Ian on Sunday

Teaching beyond the ordinary run of our lives When we are young, if we are lucky, we meet a person who opens our minds to the infinite possibilities of life in this wondrous world.

The quiet sport Not many people guess right when asked “What is the most popular sport in the world?”

The complex value of the wordI love poetry. It is the quiet passion of my life.

Home is a lovely place In Canada it is just getting cool and the trees are filling with greenish gold and a darkening red as the beautiful season of fall begins to decorate the landscape.

Greed brings down a nation In the 1987 film “Wall Street”, ruthless stock trader Gordon Gecko, played by Michael Douglas, famously declared “Greed is Good.”

Victory at all costs? An old sporting argument – good for many lovely hours of intense discussion and fervent discussion – surfaces every now and then.

A bigger threat than terror We have to look forward to a long and terrible age of increasing and fearsome devastation. 

The whole point is not to talk or think I avoid as far as I can any party, club, reception or event when or where rap music is likely to be predominant.

Unsung heroes In the last month I have enjoyed watching the Olympics from majestic opening to colourful and tumultuous closing and between those spectacular bookends have seen an endless display of compelling competitive excellence.

A festival Caricom badly needed Carifesta X was a splendid and significant success.

Illth Absurdly, we still take for granted that Gross Domestic Product is an accurate measure of success and well-being in a nation, so that if GDP is increasing we think we must be doing better.

Put poetry on the buses I favour the reintroduction of public transportation.

Will any record ever go unbroken? It seems impossible that Michael Phelps’s record of winning fourteen Olympic gold medals, with more to come in London in 2012 when he will only be 27, will ever be broken.

In an article reviewing Kasia Boddy’s book Boxing: A Cultural History the American writer Joyce Carol Oates quotes from that dark, unsettling philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Every talent must unfold itself in fighting.”

An Olympic memory I am the ultimate sports junkie. If games were abolished by some satanic world dictator I would be almost as lost as if he banned all books.