Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all. Here is my weekly offering of some of the gifts that came my way last week, things that made for some happiness and gratitude. Three Things, episode 106:                              1. Comma  For a year or so I worked editing copy at the Edmonton Journal. It was my job to lay out pages, size and crop the photos, check spelling and grammar and punctuation, write headlines, that kind of pre-automation stuff. The day that a Jamie Hall column ran without a headline, that was me who forgot to write a headline and then pressed send. I did write one good headline. It was the night in January 2006 the Columbus Blue Jackets hosted the Pittsburgh Penguins in a clash of  phenoms. Rick Nash got a goal and two assists, Sidney Crosby was held pointless in a 6-1 Columbus victory. Nash stills young Crosby . It was good enough to get Bill Sass to walk over from Business to say good job.  That was one of the unexpected memories that took shape after the news broke that Dav

Poof!  There goes another week! Here are three things that made for some happiness and gratitude. Here's Three Things, episode 105:                             1. Magic   Juan Tamariz is an up-close magician. The Spanish legend invites his fans not to fill seats in Vegas-style auditoriums, but, instead, to take a chair around a table and watch a seemingly unexplainable card trick transpire before their very eyes. Experiencing Tamariz in close quarters is probably, and guessing here, but probably like what Trevor Zegras felt when Connor McDavid made him disappear with a spin toward the net and a backhander goal against the Anaheim Ducks, which is not the item, but still, it’s worth a how-did-he-do-that lookback when you have a sec. I learned about Tamariz last week in an article in the New York Times Magazine. The author, Shuja Haider, points out that Tamariz is a master of the careful management of the attention of his audience. What is seen is not necessarily recorded by the audie

  Here a three little things that made for some happiness and gratitude this past week:                                                            1. Snow dome   Shelagh named the tune right away. She’s good at that. She knows what’s playing wherever she is, kinda like a virtual assistant, but real-er. The Pretenders, Middle of the Road, she’ll say, when we’re in a noisy restaurant where I hear only a cacophony of voices and cutlery. This time it was a symphony she picked off. We were in the car driving back from breakfast. The radio was on CBC FM. “Sibelius,” she said.  I first heard his Symphony #2 more than 30 years ago on vinyl at her place in Queen Mary Park, Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic. We experienced the music again in 2019 when Alexander Prior and the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra pumped it into the hearts of the crowd at the Winspear Centre. The performance was part of the Sibelius Festival, subtitled a Celebration of the North.  I don't know the m

And, so, we've made it through another week up here on the northern range… Looking back, here are three things that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. Three Things, episode 103:                                                  1. Palimpsest    The years are all starting to run together now, but I think it was late 1987. I was at The Howlin’ Wolf nightclub off 97 Street downtown, on stage were Ian Tyson and the Chinook Arch Riders and the song they were letting loose on was the polka picaresque, the saga of the doomed Carlos Zaragoza and his fighting rooster, Gallo del Cielo. My dancing partner was the pretty Miss Shelagh McAnally.  The dance floor was a joyful blur. During a break in the action, we said hello to Tyson. He signed Shelagh’s white shirt. He signed the guitar strap I had brought along, just in case. “GOOD LUCK GLENN,” he printed in black-ink block letters. Fast forward a couple of decades: I was working at CTV and a crew was putting together a feature story