Things you do not have to tell a CFL fan 101:

Amazing morning speaking to local high school students about the history of Canadian football. Many thanks to the history departments of J F Ross CI and the University of Guelph for organizing the workshops and to all the students who attended.

Reserve tickets – Freedom Seekers Symposium: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond – Wisconsin Historical Society Freedom Seekers Symposium: Stories of Black Liberation in the American Revolutionary Era and Beyond – Wisconsin Historical Society, Thu Apr 23, 2026 - This event is free and open to the public! ...

If you are in Madison tomorrow, please come to our Freedom Seekers exhibition and lecture. The exhibition will be up in the lobby of the Wisconsin Historical Society for ten days. www.tickettailor.com/events/freed...

How sweet it is!

With thanks to @estaitis.bsky.social from whom (on another platform) I ripped this off.

A paper on livestock judging was not something I anticipated receiving for the "history of sport at the University of Guelph" research paper on my sports history course, but the student did a brilliant job. Possibly the Guelphiest paper I've ever graded!

Today I learned -- courtesy of a research paper by one of my Canadian Sports History first-year students -- that fencing was a sport at the Ontario Agricultural College (now part of the University of Guelph) in the early 1920s in which both men and women students participated.

Geoff Crain was the Argos' first-round draft pick in 1953 but signed with Winnipeg. It was the second Big Four draft, which in those days served as an all-you-can-sign smorgasbord for WIFU teams (a key issue leading to the formation of the CFC in 1956).

Long may all fascists think so.

"explain to Trump" 😂

"Last year it was revealed LIV ... had lost more than $1.1bn since it was established in 2021."

Saudi oil revenues replenished that sum of money many times over in the time it took me to type this. If PIF is cutting LIV adrift it has nothing whatsoever to do with profits and losses.

@eamonlynch.bsky.social today on why US golf fans spurned LIV (now LXXII): "Fans don't like their traditions messed with. In any sport."
Sound familiar, CFL fans?

We need historians because history is too important and potent a public and civic trust to be surrendered into the clutches of self-interested politicians, profit-obsessed media companies or the grandees and corporations who buy and sell them.

We need historians to teach and train others to be historians, and to subject the work of historians to the critical evaluation and validation that only our fellow experts, who have been there and done that, can provide.

⤵️

His playing partner, the course setup, the draw and the press. When you lead the kind of life where police officers are disciplined for arresting you, it's bound to go to your head.

The education system is a vast organism. But certainly I see no educational value in anything that involves a student in relying on any intelligence other than their own.

Wow: they really don't want anyone to listen, do they?

Peter Magyar has offered a template which can be used, without too much alteration, in defeating populists worldwide

open.substack.com/pub/iandunt/...

The atrocious field conditions in the "Mud Bowl" Grey Cup game of 1950 neutralized Jacobs but afterwards he refused to complain, saying he didn't think better conditions would have changed the result. A landmark in (pre-)CFL sportsmanship.

Black and white photograph of a baseball game in a city park being watched by a crowd. A batter is in mid-run as the catcher reaches out to grab the ball. Fonds 200, Series 372, Subseries 52, Item 559.

Ball games have been played in Stanley Park, just east of King and Strachan, for over a century! The field was formerly on the north side of the park.

https://ow.ly/GlY150YHfXm

Definitely a record category crying out for subdivision based on where the hash marks are/were.

Typically classy of Fleetwood, hanging around to congratulate McIlroy on the green jacket - again - when Rory disappeared off the property as Tommy was winning the FedEx Cup.

I spent the whole of Friday working through student papers flagged as probably AI generated. Job more interesting? Some might think so. Job more rewarding? Hardly. Job more stressful and soul destroying? Absolutely.

Yes - Hamber was captain of the Argos that year! (and did play a game or two later)

Pud and three of his brothers played for the Argos in 1908. I'm guessing four brothers on one team is a record.

The Argos left the ORFU in 1903, as did the Ottawa Rough Riders. Ottawa switched to the QRFU to escape the Burnside rules. The Argos left because Ottawa had gone (the only reliable opponent in the union).
I need an early history of the western unions written!

For Scottish Gaelic you have Carswell's translation of the Book of Common Order, but that's going the wrong way (English to Gaelic).

All I can think of is Annals of Clonmacnoise.

A bit of a long shot, this, but does anyone out there have up-to-date contact details for my former student Adrian (Ade) Smith, whom I taught at Birkbeck and later at York on the MA and an M.Phil.?