What goes on behind the scenes
Originally started on Steemit, summarizing the original BBC article and adding a much broader perspective from talking with Chinese-Canadians in Vancouver. Cross-posted on Medium. China is creating a new social credit system to rate citizens’ trust. “By 2020, everyone in China will be enrolled in a vast national database that compiles fiscal and government information, …
… aaaand “home”. I say this both since Poland certainly is this for me, and because of the relief I feel for writing up the final of my Baltic blogs: Latvia, Lithuania, and Belarus done, it’s time to head to the a country as homely to me as my native Canada. About a week out …
Fresh out of Vilnius, our cousin took us on a genealogical adventure retracing the steps of our great-grandparents to where her sister now lives, in a tiny hamlet just outside the village of Svir in northern Belarus. We paused there for a few days to take in the atmosphere of a forest cottage where the …
October 5th: a day out of Riga and we immediately head out on a 4h bus ride for Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital. That evening we’re already at the National Olympic Committee office downtown on the river Neris, where Lina Vaisetaitė is ready to greet us. Lina has a very impressive CV, with posts as a university …
Last fall I traveled with my sister through northeastern Europe, convincing her to turn her Euro tour into a genealogical and semi-professional adventure. In under two weeks we powered through Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius, Minsk, Kaliningrad, and Gdańsk, getting a smattering of flavour throughout as we inhaled our way through the Baltic States. Genealogy and culture …
Bloodsport (1988, 92m, 6.8, 33|74%) is a cult martial arts action film made in the typical American Hollywood style, where the lines delineating good and evil are simple and audiences gather to either watch the fight scenes or the cute hero. It portrays the now-tired storyline of the young Westerner trained by an exotic, mysterious …
The past decade or so I’ve gotten into some real deep identity-, ethnicity-, and — more recently — genealogy-diving. I was extremely lucky in my search, the timing of it coinciding with the advent of the Internet as a true publicly accessible technology. I started with Poland but very quickly found myself in Germany, Israel, …
I am often asked why I’m so into family tree research, why I’m as deep into it as I am, why my research is so comprehensive and far-reaching as possible. Why not just plan for the future and let generations past stay buried where they are — what’s the point, anyway? Sometimes I’m asked rudely, …
After wrapping up my sport psychology MSc, I’ve returned to work in Vancouver to continue paying off student loans. That in itself is a different discussion: why does our current system so often leave our brightest, freshest, most enthusiastic and most prepared minds saddled with so much debt? Wouldn’t they be of more benefit to …
Christopher Moyer is a counselling psychologist who specializes in the niche field that is where massage therapy and psychology intersect. I had already cited him in my thesis without realizing he had only started blazing trails in the field. When the RMTABC recommended I check out more of his work, I was thrilled to find …
A Patriotic Man (Isänmaallinen mies, 2013, 97m, 6.3) is a Finnish comedy-drama following one man’s journey in balancing morality with patriotism while complicit in a serious doping conspiracy, loosely based on a true true scandal. It centres on Finnish Nordic skiers’ doping strategy to come out on top after a few years of unsuccessful results …
I just received an invitation to watch a neat video from a friend I made while still active in our university Polish-Canadian cultural association during undergraduate years. I was initially wary of the lightsaber battle because that’s just been waaay overdone, but when I realized the metaphor behind it, it suddenly didn’t seem as bad. …