Columns

THE SCRATCHY NEEDLE 007: Best Campfire Songs

Scratchy Needle 2y

\ 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 005: Music to Murder By

Scratchy Needle 2y

\ 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

Scratchy Needle 1

\ 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 001: Mary Had A Little Copyright Problem

Scratchy Needle 2

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!

Opening Act by Gary 17
May 16, 1994, to-nite

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…