Glenn Kubish

In the words of Darlingside , you can't live in the past, but the only way to go is to go back.   This week's Three Things goes back to the Edmonton Folk Music Festival. Three Things, episode 135:                            1. Tarps   It’s Saturday morning, we are in a line of festival goers that snakes down the multi-use path on Connors Road next to the dormant LRT tracks. We are waiting for the gates at the top of the hill to open. The wail of bagpipes means it won’t be long. The pipes are leading tarp holders who had been in the pen since whatever o’clock AM to their preferred seating locations at the base of Gallagher Park—where it’s flat, where you’re not fighting a slow but relentless rearguard action against gravity. The rest of us, those who preferred a decent night’s sleep, will scurry to a patch of earth on the slope of the amphitheatre, throw our tarps down and stake our claim when the gates open....

Here are three things in a tough week that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. Three Things, episode 126:                                    1. Strong ads   I enjoy a good ad. I think I get this from my Edmonton grandmother. She would watch TV commercials as if they were part of the show we were actually watching. And she would laugh out loud at a clever line or a twist ending to a commercial. She never got tired of the client’s surprise when Madge the manicurist told her she was soaking in it. Over the years, I’ve looked under the hood of advertisements to try to figure out what makes commercials tick. Tony Schwartz has been a reliable mechanic. Schwartz was the brains behind one of the most memorable political ads in U.S. history, the infamous Daisy spot that targeted Barry Goldwater without ever mentioning him.   Decades ago, Schwartz used the term “resonance,” still so popu...