful daughter.

In the verse, Noyes builds a spine-chilling scene on a moonlit night when the lawmen of the day lay a trap for the highwayman using the girl as bait. It all comes to a gruesome conclusion against a spooky backdrop of intermittent moonlight.

The Highwayman can be accessed on the web.

Warning: Find a quiet corner in your home and give your own imagination free rein when you read it. Ignore the accompanying film clips offered. They mostly feature sound tracks voiced by people with no feel for horses, gorgeous women or sixteenth century lifestyles.

King Canute?:

Our great leader was out there promising to change the climate in the Arctic according to the electronic media. 

The film clip showed Trudeau posturing and vigorously glad-handing the folk in Nunavut while promising to save their ices by bringing Global Warming to a halt.

And even as he spoke, the folk in the Prairie provinces were shovelling early October snow for the second week in a row with still more promised for Manitoba and parts of northern Ontario.

Impressive, what? I didn't know politicians can do that.

Children's Crusade?

When I was a small kid, we all worried about what Adolf Hitler was going to do next.

When my kids were growing up, they worried about what the Soviet Union and the US would do if some sleepy technician misinterpreted a radar screen signal and panicked. We all feared the A-bomb, then the H-bomb.

Apparently, today's kids had nothing much to worry about, so the media, together with junk science, sponsored by politicians from the United Nations, have given them Global Warming and Climate Change to agonize over.

When you see the hatred and emotional involvement on the faces of kids like that little girl from Sweden, it becomes clear that a great social injustice is being dumped on this generation. They are being programmed to agonize over a hoax.

Shouldn't people like CBC's David Suzuki and Al Gore be held to blame for inserting apocalyptic trash into little kids' minds? 

Who benefits?

Hounding Trump:

So some mysterious insider in the Whitehouse is rumoured to have some information on the president's allegedly inappropriate conversation with the Ukrainian leader and the hard-left US media is salivating at the chance to fire him out of office in any way they can..

Wow! And here we thought that our leadership problems here in Canada were stupid.