Loud quitting
Princess Märtha Louise of Norway has quit to work with her shaman fiancé. Christian Bluhm, the Chief Risk Officer for the Swiss bank UBS, has quit to become a professional photographer. Bluhm is not just a keen-eyed photographer; he knows how to turn a Euro as well.
But if they (for whom start-up capital isn’t a problem) can shear off in midlife and do something completely different, why can’t we?
Meanwhile…
1. On Tuesday, the world’s population passed 8 billion. This is more than three times the number of people in 1950. And by next year more people will live in India than in China. Meanwhile, one in nine people in the world doesn’t get enough food, while more than a third of our food is lost or wasted every day. Meanwhile, here in Canada, which makes up just 0.48% of the world’s population, the 38.5 million of us are no longer a tiny country, but one that’s slightly smaller than Poland and slightly bigger than Saudi Arabia.
2. If a Navy Seal can sleep in a freezing foxhole…surely we can sleep in our warm beds. Here’s how they do it and how we can too.
3. The world’s greatest salesman came from Manitoulin Island. When Harold Ritchie died in 1933 at the age of 52, Time magazine’s obituary noted: “Appendicitis was the immediate cause, but it was really overwork that did it. He talked day and night, sat up till 4 a. m. if he could get a buyer to listen to him, never walked, played golf, or took any form of exercise, ate only when he happened to think of it (and then in huge quantities).”
This week, Don Gillmor’s book on this world-famous-but-unknown-in-his-home-and-native-land character comes out as Carload Ritchie.
4. Top feeder schools into Silicon Valley. You’d expect Stanford to be there, of course, and the University of Southern California. But the University of Waterloo is #8 and the University of Toronto is #19. Here’s why.
5. One of the benefits of gender affirmation is paying for it. Montreal’s Desjardins Insurance is one of the first companies in North America to help pay for gender surgery. As part of their group benefits policies, it “enhances the coverage available through public health plans by adding coverage for expenses related to certain treatments and surgeries. These include Adam's apple surgery, vocal cord surgery, laser hair removal and, in some cases, facial surgeries and hair transplants.” According to Statistics Canada, last year one in 300 Canadians age 15 and up identified as transgender or non-binary.
6. How to pick locks. Not pick as in select; pick as in open. And I’m not talking about once with a hatpin. I’m talking about learning this as a professional skill. Schuyler Towne leads five online sessions via Atlas Obscura next month. Limited to 25 incipient pickers.
7. Things are heating up. More proof of the obvious. Just click on this chart of temperature change by country from 1880 to 2021.
8. World War I’s deadliest sniper. He had 378 confirmed kills, was gassed at Ypres, and fought at Passchendaele, the Somme, and Amiens. Francis Pegahmagabow was from an Ojibwa community near Parry Sound, Ontario. In 1916, he was awarded the Military Medal and earned two bars, becoming one of just 37 Canadians to win the Military Medal with two bars. When he returned home to Ontario, he was treated dreadfully.
9. Pretty pictures. First, from Britain’s landscape photographer of the year awards; next, from Architectural Digest, homes built into cliffs.
10. Kevin Chen wins 2nd big piano prize. Last year, the then 16-year-old Calgarian was the youngest ever winner of the Franz Liszt International Piano Competition. Then last week he won the 76th Concours de Genève. Here he is at age 9 talking about his playing – and composing.
And now for someone completely different. Bruce Springsteen plays Thunder Road live last week on Howard Stern.
Not completely different enough for you? How about Daniel Craig changing his image big-time?