Building the Pink House

The Pink House house is made of rammed earth, and heated by geothermal energy – through in-floor water pipes. The floor is concrete, which is the best conductor for in-floor. The heating is supplemented by a Tempcast masonry stove, the latter the greenest cheapest way to heat a house, its radiant heat used in pre-electricity Europe. For the first year, we only used the masonry stove, and it kept us warm, despite the 12 foot walls, and massive central hall.

The cost savings of geo-thermal were substantially less than advertised.

Poisoner-in-Chief

September 23, 2019

Yesterday and wonderfully friends expressed concern for my well-being after my publishing a blog post about my mother’s persecution at the hands of Dr. Evil. We’ve known what happened to her since the ’80s, and the story of MKUltra and psychiatric experimentation on the vulnerable has had considerable exposure, albeit mostly in the world of the clinically paranoid. Nevertheless, there is solid documentation available. Recently, the Guardian, Politico, Publishers Weekly, NPR, ...

Rolling in the Deep

September 21, 2019

I have been absent of late, despite recovering from a Chronic Fatigue relapse, which in itself is triumph enough, feeling healthy, picking up the strands of life I still want, dumping others – it’s a salutary task – highly recommended. So as a reward, the universe delivered my mother’s psychiatric records. Not all of them, but some of them, enough for me to reconstruct my childhood memories. My mother, Virginia Elizabeth Hooker Nickson, ...

E. Jean Carroll’s Bitter Feminism

June 23, 2019

One has to feel sorry for E. Jean Carroll, shot for the cover of New York Magazine in her mid-70’s, in an attitude of hollow-eyed raddled misery, wearing a coat dress that has seen better decades. Her mood resembles an African who has watched her entire village raped then killed, rather than a famous writer who has lived her entire life sipping on cocaine and Moet Chandon and having zipless encounters with horrible men like Donald ...

June 8, 2019

Reading this might Save your Life: the Vagus Nerve and the end to Mysterious Illness. Elizabeth NicksonJun 3 I am 85% recovered from a Chronic Fatigue relapse. Which means I have recovered twice. Which makes me anomalous. Traditional medicine claims a cure of 6%, and functional medicine which combines alternative with hard-core science has been able to “cure” 60% of patients, but mostly in part. There are many others like me, but we are decidedly in ...

The Commies Among Us

June 2, 2019

This weekend it was brought home once again, just how tolerant of a genocidal and vicious ideology we have become. The London Sunday Times tongue-bathed the Labour Shadow Chancellor, an admitted Marxist, up one side and down the other. John McDonnell put on the charm and went ’round the City on a tea offensive telling them not to worry, he won’t totally eviscerate their funds, but change it is a-coming. I’m quoting extensively ...

Reading this Might Save your Life

June 2, 2019

The modern physician should know as much about emotions and thoughts as about disease symptoms and drugs. This approach would appear to hold more promise of cure than anything medicine has given us to date Hans Selye I am 85% recovered from a Chronic Fatigue relapse. Which means I have recovered twice. Which makes me anomalous. Traditional medicine claims a cure of 6%, and functional medicine which combines alternative with hard-core science has been ...

An Exciting Week in the World of Wimmen

May 4, 2019

Languishing on my bed last week, like millions of others I happened upon Brene Brown’s Netflix talk. Brown, like Jordan Peterson, is a data-driven social scientist forced into the public square, in her case, by a Ted talk in which she admitted she’d had a breakdown when she realized that vulnerability was the key to just about everything. Five million views and a lot of embarrassment later, she emerged a star. Brown ...

MKULTRA, Mind Control, and My Momma

April 20, 2019

I signed onto a class-action lawsuit last week, for the first time in my life, unusual because I am fiercely independent and prefer to just out-live the slings and arrows. Proud too, I guess because there have been many insults if I think about them – which I can’t because my spiritual discipline demands that I not only forgive you, but I forget you ever existed. (This works btw). But this one, this is ...

The Nap Ministry

April 12, 2019

The only publication I subscribe to is Bon Appetit, which is a lively little Conde Nasty rag which delivers a lot for $2 a month. There is a nest in the staff of radical people of color whose effusions I sometimes enjoy, despite the accusatory hate leveled at filthy white people like me. This week they published a story about the Nap Ministry, an outfit in Georgia, that promotes the nap as necessity, ...

The Death of the Old Way

April 9, 2019

(This was published in the Globe and Mail a few years ago. I’m writing about the same culture again, so wanted to archive it for myself. Plus, it’s a great book review, if I do say so myself) I sometimes think I had the last Victorian childhood in existence, growing up among the Anglo-Protestant clans of Old Montreal. We’re pretty much a diaspora now, clinging to the wreckage, which is all right, things as ...

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