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Protected: The H-Files 001 - Welcome to Club Meds!
Columns
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 007: Best Campfire Songs
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ It doesn’t matter if you are a guitar teacher with two students living in small town Ontario, a lead guitar player in a local bar band in a big city like Toronto or if you just won a Juno last week for playing forty years of Heavy Metal…
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 006: Thank You For Mentioning Canada in Canadian Songs
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ In celebration of Canada’s 150th Anniversary, I have put together a list of songs that mention Canada in their lyrics and that are written and sung by Canadians. It is fascinating to note that many classic songs that mention the actual word “Canada” were in fact penned by…
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 005: Music to Murder By
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ I have murder on mind lately, not because I particularly feel like killing anyone, but because I ran across a YouTube video of an Alfred Hitchcock album I used to love as a ten-year old called Alfred Hitchcock Presents Music to Be Murdered By. This wonderful 1958 novelty…
The Scratchy Needle 004: Living The Handmaid’s Tale Dream
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ “The Handmaid’s Tale” has been on my mind a lot lately, not just because I have been a fan of Margaret Atwood’s brilliant dystopian novel since I first reviewed it in 1985, but mainly because I am sitting, where I sit every day, in one of the skeletal…
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 003: The everlasting aroma of the Perfumatic at The Horseshoe Tavern
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ For me, the penultimate artifact at the Horseshoe Tavern was the Perfumatic machine that was a permanent fixture in the cavernous Women’s washroom located in the basement —second only to the condom machine in the Men’s room, which I have never seen. The Perfumatic was a suitcase sized…
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 002: No Sex, Prescription Drugs and the Hard Rock’s death rattle
\ By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca \ The news on “the longest street” is that the Hard Rock Café at Dundas Square (279 Yonge Street) is closing at the end of May 2017. This is not that much of a heart-wrenching handwringer for those of us who barely cared in the first place when it…
THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 001: Mary Had A Little Copyright Problem
By Donna Lypchuk for TorontoMoon.ca Mary had a little lamb —but not for dinner in Greektown with a bit of cumin, tzatziki and a nice Pinot Noir. Instead, she brought one to school in the 1830s, where it made the children laugh and play in Worcester County, Massachusetts, USA, which to this day still only…
Vault post focus: 20 years later I feel exactly the same!
The following post, which I put up in the Vault section of the TorontoMoon.ca website in March of this year, is of a column I published on May 16,1994, exactly 20 years ago today, when this publication was still very young. It outlines my concept of “Upwing Politics”, which seems very relevant two decades later…
Opening Act by Gary 17, to-nite #24, May 16, 2022 “The Politics of Celebration”
From the very, very deep archives, one of my earliest “Opening Act” columns when the publication, then known as to-nite, had just turned two years old and was starting to hit its stride back in the spring of 1994. (Normally posts in the Vault sections of the website are blocked to non-subscribers, but I want…
