Author Archives: L. G. William Chapman, B.A., LL.B.

About L. G. William Chapman, B.A., LL.B.

Past President, Mississippi Masonic Hall Inc.; Past Master (by demit) of Mississippi Lodge No. 147, A.F. and A.M., G.R.C. (in Ontario) Chartered by the Grand Lodge of Canada July 20, 1861; Don, Devonshire House, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario; Juris Doctor, Dalhousie Law School, Halifax, Nova Scotia; Bachelor of Arts (Philosophy), Glendon Hall, York University, Toronto, Ontario; Old Boy (House Captain, Regimental Sgt. Major, Prefect and Head Boy), St. Andrew's College, Aurora, Ontario.

Upriver across the meadow

Undeniably it soothes the languid persuasion of sustained contemplation and meditation that today is Sunday, a day traditionally devoted to what might more aptly be called the private adherences of the week, including for example select (perhaps sacerdotal) music and literature (such as Jane Austen). I am foremost engaged in the opening act of breakfast, a superior event which to me is as common and repetitive as matins and vespers once were. Curiously my selection of breakfast and Sunday morning domesticity has altered over time (but only the nature not the substance). The paramount absorption of my immediate environment – an immersion of both topical and temporal singularity – is the view upriver across the meadow.

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Canada Day Saturday, July 1st, 2023

Maintaining as I do an overall idle distraction throughout the day – a civility and mental avidity which I reluctantly confess is wont more often than I care to admit to commence as late as 11:00 am after the appearance of a good night’s rest – it is no enormous deprivation on occasion to encounter a prolonged rainy day. This at least would be the standard accommodation. When however the day about which one opines is more than a mere midsummer’s day but instead Canada’s National Holiday, the hardship is somewhat less dissoluble. Watching the combined effort and effect of the wind and the rain amounts to a dramatic and strategic attack upon the evident nature of the coast-to-coast celebration of higher estimation.

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Featured image

There is mounting controversy surrounding the authenticity, legitimacy and veracity of any number of assertions on the World Wide Web. Nor should it be entirely surprising that there is a growing dispute regarding many of our more popular social opinions, things like religion, political propriety and what if anything can be done to make America great again.

The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling information to be shared over the Internet through simplified ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT “specialists” and hobbyists, as well as documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet according to specific rules, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).

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Favourites Mix

Years ago when I began subscribing to Apple Music I hadn’t any practical concept of its algorithms. That was the introduction of Apple Music’s treasury of music available to the public at what then seemed a remarkably digestible price (compared to the cost of purchasing a fresh CD).

Algorithm: late 17th century (denoting the Arabic or decimal notation of numbers): variant (influenced by Greek arithmos number) of Middle English algorism, via Old French from medieval Latin algorismus. The Arabic source, al-Ḵwārizmī the man of Ḵwārizm (now Khiva), was a name given to the 9th-century mathematician Abū Ja‘far Muhammad ibn Mūsa, author of widely translated works on algebra and arithmetic.

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Start anew

Since last November 2nd when we unloaded our domestic possessions at Riverfront Estates, it has been a cycle of change and anticipation as we have sought to complete the establishment our new residential platform.  Granted the alteration from 100 Jamieson Street to 225 Johanna Street was temporarily thwarted by our jaunt to Key Largo for six months. But now we are once again completing the annual cycle. This means finalizing the routine rituals; viz., annual physical checkups, teeth cleanings and check-ups; eye examinations; hearing aid check-ups; and in this instance managing a new left knee replacement.

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Uncommon preserve

I should have known something was off beam when I awoke after 5:00 o’clock this morning without having already taken my usual handful of analgesics. This was a signal to me that I had survived an uncharacteristically long period of both dormancy and abeyance since my last dose. What made it more curious was that, knowing this suspension, I determined nonetheless to hang fire. I would reserve whatever palliative there was for a later moment (an admittedly unusual accommodation and deprivation on my part). Objection to anodyne is not normally something I undertake for any disputed purpose. My incarnation does not derive its strength from long-endured abstraction.

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Midsummer Wednesday June 21, 2023

There is I suspect a lot of ambitious though shiftless chat on the internet about Midsummer, no doubt some of it concerning its putatively lascivious nature and its patent evolution from springtime and rebirth and the multitude of poetic details arising from Nature’s calendar contribution to our daily life experience. The depth of enquiry may allude for example to moderately disturbing assertions similar to those surrounding the May pole and school children dancing around it.

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The personal option

It is fairly assured that before I undertake even something as quotidian as a late afternoon mug of chilled espresso coffee while perched at my writing desk overlooking the meandering Mississippi River I shall succeed to invest the daily enterprise with sufficient personal option to warrant an attribution beyond nondescript or mundane. There percolates from within the agricultural panorama a variety of colours, birds and plants.  Already portions of the realm are blotted by ramblng vegetation and row-upon-row of cultivated seeds. It is a long-awaited sequel to a lifetime devoted to bog-standard. I have always preferred the brushes of colour from weeds in the field or along the side of a dusty country road; and the placid river water, capturing blotches of shimmering reflection.

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Hard not to see where that comes from!

Father’s Day is Sunday, June 18th, 2023. Whether or not you still have a living father to whom to accredit your habits, good and bad, appearance and traits of personality, more likely than not some of the recognition – perhaps at times even more than we care to acknowledge – evolves from the paternal influence. Curiously much of the parental mastery goes predominantly unnoticed for much of the child’s existence at least until late in life. But eventually we all awaken to the indisputable defining characteristics, some of which may broaden further than we would prefer to have imagined. It is indeed true that “what is bred in the bone will out in the flesh”.

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