And a hundred or so other Air Cadet pilots, at our graduation ceremony. To celebrate to 50th anniversary of the RCAF, special guests were brought in to pin the wings on the graduating pilots at ceremonies around Canada. Ontario got the Prince of Wales, the Maritimes got Chuck Yeager. Usually Ontario gets the special treatment in Canada, but as newly minted pilots, having the first (official) man to break the sound barrier and decorated WWII fighter pilot decorate us, I think we all agreed that we won out that day!

Joseph Campbell's Masks of God series and the Hero with a Thousand Faces and Marshall McLuhan's Gutenberg Galaxy were life-changers for me. Campbell showed how all cultures use the same basic myth structures and the same elements can be found in all stories ever told. He also helped me understand a point my religious studies prof in uni told me; myths are stories where it doesn't matter whether it is true or not. Their value are as frameworks and models through which to see the world and help life make sense. McLuhan helped me to see how the tools and technologies that we invent and use change the very way that we think. You cannot separate our culture from the medium needed to transmit and sustain it. And it's the unspoken constraints and limitations of those technologies that limit and define what our civilization can become.