I’m running rather late on this, but I’ll try for an answer just the same. Dan asked on Friday: In all your life’s travels, what are your five favorite spots that you’d most like to visit again to be able to share the spot with friends/family? Was it the place itself or the experiences you had there? To be honest, I still feel relatively poorly traveled compared to a lot of people I know. So it’s going to be a little difficult to answer this question. But I’ll try my best: Rue Ste.-Laurent, Montreal. I think I’m remembering the name …

Oh my God, I’ve got to stop submitting questions to our Friday Five: My question for this week turns to Time Travel again, but this time, it’s a Connie Willis sort. In her novels, characters often return to some time period in the past in order to do research; time travelers are very often historians, and archeologists have been rendered all but obsolete. If you were able to propose five such trips, assuming that one would work and that you would have to go and actually live in that time period, researching it and studying it for up to a …

This week’s Friday Five was asked with a brevity I’ve only seldom been able to muster myself. Dan asks: What are the five happiest moments you’ve had with pets? Given that my life has been relatively low in terms of concentration of pets, I’m going to have a few repeat appearances by the same dogs. You’ll have to forgive me. The day we found Toto. Our dog Toto (yes, shut up) ran away in terror one rainstormy night and it took three days before she turned up again. A neighbour found her with torn up pads on her paws, whining …

Friday Five, a few days late, from the evil mind of… oh, gee, that’s my question: You’re given a chance to use a time machine to snatch five historical personages and bring them to the twenty-first century. Perhaps you’re saving them from their awful fates in history, or perhaps just picking them up for teatime and a Saturday night dinner party. The catch is, there’s a problem with the time machine and a possibility that you will need to house all of them in your living space for a few days, pehaps up to a week. So they’d better get …