You may wonder what these three topics have in common. As it turns out, nothing at all other than they were all topics of presentations I was involved in over the last year.

In October 2017 Loretta Phinney and I did a combined presentation at St. Stephen’s on the Hill, Mississauga which described our ascents of a very different “hill”. My presentation focused on a self-directed five day budget-rate climb of Africa’s largest mountain which I did with three friends in the early 1970s (see photo of the February 1973 Kilimanjaro ice cap below).

Loretta’s presentation, very well illustrated by a large number of excellent photos, summarized her eight day climb to the summit of Kilimanjaro with an organized tour group in the spring of 2017.

In February 2018 I presented another in my series of history based lectures at Florida Gulf Coast University’s Renaissance Academy in Punta Gorda. This one was titled “Unique Perspectives on the War of 1812”.  I had a lot of fun providing the primarily American audience with a balanced take on that war which turned out to be quite different from what is generally taught in US schools.

In June 2018, again at St. Stephens on-the-Hill in Mississauga, I delivered a presentation on the Canadian artist William Kurelek who, in 1965, had created a painting depicting the story of Zacchaeus in the tree surrounded by the St. Stephens church and its congregation.