Glenn Kubish

There is no denying that as a big city we must play on the big stage of the small screen, and that means dealing in the big messages that are sent by small images like this from our good mayor: Norwood That throng was yesterday in Edmonton, as the Women's World Cup debuted at Commonwealth Stadium in front of the largest crowd ever to turnstile its way into the seats to watch a national side sporting match. In fact, Edmonton broke Edmonton's record, going back a few years to a men's soccer match against Brazil. Nicely done, hometown. Yes, the trees of Norwood have witnessed crowds of trembling size. But it's not the whole picture. Here's another soccer image from yesterday: Glenora On the other side of the Glenora School fence, watched, tweeted, and retweeted by an audience of exactly no one, 10 or so middler-agers were in a pitched battle of their own. Evidently, no one wanted to play goal, because the players had planted hockey nets in front of the...

Seeing Edmonton from the 21st floor of the downtown tower where I work makes clear one thing about the streets and the cars below where I pedal. It's a foolscap world in the city, friends. View from above (Foolscap. Just saying that word is fun. Foolscap. Foolscap. Foolscap!) Foolscap, or course, was the marvellously medieval name for the sheets of lined paper we were issued in third grade, that year when we traded pencils for pens and were initiated into the slow mystery of cursive handwriting. The horizontal lines on those pages were our borders. They kept the stops and starts of the inky flow organized and moving in something resembling the right direction of a sentence. From my vantage point, the concrete sidewalks are those foolscap lines. The asphalt roadways they border are the stacked spaces through which the coloured dots of cars trace their paths. Under this spell, the amber lights are reimagined as commas, and the red lights as periods that mark the ends of b...

Quick note off the top: I hope to attend the Winter Cycling Congress in Minneapolis next February, where the theme is equity. To get my thoughts started, I put together a draft Pecha Kucha-style storyboard on the question of winter cycling and ownership—even though it's May and there is no snow in the forecast. It's not exactly what in cycling circles is meant by equity, or maybe in a way it is. In Happy City ( read it, btw), Charles Montgomery writes: "Despite the obvious effort  [my emphasis] involved, self-propelled commuters report feeling that their trips are easier  [his] than the trips of people who sit still for most of the journey." I wanted to explore that idea, and see if something in addition to good feeling isn't being lost in our thinking about winter and bicycling. I wanted to think about work and ownership. This draft starts with John Locke and ends with Bob Mould, with some David Byrne and Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt and John Hiatt sprinkled ...