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‘I think we're all special, but in the realm of human beings, I'm not trying to make you think I'm precious or anything.”

Oh, but he was precious. Precious as in one-of-a-kind.

This was Steven Seagal talking, one of my memorable 2007 interviews.

I figure there's a book on the subject of this column, now seven years in the running and populated with more than 350 people. I could call it Aspects and Episodes of Being.

Or the low-brow version: How Steven Seagal Kick-boxed My Day.

Just when you're feeling that life is routine, bourgeois or too Tim Hortonish (hey, it's hard to find stimulation sometimes), along comes an interview subject who gives you a fix of the deeply weird.

Who could have imagined, for example, what I would find once ushered, after much negotiation, into the penthouse lair of Mr. Seagal at Casino Rama in Orillia, Ont., where the former aikido action star was performing as a blues singer?

In addition to hawking a new line of herbal skin remedies from the Catechin Research Institute, he was in the midst of his self-styled 2007 Mantra World Peace Tour.

He got all testy when I gently interrupted his verbal flow. He turned to look at me for the first time, then added something dismissive about people who try to dig beneath his pasty skin.

The interview ended shortly thereafter, but not before he had a little rant about the media, as in, “If you fuck me again, it's okay. It's been done before.”

I couldn't scribble in my notebook fast enough. Behind my trusty mask of professionalism, I was ecstatic as a schoolboy who has just uncovered a stash of Playboy magazines.

Wow, full-frontal eccentricity doesn't get better than this.

I get to report on the foibles, kinks, hardships and triumphs of people, which sure beats writing about weather, even though that's somewhat unpredictable, too.

Consider Perdita Felicien. The star Canadian hurdler, whose moment of fame was partly her shocking fall in the 2004 Olympic final in Athens, was overflowing with enthusiasm when I met her. What was remarkable was her joyful exuberance, not about a recent comeback triumph so much, although that was a highlight. It was her ferocity about life that was so stunning – how she talked with fond exasperation about her mother, for example, who once showed up at a competition with a custom-designed T-shirt saying whose parent she was.

Personality always spills from beneath the tidy message that subjects want to impart – if you let it. Consider Marc Emery, the Prince of Pot, Burt Reynolds, the seventies sex icon, and Tila Tequila, the It Girl of MySpace.

Mr. Emery is facing extradition to the U.S. on charges of drug trafficking over his now-defunct mail-order business, which sold marijuana seeds.

The Prince of Pot should be called His Highness of Dopedom. He babbled on about his sex life; offered a lurid description of a former girlfriend's genitalia; and an explanation on why even crystal meth should be legalized.If pot activists knew what was good for their cause, they would encourage Mr. Emery's extradition and find some spokesperson who doesn't come across like a man who has smoked too much weed in his lifetime to know how to be serious when it's required.

And Mr. Reynolds? He had a lovely, deep pool of emotion behind his carefully maintained face. I was expecting him to be as brittle as his retro appeal. But the 71-year-old was spilling regret and love and missed chances (about Sally Field, mostly) all over the place. He even cried when asked about his father, a tough cop who never approved of his son's acting career, until Jimmy Stewart told him at a Warner Bros. party that he should feel pride.

Mr. Reynolds was evidence of how celebrity is reductive. Whereas an interview with Tila Tequila, the small woman who came from nowhere to be a big star on the Internet, proved how celebrity can make people more compelling than they are in person.

Her underground following spawned a reality dating show on MTV, A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila, with the twist being that she is bisexual and therefore choosing between both male and female candidates. Ms. Tequila has made the unimaginative leap from being an online image that gets a lot of “hits” to thinking everyone wants to hit on her. Her eccentricity was in her vacancy.

Other notables in 2007 include Carol Grant Sullivan, the extreme skier who tumbled 2,000 feet from a peak in the Andes, and survived. Her sang-froid about her accident was unexpected. She was a display of how resilient we are. “Humans don't die easily,” she told me, after recounting how she insisted, despite her pain, on skiing out before dusk fell on the mountain with her husband and their guide.

Howie Mandel, the Canadian comedian and host of the hit game show Deal or No Deal, was noteworthy for his humility. (It seemed even more unusual than his well-known obsessive-compulsive disorder.) I always find people who understand fame as transitory to be interesting, if only because it suggests an imagination expansive enough to understand that they should never be the centre of it.

But I will end with the subjects from this year who will stay with me for many more.

There was Leonard Cohen, the reclusive Canadian cultural icon, with whom I spent five hours in his Montreal house. Like Mr. Cohen, Pier Giorgio Di Cicco, Toronto's poet laureate, was also compelled to discuss beauty – even if it is in the random encounter of people in a civic environment.

The world needs more of the poetic sensibility; people who can remove themselves enough from daily life to observe it and frame it for the rest of us. It is an eccentricity, an oddity, but shouldn't be.

And finally, there was my 107-year-old hero, John Babcock, who lives in Spokane, Wash. The last surviving Canadian First World War veteran, he is a poetic reminder that life is just a series of memories, all fleeting.

There is nothing particularly remarkable about his life. Born one of 10 children on an Ontario farm. Didn't even fight in the war. Shipped off to England at 15, he was sent to the countryside with the Boys Battalion. When he came back, he worked as an electrical contractor. Married. When his first wife, Elsie, died after 44 years of marriage, he promptly wed the woman, Dorothy, who had cared for her in her illness. Family life: happy.

Ordinariness is remarkable, too, sometimes. “I just happened to be at a certain place at a certain time,” he said about being caught up in the events of the war.

What could better describe the reality of most lives?

Not all of Mr. Babcock's memories are clear, but they are there, the moments of serendipity, of hope, fear, boredom and of celebration. They are waiting to be retrieved, enjoyed and sometimes cut loose, as they are for all of us.