“What lovely handwriting young man,” my Grade 5 teacher said to me way back in the Paleozoic Era. You know, back then when gasoline was thirty cents a gallon, people had rotary phones, and cursive handwriting was a mandatory part of the curriculum. As a young boomer I put my handwriting skills to good use, signing birthday cards, writing cheques and sending heartfelt letters to my girlfriends because that’s what you did in the pre-Internet days before texting.

Eight years after their scheduled showing (which was cancelled due to concerns over their provenance), the Vancouver Art Gallery has finally released ten controversial oil sketches attributed to the Group of Seven’s J.E.H. MacDonald. It's controversial because while Toronto collectors Ephry and Melvin Merkur gifted the sketches to the gallery in 2015, and while the gallery’s senior curator authenticated them at the time, others doubted their authenticity.

The smoke is clearing as 18-year-old Ben Shugar emerges from the live fire training facility on Pender Island. He’s tired but energized. “Live fire, yeah, I’m really into it,” he says. “I love the feeling. There’s so much adrenalin but you also have to take deep breaths and calm your mind so you can think clearly.” Ben and his buddies have just tackled a simulated house fire, coming to grips with heat, smoke and working in a confined space.

It was simple curiosity that drew me into the unassuming farmhouse and driveway just off Slea Head Drive on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. The sign said Beehive Huts Fahan Group. Beehive huts? What are beehive huts? And then I saw them, a group of stone huts in the shape of beehives in the middle of a rocky sheep enclosure.

June 12, 1942. Russian pilot Nadezhda Popova and her navigator Sofia Vodyanik climb into their twin-cockpit Polikarpov Po-2 biplane fueled, armed, and waiting for them at their base in eastern Russia. As members of the recently-formed, all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, their mission is to harass German units crossing the Muis and Donets Rivers in southern Ukraine.

Back in LA on a short-term contract, I grabbed my coffee from the multi-tiered shopping mall at Hollywood and Highland and ambled down the steps to the Boulevard and the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was a whirlwind of activity, the busiest part of the strip. This is where tourists gather to board the tour buses and take photos of the more recognizable five-star brass stars embedded in the terrazzo sidewalk.

Internationally recognized as one of the most important artists of his generation, 87-year-old Robert Murray, Canada’s foremost abstract sculptor, shows how ingenuity conquers the impossible in Between Earth and Sky, on view at Vancouver’s Paul Kyle Gallery until July 29. The show includes a selection of small sculptures, reliefs and drawings, demonstrating Murray’s mastery of material and technique.

The mid-1960s were heady times in rock and roll, attracting a pantheon of photographers who sometimes became as noteworthy as the talent they were following. One of the first was English photographer Barrie Wentzell. “We were out there discovering bands,” he says of the days when he worked as chief photographer for Melody Maker, an influential British music magazine that predated Rolling Stone. “Nobody was really famous, apart from the Beatles, and even they were very sweet.”