About

Welcome to Bologna—my little corner in cyberspace.

“Who are you?”

I’m James MacMillan. I’m lucky to be married to Sarah and to have three fabulous kids. I practice palliative medicine.

“And why is your site named Bologna?”

1.  Bologna seems an appropriate metaphor.  The food (though whether it should be called a food is perhaps debatable) is a conglomerate—a mishmash of all sorts of ingredients.  Similarly, this site is a mixed bag—primarily a commonplace book with a sprinkling of personal family news, recommended poems, music, and art, reflections on medicine, musings on faith and politics, cultural criticism, some (attempts at) humour, and a smattering of other oddities, tidbits, and trivialities.  And like the food, I don’t presume that the blog will be particularly nutritious, but some people may in fact like it.

2.  “Bologna” is a bit of a play on the word “blog.”  I’m a father of three, so I’m officially entitled to indulge in puns.

3.  “Bologna” was one of those words (like “restaurant” and “manoeuvre”) that I could never remember how to spell.  Now, I’m think I’m finally getting the hang of it.

“What should I know about Bologna?”

Much of what I post is other people’s thoughts and ideas. I don’t necessarily agree with all of those thoughts and ideas, but I post them because I think they are, nonetheless, worth hearing. (And, while it should go without saying, in our fraught moment one needs to say it anyway: quoting others does not equal endorsing their entire intellectual projects nor approving all their actions.)

Also, I’ve been posting since 2010, and a lot can happen in that span of time. Links die. Videos go unlisted. Pictures mystifyingly vanish. Formatting goes wonky. Posts become utterly irrelevant. Perspectives change. I certainly have modified or, at times, altogether abandoned ideas that I once held. However, if nothing else, this site serves as a partial chronicle of my thinking and my interests.

Finally, I compose the majority of posts in advance and schedule them to appear in the future—usually weeks and sometimes months down the road. I do this primarily to create a relatively steady flow of posts instead of silent periods punctuated by dumps of dozens of posts. But what this inevitably means is that a post get published without any reference to what is actually going on in the real world on the day that it appears. This is usually inconsequential, but occasionally an unsuspecting reader might draw connections that aren’t intended. To paraphrase the disclaimer in movies, any similarity to real events of the day is purely coincidental.