Glenn Kubish

Here, once a week about this time, and because the week's ending is also a kind of beginning, I try to notice what I noticed from my little life that made me happy or grateful and, from the noticing, make the Three Things podcast . 1. Minding the gap 📡 👼 For the most part, I’m good with working remotely. It’s curious, though, how we use the two words “connected” and “remote” to describe distance communication in the pandemic. “Connected” and “remote,” are more opposites than alikes. Connected means “with” and remote means “apart,” kinda, right?  That pair of states of being does capture nicely a piece of the human condition. We are at the same time apart and with. I am indicted every time Auntie Shelagh says something like, okay, did you hear anything that I just said? which is not frequent but frequent enough. The truth about us is probably that we connect because we are remote. We are forced to communicate not just to get our ideas across but because, not being angels, we can...

  The little Three Things podcast  is where each week I try to notice three things that I noticed that made me happy or grateful. Not the biggest things in the world, just things like: 1.  Frazil Ice 🧊 🥘 In the days before the North Saskatchewan River freezes, it blooms with floating ice pads. These are those short days, and the mosaic pieces of ice are called frazil pans.  Frazil, F-R-A-Z-I-L, what a great word, the F-R of freeze and frigid and fragile, the shard of the Z, and the way the L lingers and trails off like in the words gentle and beautiful and peaceful. My hydrologist friend Steffen can explain how frazil ice forms at northern latitudes when the atmospheric conditions and heat exchanges are conducive to its making. I phoned Steffen at his ice-free retirement home and we talked ice. I asked him if he missed frazil ice.  “I definitely miss them,” he said from Ladysmith, BC. “I loved going onto the Terwillegar footbridge and just watching them go by....

  It’s all a gift, worth trying to notice algorithm free. Three Things this week: 1. Reliable sources 📰 The Lektriever, of all things, somehow surfaced in back-and-forth with Hogey as we pedalled last week. The Lektriever, how to describe it? It was a kind of giant mechanized memory machine, a chairlift of files holding news clippings organized by topic and author. The contraption was in the library at the back of the Sun newsroom in the 50th Street building when I worked there as a young reporter. You’d get your assignment from the desk, you’d go back to see John or Bruce or Ileiren in the library and get your files, so that,  before doing any interviews, you had a handle on what had previously been reported on the story. The librarians would get the old Lektriever chugging, and hit stop when the tray with your files came to the front. Very analog. Kinda like how my memory works some days. Which is what Hogey and I were talking about...getting older….forgetting stuff….ca...

Happy end o’ the week, friends. I try to scrabble the meaning of three things that made me happy or grateful each week. Here's this week's Three Things podcast: 1. A healthy injection There were 96 commercials during the broadcast of World Series Game 4 between Atlanta and the Astros. 95 of them were in the same basic category—attempts to get my attention and then my money to consume beer, fast food (especially the Burger King Crispy Chicken Parmesan), winter tires, power tools or the Rav-4. There were commercials to get me to consume Hollywood movies. Ads to bring big pieces of exercise equipment into my house. And a surprising number of commercials to convince me to bet against the house—gambling site ads are in high rotation. One of the 96 was not like the others. It was a story. With a beginning, middle and end. With a reminder that I’m not just a consumer. This was the Heritage Minute, the story of Banting and Best, and, I learned, Macleod and Collip, and the story of L...