Chris Wilton
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magnuspim.bsky.social
Chris Wilton
@magnuspim.bsky.social
280 followers 290 following 270 posts
🇿🇦🇨🇦 Secret wine agent, college instructor, poetic inhibitor, amateur historian. Immigrant. Arsenal. Stormers. Springboks. he/him/his
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magnuspim.bsky.social
I found this poem in a birthday text to a dear friend and thought I might give it a second life. My mother emigrated to 🇨🇦, a comet with a tail; her mother had a stroke when mine was 13; her mother emigrated as a teen from 🇮🇳 to 🇿🇦، with her mother, indentured, 2 women alone. I cook to hear them.
My Mothers Echo for Gabe, on her day March 13, 2023 We are an echo Of the dreams that send us. I remember my mother singing As we drove into the sun Her voice unbounding my life Bouncing off the rock face Of Chapman's Peak Like a blind person's cane As she sang her being here. And her echo, her mother's voice Calling out from the back room as she fell Shaking the house down Bursting the doors open Sending my mother flying Like an arrow into the sun. And her mother's voice, wary amongst the waves battering the hull of the ship An abalone shell sailing her far from home, Sold into servitude in a scrub land Whispering her secrets to the ocean, Dreams like sea-foam. And her mother's voice, echoing down these years, lost to the beat of my eardrum, as I stir my spoon, banging the sides of my pot, blind But breathing in deep The smell of them. Making the stew my mother taught me humming this distant half-remembered tune.
October 17, 2025 at 4:22 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Yes but Last Exit to Brooklyn
Jennifer Jason Leigh in Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989)
October 17, 2025 at 12:05 AM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Here he be
Ex-Navy SEAL Robert J O'Neill poses as a member of Antifa for a Fox News con-job
October 7, 2025 at 7:28 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Ollie is a real live man from small town WI, and despite his repeated attempts to stay on fb, a perceptive and sensitive writer disgusted by the slow rot of the United States.

substack.com/@oliverkorne...
A description of Donald Drumpf as an obscenity.
September 26, 2025 at 12:16 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Come and build your community #FoodNotBombs #OPIRG #B!KE
Oct 4 2025 11am-2pm OPIRG BBQ Sadleir House Nogojiwanong
September 23, 2025 at 6:23 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
#PoemsAbout #BlackSky @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk Yesterday, 18yo Victoria Mboko beat Naomi Osaka to win the Canadian Open, capping off an extraordinary run which captivated the country and made her the 2nd youngest player in the Open Era to defeat four Grand Slam champions.
Allez Vicky Her skin so black It absorbs the camera. Her African face Shiny and strange Smiling and familiar. She swings her racquet And the Montreal crowd erupts Their breath held back By double fault By black girl magic. This country will claim you It will eat you alive The winner you hit The history you made Erased for the next right thing. Here, the sky is so blue So white and forgetful Between islands of paint We are always burying What we cannot bear to see.
August 8, 2025 at 11:34 AM
magnuspim.bsky.social
My friends and I were lost in a stand of Old Growth forest recently, a rarity in this age and day of constant auto-location, a small moment of utter terror, a small crack to freedom. I said, the old ones had cast a glamour upon us.

#PoemsAbout #Glamour @alanparrywriter.co.uk @thebrokenspine.co.uk
Lost You cast a glamour upon us As we stumbled over thick roots Boiling through a pine sea Like sea snakes upon a map No eyes have seen For centuries. You cast your glamour upon us And we were beautiful again Turning beneath your canopy Shimmering sisters in starlit gowns Unprepared Babes in the woods. You cast the glamour aside And the way we thought we were going Stretched into a blindness before us Everything estranged, lost Abandoned to the here and now And a terrible thirst. You cast a glamour upon us Fey and wild, oldest in the forest To lead us astray From the path prepared by warlike men Towards an unseen river Towards your secret peace.
July 25, 2025 at 12:34 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
This all checks out
Douche Panzer parked out front of a quackery outlet
July 8, 2025 at 6:10 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
#ASoldierADay #PTBOCenotaphStories On the cloudy night of June 29, 1917 at Avion, Sgt. Roy Leslie Coones from Apsley, led 10 men of 52nd Bn to secure a forward position his battalion was set to attack in the next hour. Rec'd for the DCM, he was awarded the Military Medal for his action.
June 29, 2025 at 10:38 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
In 1921, three U-86 officers, including the captain, OLtzS Helmut Patzig, were charged at the Leipzig War Crimes trials. Patzig could have stopped and searched the ship, but attacked instead and then tried to cover up his crime by killing the lifeboat survivors. He fled Germany and avoided trial.
Black and white photo of Oberleutnant zur See Helmut Patzig, who sank HMHS Llandovery Castle. After torpedoing the clearly marked and lighted hospital ship, Patzig ordered his sub to surface. He interrogated the three lifeboats of the Llandovery Castle and knew he had committed a crime; against the standing orders of the imperial German Navy and all human decency. He ordered his crew to cease rescue operations and prepare to dive, but turned and rammed the lifeboats. Patzig remained on deck with his two watch officers, John Dithmer and Ludwig Boldt, as well as the gunner, Chief Petty Officer Meißner. He ordered the gunner to fire at the lifeboats. They hit one, sinking it. The helmsman, who had peered out of the conning tower, would state to his family forty years later how Patzig pushed the gunner aside as he was firing on the lifeboat. Patzig tried to kill the shipwrecked passengers himself. After the war, the case was one of six German war crimes prosecuted at the Leipzig trials. OLtzS Patzig had meanwhile been promoted to KptLt and upon learning the authorities were looking for him, assumed the name Brümmer and hid in Riga, Latvia. Dithmer and Boldt stood trial but refused to make any statement and were sentenced to 4 years prison. Boldt escaped from jail in Hamburg in Nov 1921. Dithmer was broken out of jail in January 1922 by proto-Nazis, who would later murder Reich Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau as an 'Elder of Zion'. Dithmer worked in a bank in Barcelona, and Boldt founded a company for electrical systems in Colombia. In 1926 the arrest warrant for Patzig was rescinded and in 1928 his two junior officers were cleared of all charges and awarded compensation for the partially enforced sentence. Patzig was granted amnesty in 1931 and was never prosecuted. He joined the Nazi party in 1933. He went on to serve as a torpedo attack instructor and command a U-boat flotilla until the end of the Second World War. He died in 1984.
June 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
HMHS Llandovery Castle was making the return trip from Halifax to Liverpool when she was sunk June 27, 1918. She was carrying 164 crew, 80 officers and enlisted men and 14 nursing sisters of the Can Army Med Corps. The loss of these 14 nurses particularly provoked the anger of the nation.
Victory Bonds Poster 1918 "Victory Bonds Will Help Stop This" "Kultur vs. Humanity" A poster depicts the aftermath of the torpedoing of the Llandovery Castle. In the ocean, a Canadian soldier struggles to hold onto a nursing sister as he shakes his fist at a German U-boat whose top gun is firing. Wreckage, including a "Llandovery Castle" life preserver, floats nearby. Sgt. Arthur Knight was on the lifeboat with the 14 nursing sisters, including Matron Margaret Marjory (Pearl) Fraser, daughter of a former LG of Nova Scotia. “To save the [life]boat we tried to keep ourselves away [from the ship] by using the oars, and soon every one of the latter were broken... We were carried towards the stern of the ship, when suddenly the poop-deck seemed to break away and sink. The suction drew us quickly into the vacuum, the boat tipped over sideways, and every occupant went under... we were together in the boat about eight minutes... There was not a cry for help or any outward evidence of fear. In the entire time I overheard only one remark when the matron... M.M. Fraser, turned to me as we drifted helplessly towards the stern of the ship and asked: "Sergeant, do you think there is any hope for us?" I replied, "No," seeing myself our helplessness without oars and the sinking condition of the stern of the ship. A few seconds later we were drawn into the whirlpool of the submerged afterdeck, and the last I saw of the nursing sisters was as they were thrown over the side of the boat. All were wearing lifebelts, and of the fourteen two were in their nightdress, the others in uniform.” An eyewitness on another ship stated: "[S]uddenly we began going through corpses... we were sailing through floating bodies. We were not allowed to stop - we just had to go straight through... seeing these bodies of women and nurses, floating in the ocean, having been there some time. Huge aprons and skirts in billows, which looked almost like sails because they dried in the hot sun.”
June 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
#ASoldierADay #PTBOCenotaphStories On the evening of June 27th, 1918, the Hospital Ship Llandovery Castle, out of Halifax, was nearing its destination of Liverpool when it was torpedoed by a U-boat and sunk. Of the 258 aboard, 24 survived. Pte Carman Kelly CAMC, of Havelock, was one of those lost.
Black and white photo of Private Robert Carman Kelly in uniform, a curtained picture window behind him, a riding crop held horizontally in both hands, a bandolier diagonal across his chest. He is clean-shaven with a clear gaze and soft, protruding lips and looks at the camera with innocent apprehension. He is an 18yo, 5’6”, dark-complexioned, blue-eyed, dark brown-haired student of Havelock, the 8th child of 15 surviving children of Daniel Liam Kelly and Margaret Elizabeth O’Neil. His mother had died of cancer at age 48 three years previously. He enlisted in the 93rd Bn in the spring of 1916 in PTBO but transferred to the Queen’s University Field Ambulance Corps that summer in Kingston, staying behind as the rest of the 93rd sailed for England. The following spring of 1917, he followed them, sailing aboard the SS Missanabie, which was later torpedoed and sunk by U-87 off the Irish coast with 45 lives lost in Sept 1918. He spent a year in England with the Canadian Army Medical Corps until being transferred in the spring of 1918 to HMHS Llandovery Castle, one of five converted passenger liners used as Canadian hospital ships during WW1, ferrying wounded soldiers home. Two weeks after being posted to his ship, Carman was awarded a Good Conduct Badge. After making several transatlantic crossings between Liverpool and Halifax, the Llandovery Castle was sunk by U-86 that summer and Pte Carman Kelly was reported as missing, believed drowned. Only one lifeboat escaped; the rest were either sucked under as the ship sank or attacked by the U-boat to cover up their crime. The submarine’s officers were later charged with committing a war crime. It was the deadliest Canadian nautical disaster of the war and enflamed national passions, being used as propaganda for war bonds and proof of German cruelty.
June 28, 2025 at 1:45 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
This picture says a thousand words.
Joffrey gazes at his mother, Cersei, with real contempt and disdain. If misogyny lies behind much of the disaffection of young men, then there can be no starker image for it than this one. As the poet said, barbarism begins at home. A BBC article about the son of Norway’s crown princess, Mette-Marit, being charged with three counts of rape, and twent-three counts of sexual assault and bodily harm following his arrest in November 2024. Marius Borg Høiby, the eldest son of Norway’s crown princess and stepson of the heir to the throne, Crown Prince Haakon, has been under scutiny since he was repeatedly arrested in 2024 amid allegations of rape and on preliminary charges of bodily harm and criminal damage. On Friday, Oslo police said Høiby, 28, was co-operative during police questioning, which is now complete following a months-long investigation in a case that involved a "double-digit" number of accusers. Evidence in the case was drawn from sources including text messages, witness testimonies and police searches, Oslo police prosecutor Andreas Kruszewski said. During a press conference, Kruszewski said the charges included one case of rape involving intercourse and two cases of rape without intercourse, four cases of sexual assault and two cases of bodily harm. "I cannot go into further detail about the number of victims in the case beyond confirming that it is a double-digit number," he said. Høiby was arrested on suspicion of rape in November and police said in a statement that he was accused of carrying out a "sexual act without intercourse" on a victim "said to have been unable to resist the act." The accuser is a woman in her 20s who did not know Høiby before she met him on the day of the alleged incident, her lawyer Hege Salomon said. She was not in a relationship with him.
June 28, 2025 at 10:34 AM
magnuspim.bsky.social
#ASoldierADay #PTBOCenotaphStories On the dull, wet morning of June 27, 1916, in the support lines of the 13th Bn at Maple Copse, near Zillebeke, south of Ypres, 20 year-old L/Cpl Wilfred Hull of Lakefield ON, was killed by the concussion of a shell. His death was the first of the war for Lakefield.
Black and white photo of Wilfred John Cullis Hull, a serious looking 18 year-old in a starched white collar and suit and tie, son of a prominent businessman from Lakefield, Ontario, circa 1915. His father, John Hull, owned the grist mill on the west side of the Otonabee river and Wilfred's mother was his third wife. His first wife, Jessie, died age 41 without any living children. His second wife, Jennie, died age 52. A year later, John married her 31yo sister, Elma, who was also a witness at his previous marriage. They had 4 children, of which Wilfred was the eldest. Wilfred enlisted soon after this photo was taken in the winter of 1915 and sailed for England in the summer. He joined the 13th Canadian Infantry Battalion (Royal Highlanders of Canada) in Belgium in September 1915 and saw action at the Battle of Mont Sorrel during the Somme Offensive in which about 300 men of his Battalion were killed. He had just been appointed Lance Corporal after the battle and two weeks before he was killed on the morning of June 27, 1916. It had rained all night and the Germans began their bombardment at 4am, using all calibres of guns, but it was specifically their heavy trench mortars which caused about 67 casualties that morning. Wilfred was one of them, listed as a Private as his promotion to L/Cpl had not yet been officially confirmed. He was the first casualty of the war from Lakefield and news of his death cast a pall over the village that summer. His father, John the miller, died the following spring in 1917 age 75.
June 27, 2025 at 4:42 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
A fumbling first foray into #PoemsAbout #ItsASin @alanparry83.bsky.social @brokenspinearts.bsky.social For #PRIDE weekend, for Brian and Dallas. #ItsARiot
Sin Your lips burn Set me on fire Beneath the perfect White linen tablecloth. Our fathers talk While our mothers Serve them silence. They know we’re here But choose to forget, Choose to cover Our small bodies With their shroud; Which they’ll later lift To identify us. Your lips burn mine Like a red coal Like hellfire, they say, But your tongue Tastes like the ocean Deep and dangerous Dreaming of seraphim Waiting to come Up for air. Riot Your love flies right at me Like a Molotov cocktail End over end And sets me on fire. We run Hand in hand Blood flecking the wind Holding our bodies in From the truncheon sting. We ran from nowhere to everywhere From their hell to our heaven, But they found us And would not let us be. Sent the state against us Broke our harps Smashed our halos. But I am now on fire Running through the streets Hair streaming behind me, And our bodies keep rioting Keep breaking the surface And marching And dancing And sweating And loving End over end World without end Like a fire tumbling Out of the night.
June 27, 2025 at 12:08 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
FYI the Peterborough Evening Examiner from Wednesday April 14, 1915, p10 notice which started the discovery for me.
Peterborough Evening Examiner Wednesday April 14, 1915, p10. Ottawa, April 14 - The remaining reports of Commisssioner T. R. Ferguson were tabled yesterday, and they contain a mass of evidence concerning the alienation of the natural resources of western Canada under the latest administration. One report deals with the trafficking in Indian lands by three Government officials, Frank Pedley, James A. Smart and W. J. White, in which they made $84,000 profit out of Moose Mountain Indian Reserve lands. The commissioner states that hundreds of blank tenders were sent from Ottawa to Toronto to be filled in, and then returned to the department, where nearly all were accepted. It is stated that Pedley, then deputy superintendent-general of Indian affairs; White, immigration inspector, and Smart, deputy minister of the Interior, had formed a partnership for acquiring and re-selling Indian lands, which were offered for sale by the Government by tender. A. C. Bedford Jones, a Toronto lawyer, tendered for them and held the lands for them. A deed of trust, providing for this said that it was inexpedient that they should tender in their own names.
June 24, 2025 at 5:14 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
John 'Jack' Gillanders Turriff - MP for Eastern Assiniboia 1904-1921. Farmer, later Senator (1918‐1930), who altered land records as commissioner, doubling them in size from their original agreements.
Died 1930 Ottawa brain haemorrhage. His only son also died in WW1.
Black and white photo of a clean-shaven, thin-lipped, middle-aged white man in white colllar, suit and tie, with a shock of greying hair, looking to the favour of Robert Borden, circa 1912.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Robert Cruise - MP for Dauphin, MB 1911-1921. Farmer and businessman who illegally claimed Riding Mountain Reserve land while living elsewhere. His 17yo son, Robin, was killed in WW1. Died 1932 Dauphin.
Black and white photo of a clean-shaven land thief masquerading as a politician, circa 1917.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
George William Brown - Lieut. Gov Saskatchewan 1910-1915. Lawyer from Regina who bought up Métis scrip and amassed land holdings he sold later at considerable profit. Many Métis sold scrip to land speculators for less than their worth or were cheated on the value. Died 1919 Regina.
1915 portrait of a flabby silver-moustachioed man in regalia, hat under arm, standing by a pillar.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Frank Oliver - Minister of the Interior 1905-1911. A newspaper man from NWT and Alberta, he used his paper and position as MLA to oppose the Papaschase Cree reserve until the Can Fed Gov forced the last 80 ppl from their land, dividing it b/w railway, settlers, and itself. Oliver died 1933 Ottawa.
A third mustachioed man, balck and white 1933, with a wild bushy white mustache, white collar and tie and suit, stares darkly to the left of camera, seeing Justice coming for him.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
James Allan Smart - Deputy Minister of the Interior 1896-1902. A hardware merchant from Manitoba, he resigned from public life in 1903 and died in Montreal 1942 after years of ill health. With Pedley and Oliver, he formed a company of sorts to steal Native land, making a profit of $84,000.
Another moustachioed man, bald on top, in white collar and suit looking pensive in a 1903 sketch.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Here are the main thieves:

Frank Pedley - Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs 1902-1913. In 1907, he carried a satchel of $5000 which he paraded before the Peguis Nation on Lake Winnipeg in a heavily manipulated surrender of their lands. Died 1920 Ottawa with no surviving children.
A black and white picture of a mustachioed man named Frank Pedley in a waistcoat and jacket, his haunted gaze off camera likely due to his theft of Native lands.
June 23, 2025 at 11:25 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Buster, 16 years old today and the very best dog I've had the pleasure to treasure. He still begs for food and goes on hikes and screams his barbaric yawp to the world. #KeepOnKeepingOn #DontLetTheBastardsGetYouDown
A 16 year old Cairn terrier/toy poodle cross looks at you through milky eyes, unsure if you're going to try to pet him or give him food.
June 9, 2025 at 12:08 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Green volcano
Like the billowing eruption from Mt Etna, green leaves burst forth from the trunk of this tree
June 7, 2025 at 3:56 PM
magnuspim.bsky.social
Makhanyi biryani ? Butter chicken made with bone-in skin-in chicken thighs, cooked with pilau rice on makhanyi sauce.
Seared chicken thighs with rice on a butter chicken sauce and cilantro garnish.
May 15, 2025 at 10:43 PM