Glenn Kubish

Here's this week's Three Things podcast on Apple. Also, in words and pics: 1. Fish 🐠 There’s an aquarium at the Lois Hole Library in west Edmonton, and if you happened to be there last Sunday afternoon close to closing time, that was me standing in front of it, staring like someone who had never seen fish in a tank, which is pretty much what it felt like. I was mesmerized. The little fish twitch and flash and appear quite nonplussed about hanging suspended in gallons of water held in shape by a thin skin of glass on the other side of which is, well, death for them. Earlier that day, Auntie Shelagh and I had spent a couple of hours on Whyte Avenue. We took the steps down to the Tokyo Noodle Shop for ramen. We darted into Blackbyrd for some new vinyl. We drifted over to Sugared & Spiced for brownies and to talk to Jeff about Thomas Hobbes. If you think this dropping, darting and drifting means I now see all of us as kinds of giant upright fish flowing past each other insi...

On December 30, 1981, Wayne Gretzky scored five goals against the Philadelphia Flyers, setting a record for the fewest games (39) needed to reach the 50-goal mark in the NHL. It is a record that will stand longer than the Northlands Coliseum that played host to the historic night in Edmonton. It's easy to re-live the game highlights. Search Google. In 0.37 seconds 1,140,000 results are returned, including video of the four goals Gretzky scored against Flyers goalie Pete Peeters, making him look more like a masked mannequin between the pipes than an elite netminder of the time. And then the fifth goal as Gretzky carries the puck up the ice, cuts to his left just before the opposing blue line and toys with defender Bill Barber for an extra second, making the Flyers star dive in futility to stop the empty net goal. Peeters on the bench, Barber on his face, fans on their feet, Gretzky in the record book. It's all easy to find and re-live. After the game, Gretzky sat...

Speller explains that Hank started as a film camera news shooter. Hank shot on a CP-16 with a supply of film that lasted 10 minutes. Back in those days, most camera guys were frugal with the footage. Shooting more than 10 minutes of film meant you would have to load up a new magazine using the black bag procedure, and that was a pain in the ass. Economy was a way of being, as Fitz says. I got to know Hank in 1995 when I started working in the ITV newsroom. I was the assignment editor. My job was to match all of the incoming stimuli—news tips, scanner chatter, stories that Speller thought were important, reports of stuck trucks in underpasses—with available camera resources. I assigned the shooters. Korbs, 10-6 at 137 Ave and 66 St, go.  Hamish, can you get six shots at the cake cutting, please. Rudzy, golf highlights at the Belvedere. I once sent Chuck to a house fire in northwest Edmonton. It was actually a forest fire in Chisholm. He got back three days later. I think...

The front tire wasn't a front tire as much as an oversized windshield wiper clearing snow from the glass. The transformation was rapid, and complete: Now I was pedalling down a riverbank utility road, and now I was thinking how lovely it is when the brown city gets a fresh set of linens, and now my front tire was skidding across the ice hidden beneath the snow—and now I was clearly falling. And now, sitting propped up on an emergency room stretcher, I was signing my name to a form without lifting the pen off the page before things went black under a veil of fentanyl and propofol. The scan shows the dislocated shoulder bone  back in place (it looks like a pork chop) and the chunk of bone that fractured off. Frickity fracture Here is another view inside: The fall happened on March 30. I was riding back home with a friend from a meeting of Coffee Outside. For more than three years a growing group of bicycle commuters in Edmonton have met on Friday mornings in a...

As we bused back north up Highway 2, the military vehicles streamed south. I was with some ATB Financial colleagues who were finishing up the first leg of a province-wide tour to mark the 75th anniversary of the financial institution born in a disaster of too little water. Now, a disaster of too much.  Heading to Calgary The camouflaged vehicles presented both a welcome and an eerie prospect. Yes, the uniformed men and women were bringing their engineering skill and sandbagging brawn, but the movement of those same vehicles whispered that this was, maybe, a state of nature (and not of the tourism variety) they were heading toward.  Back moving through Edmonton on that Friday afternoon, a scheduled drink at Latitude 53 just ahead of me, the scenes through the bus window were jarring. Not because they were hard to see. They weren't. They were the easy images of friends talking on the steps of the Hotel Macdonald. And of a businessman running to get a waiting cab. A...