Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from slightly off the path that left behind some happiness or gratitude this week.  Three Things, episode 79:                                             1. Local news 🪰 Of all the news that has broken in the past week, of all the voices that I’ve heard talking about everything from the heat to Hockey Canada, of all the stories watched or read that I can’t quite recall, the story and the sound that have stayed with me were <Jeopardy music here>...cicadas. You’ve all heard them, but did you know they were here? I owe the fact that cicadas are in Edmonton to Taproot Edmonton reporter and recorder Brett McKay . I enjoy their sound. I like the sound of the word itself—cicada, three syllables, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, which makes it an amphibrach, the name for that kind of foot in poetry. Like Versace or Fi...

The Bow Valley Parkway, that ribbon of road not travelled as much anymore between Banff and Lake Louise, got into me for the first time three decades ago (actually 30 years ago this month where does time go, where does it actually go?) and it came back into view the other day as I pedalled north of Edmonton. I was in the Tour de l'Alberta's 100 km ride out of Morinville, and had made the turn up Highway 44, and what struck me at approximately 28 kilometres an hour was the wreckage. Bolts and spears of wood and chunks of plastic and shards of fiberglass and a soiled glove and a baseball-style hat with a trucking logo on the front and the rubber of exploded tires discarded by passing tractor trailers. The shoulder of a highway is the asphalt shore where the flotsam and jetsom of modern travel washes up and sits discarded and forgotten, and, at 120 kilometres an hour, unseen. Road bike "It's amazing how much crap there is on the shoulder," I say to a cyclist...

Shelagh and I are just back from a quick trip to Portland where we were blown away by, take your pick, the bicycles, the transit system, the proud people, the beer, the coffee-houses, the nighttime rain, the bridges, the avocados, beer at Velo Cult, the Sprocket Podcast guys, Pok Pok, the kind bus drivers.  Here's a lookback.  We went to Portland to watch films at the Filmed By Bike festival at the Clinton Street Theater. And I had a chance to get up on stage and tell my own bicycle story. Here, along with actual period photos, it is. My first bicycle was a green, CCM Mustang. It was the 1970s, so that bike had everything you needed to turn the heads of the ladies. In second grade. It had a banana seat. Those high-rise handlebars. It had what we called in those days a sissy bar on the back. We would attach baseball cards with clothespins to the back of the frame so the spokes would deliver that motorized sound as we pedalled forward. Chasing sp...