Nose Counting, Nose Picking: What's the Difference?

How much does the census cost us?

And what do we get for our dollar?

The answers are these: A lot, millions, who knows. And, not much, damn little, warmed over folk tales.

Who didn't know that there is every kind of "family" these days? Truth is, there always was.

All those years that saps were eating up "Father knows best," the neighbourhood was filled with single parents, blended families, bachelors and old maids, gay couples, menages and who knows what other arrangement human beings have been concocting since we crossed the dessert and moved into town.

So many people get depressed at Christmas. They are lonely. They see the beer commercial with the Clydesdales dashing through he snow past the lovely cottage in the woods with the fire from the hearth within glowing.

Get a life! This is a beer commercial! It is fiction.

Where I grew up in the north end of Winnipeg, a so-called "normal" family was a science exhibit.

Remember the war? Half the dads and uncles had been killed. And the ones who came back were alcoholics.