George Case's Blog

There was a revealing detail in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech before the Munich Security Conference on February 14.  Widely interpreted as a conciliatory message to Europeans rattled by the America-First aggressions of the Trump administration, Rubio assured the attendees that the United States and Europe “are bound to one another by the […]

My oddest experience with Freedom to Read Week, the annual anti-censorship campaign observed in Canada from February 22 to February 28 this year, came during my stint in a Vancouver book shop.  I was enlisted to collect a stack of titles to put in the storefront display along with a poster and other bumf announcing […]

While February 14 is a special day for couples and the courting, the commercialized hype of romance represented by Valentine’s Day may be unwelcome to involuntary singles and the otherwise lovelorn. Fortunately, perhaps, there are lots of classic musical expressions that capture the heartache of lost or unrequited loves – and perhaps, for the length […]

In November 1975 I was eight years old, growing up in my home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Canada. There was a huge storm one night that month, and I recall an elder calling me in from my yard in the evening, as small branches were beginning to blow off of trees. The next day […]

I’m happy to say that after a long battle, I’ve triumphed over addiction. Years of heavy, heavy substance abuse almost took me down, but I can now report that I’ve bounced back stronger and better than ever. The least I can do today is to pass on what I’ve learned from this fight, and hope […]

Vanity Fair magazine is still relevant.  A piece by Chris Whipple in its December 2025 issue quoted Susie Wiles, Chief of Staff in the Donald Trump White House, and her candid revelations of Trump’s character (the POTUS has “an alcoholic’s personality,” she said) and other inside dirt (veep J.D. Vance has been “a conspiracy theorist […]

Any list of literature’s greatest war novels will probably include some familiar titles: Steven Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet On the Western Front, and Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, say, along with Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, and maybe Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. But all […]

Some music means so much to me that I not only follow the artists, play the songs, and even try to learn them on my guitar, but I’ll depict the works visually. Of course lots of music has been set to movies or videos, or represented by album covers and 45-RPM single sleeves, but this […]

In previous years I have posted a recurring speculation that the annual consumerist frenzy sometimes designated Christmas may eventually become extinct; perhaps that end has arrived sooner than I expected. But the pandemic of 2020-2022 might actually have rendered obsolete only the most traditional rituals of the December festival – warm gatherings of families in […]