Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from that past week that for now have left behind some tracks of happiness and gratitude.                                         1. Big smiles   We filled up on beers and bar food at Towers, and, then, Shelagh and I brought down the average age at the MacEwan University pub by paying our tab and leaving. We walked up a few blocks, took the bridge over 109 Street to Allard Hall and got seats at a fundraising concert for Ukraine. It felt quite downtown-y and undergraduate-y. The pianist John Stetch was the draw. He banged out variations on J.S. Bach, F. Chopin, N. Diamond, T. Swift and S. Twain during the concert, which also featured a jazz take on Beer Barrel Polka, I think.  Stetch, who grew up in these parts, used the word “tentacles” to describe the connections re-experienced being back in his Edmonton roots. My tentacle to ...

Three Things, episode 54 , has a bit of Auntie Shelagh solving a Wordle (and me solving, tentatively, an old question between wives and husbands), some Mozart, some Boston (from the first album) and some notes about being summoned to the boss's office.  1.  Word up It recently came to pass that Auntie Shelagh and I didn’t agree on something. What it was doesn’t matter. Okay, it was whether Wordle will give you more information than you have a right to after guessing one correct letter in the wrong spot. Like, if you guess, say, V as in Victor, and it’s in the wrong spot, but there are two Vs in the answer, will Wordle give you not just one but two yellow indicators? Auntie Shelagh said yes, or, at least, it should. I said no. When we’re at an impasse like this, we usually make a friendly wager. Whoever is right gets the book of her or his choice. We marshalled our arguments. I felt my competitive juices start to simmer. And then I remembered, of all things, graduate school, an...

Paul Lorieau, the tenor who could make you forget there was a faceoff only a minute or so away, has died, and Edmonton today is full of stories and memories of the anthemic voice for decades of the Edmonton Oilers. In the Oilers' 2006 Stanley Cup run, Lorieau left us spellbound with his raised microphone, an invitation to the fans, so rousingly accepted, to sing the national anthem together. Think about that for just a second. The trained voice, the student of voice, the artist with the camera trained on him freely chooses silence, so that the full-throated, beer-holstered hockey throng could experience the joy of singing themselves into a northeast Edmonton night. Now, we contemplate the meaning of the silence choosing Paul Lorieau. Countless times on TV and many times in person in the Coliseum I experienced Lorieau's singing O Canada. Once, I met him. It was on a small rink that a band of friends at CTV Edmonton (Hoop, Raymo, Dub, Kobes)  watered into being on...

Here is what Mayor Stephen Mandel has taught me about political leadership: arrive in your own vehicle.  Here is what I mean.  A few years ago, when I was still working at CTV, our newsroom had a travelling slo-pitch team. The idea was we would get a side together and travel out to your community diamond, bring a news camera along, shoot some "highlights" (usually Dan Kobe making a good play) and plug your neighbourhood or agency initiative in the process. It was a lot of fun. But that's not the item. One evening we were playing the good people at the Mustard Seed Church on the inner-city ball field in Boyle Street. Shopping cart poverty pushed past. There was some despair sitting in a small circle in right field. I removed a couple of hypodermic needles from the base path between first and second base. We had invited the mayor to join us and, with the warmup under way, he roared into the parking lot in his late-model Mercedes Benz and jumped out.  That...

Here's an email I got this evening from my mother. I am not making this up. Hi, Glenn. How did the media hockey tournament in Calgary go? Bad luck for David Mitchell. Is he out of hospital? Love, Mom Mitch lays it out The body of David Mitchell, better known as Mitchy, the former sports director and now videographer at CTV Edmonton, lasted approximately 60 seconds into the first game of the tournament. And that's rounding up generously to the nearest minute mark. Mitchy's spirit was ready to play, his legs were ready to skate, his heart and lungs were willing to supply the oxygenated blood necessary to fuel the effort. But a disc in his back waved the away-white flag. It seems Mitchy's 45-year-old spine is the Maginot Line of his hockey-playing body. "I'm out," he said to us on the bench. His eyes were question marks. "Like out out?" "I'm out." Periods. And with that verdict, punctuated as the play crashed on...

Me today at Enterprise Square, listening I have always enjoyed eavesdropping. Not the spying-on-what-you're-saying-about-me variety, but more of an academic, creative kind of espionage where I imagine listening in on authors, across time, space, genre, sometimes the grave, discussing a topic of my choice. It's a bit dangerous, this practice of combining what this writer wrote with what that speaker later said, or what this observer on this author said with what that person subsequently posted or painted. Risky, obviously, because I am hosting the debate in my own mind without direct access for clarification to the principals I imagine to be encountering each other. It can get crowded, and crowds make for not getting right what you think you are hearing. But it's a fun kind of daring. And it makes the literature review I am building for my final assignment on the meaning of the Duckett Cookie Episode (when not blogging about building a literature review for my f...

Neil Armstrong has died. The news was sitting, waiting for me on my iPhone in a message from my buddy, Dan, who has had to suffer hearing many times what the story of the first man on the moon means to me. Dan was there at work the day my $100 lunch kit from Amazon arrived. But first things first. Rewind to the late 1960s and picture yourself in the kitchen of a new bungalow in a new neighbourhood at the edge of north Edmonton. Mom, aproned, yellow-rubber-gloved, is working over a nifty, new double sink, cleaning dishes, rinsing dishes, and piling them on the counter in a left-to-right, two-armed assembly line. Now, look down just to her left at the closed door of the utility cupboard And listen. Because you might be able to hear the young, imaginary astronaut inside. He's about a 6 or 7 years old and he's sitting on a pile of old Edmonton Journal newspapers that serve as his cockpit seat. In front of him is a kitchen plumbing pipe re-imagined into an oxygen supply sys...