Author: Graham Long

This is the scariest time of year. And not just because the US midterms are coming up, although, let’s be honest, that doesn’t help.

So there we are then. The dust is starting to settle after Albertans delivered a (moderately) resounding no to the possibility of leaving Canada. At least for now.

I’m disappointed that so few people have asked me how they should vote in next week’s referendum. (So far, absolutely nobody, but there's still time!) But I didn’t get where I am today by letting the complete indifference of the public at large prevent me from foisting my opinions willy-nilly on an unsuspecting readership, so here I go.

There’s something weird about picking mid-October – the point in the calendar where things are about to go completely in the crapper for the next six months – as a time to give thanks.

“To everything there is a season," wrote King Solomon in his bestselling book, Ecclesiastes. Sadly, the best two seasons of 2026 are now behind us, and they’ve taken a lot of the good stuff with them.

The return of the Drayton Valley Wildcats after a lengthy hiatus has got me thinking about other fixtures of life in the 1990s that I’d like to see make a comeback. Here’s a quick rundown in no particular order.

Life moves pretty fast. Later this week it will be 25 years to the day since I was woken up by a phone call from a friend telling me to turn on the television because “they are crashing planes into the World Trade Centre.”