Flashback: Pete Seeger name-checks Bob Dylan
Dollar store deals, getting medieval and more
Bargains on basics
The discount store Dollarama is planning to build a new distribution centre near Calgary and open hundreds of new outlets across Canada, the Canadian Press reported recently. CP noted that the chain's price points "tend to be lower."
Dollar stores — where items often cost literally one dollar — were still new in 1993, when the CBC business show Venture looked at coupon usage and other shopping trends. Host Robert Scully said Canadians had become bargain-hungry hagglers.
"I've discovered dollar stores, and I started buying some of my basics there," said one woman. Another savings tip: "Crafty shoppers know that a commissioned salesperson has become fair game for a haggle," said Scully.
Music with meaning
Among those also portrayed in the new movie, A Complete Unknown, about young Bob Dylan is his folk elder Pete Seeger. "Seeger was deliberately trying to use folk music to feed activist causes," wrote CBC Entertainment's Jackson Weaver in a recent review.
Pete Seeger spoke and performed often on CBC-TV in the 1960s, according to the catalogue for our TV library. In February 1965, he was a guest on the current affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days. (A day earlier, he went skating on an outdoor rink and performed at Massey Hall, according to the Toronto Star.)
When host Patrick Watson remarked there was often social commentary in folk music, Seeger agreed. "The words have got some meat in them," he told Watson. "With almost every folk singer I know — Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Harry Belafonte — all of them, I think, think of a song as saying something."
Medieval times
The just-published 2025 CBC Arts Trend Forecast predicts the year's themes in arts and culture. "The middle ages, or at least our fantasies of medieval Europe, have already stormed the gates of our collective imagination and will only continue to influence culture in the year to come," said a piece on one trend.
Chainmail is specifically referenced, meaning Ottawa armourer Bill Fedun was ahead of his time by more than 30 years (or behind it by about 500 years). Back in 1994, a report on CBC's Midday profiled his work with the Society for Creative Anachronism as they went deep into the dark ages.
For one club member, it wasn't just about knights. "I like to reproduce the clothes that they wore at the court," she said. "There's also calligraphy, illumination, parchment-making, cooking. There's a lot of different aspects to it."
Game for anything
A student in electromechanical engineering in London, Ont., has unofficially beat the Guinness World Record for building the world's tiniest arcade machine, CBC News reported this month. For the project, she chose a video game that CBC viewers learned all about in 1976: Pong.
Aces high
Snoopy's imaginary air battles with the Red Baron — the Peanuts pup's alter ego was a First World War pilot — are the focus of a current exhibit at the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada in Winnipeg. CBC News was there when some real-life flying aces reunited in Paris in 1981.
Special delivery
Before the mail strike ended last week, CBC Radio's Cost of Living looked at a man who made a side hustle for himself by launching a substitute delivery service. In 1982, CBC News reported on an alternative to Canada Post in Prince Albert, Sask.
Money matters
Among the headlines that emerged from last week's fall economic statement: Terry Fox will be the new face of the $5 bill. Farewell to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, who was put on the bill as part of a 1969 exercise in acknowledging our prime ministers.
