Glenn Kubish

It’s approximately the end of the week as we knew it, friends. Here are three things from my daily life that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude. I’m confident that two of them actually happened as described. Episode 142:                            1. Wedding  The musician Craig Cardiff from Ottawa was on stage right in front of us at Aimée and Steve’s wedding reception upstairs at Kaffa in Garneau. When musicians get married, things are cranked up a few notches. The equipment itself, the cables and the speakers, are high calibre. There is a sound board at the back of the room. There is a sound technician running levels so that not once is there any feedback. And there is live performance. Cardiff sang four or five tunes, including a cover of the Dawes song, A Little Bit of Everything.   I couldn’t believe it. It’s one of our faves. We saw Dawes in 2014 at the Starlite Room downtown by the old Chic...

Here are three things from the week that was that left behind tracks of happiness and gratitude.  Three Things podcast, episode 134:                            1. Baseball   The pitch, the hit, the ground ball. The runner hoofs it to first base. The shortstop scoops up the ball and telegraphs it to first base—bang, bang, one out! With the ump’s signal, the crowd gets another proof that the thrown baseball eradicates space quicker than the running player. In miniature, the play at the Riverhawks game on Sunday was an episode from the history of communications technology. It was also a routine out. For the mathematical ones scoring the game, the play is symbolized universally and beautifully as 6-3: 6 for the shortstop’s position, 3 for the first baseman’s position. Not their uniform numbers or their names, but their slots numbered 1-9 in baseball’s defensive array. Not that I was scoring the game, and not tha...

It feels difficult and wrong and even obscene to fiddle around with three little things when such big things are going wrong, and when ordinary people are forced onto the unarmed road of flight. But I am grateful for my little life. I hope it can stay this way. It is heartbreaking to see everyday lives clawed apart by the powerful. Against the historic backdrop of our dark times, I offer this week's Three Things подкаст . 1. Reappearing act   The doorbell rang. Our friends Lori and Murray were on the front step, carrying a gift from the beyond. Back in the 2000-2001 minor hockey season Murray coached the KC Annunciation Rink Rats novice team on which our son Alex played. Coach Murray had things under control, including the most important thing for a coach to have under control: himself. He was calm and knowledgeable and made the season fun for the eight- and nine-year-olds and their fans. He was in it for the team. (The mistakes I would go on to make as a hockey coach I wouldn’t h...

Here, once a week about this time, and because the week's ending is also a kind of beginning, I try to notice what I noticed from my little life that made me happy or grateful and, from the noticing, make the Three Things podcast . 1. Minding the gap 📡 👼 For the most part, I’m good with working remotely. It’s curious, though, how we use the two words “connected” and “remote” to describe distance communication in the pandemic. “Connected” and “remote,” are more opposites than alikes. Connected means “with” and remote means “apart,” kinda, right?  That pair of states of being does capture nicely a piece of the human condition. We are at the same time apart and with. I am indicted every time Auntie Shelagh says something like, okay, did you hear anything that I just said? which is not frequent but frequent enough. The truth about us is probably that we connect because we are remote. We are forced to communicate not just to get our ideas across but because, not being angels, we can...

There must be imperceptible valleys of isolation between us. Email has revealed this communication gap. You email me. I see it drop onto the top of the ladder of messages on my smartphone. I am content for now to know that your message has come in. I do not respond. You may feel slight anxiety with my delayed response to your call. I respond later. This is called asynchronous communication. But it is all asynchronous communication, isn't it? The email version is just easy to see. Like the interval of white space between communication  in the previous paragraph and It is at the start of this paragraph is easy to see. After I had hit the enter/return button. Yesterday, Coffee Outside was marvellous. Most Fridays for almost three years now, summer or winter, for 10 minutes or two hours, a group of us bicycle riders in Edmonton have met in Faraone Park to drink and brew coffee and talk about the weather, the city, our travels, the media, bicycle components, issues of the d...

Among the experts, the séance seems settled: communication with the dead is still a perilous, one-way business. That is not to say that our efforts to make contact with the departed and dismembered are not sometimes noble and glorious efforts. It's just to say that it's hard work, all that digging, all that taptaptapping, all that listening. It remains what it always was—difficult to pick out a true signal from the other side. Philosophers know this. Poets know this. Edgar Allan Poe certainly knew this. And now the FBI is again learning this. It's not easy to get at encrypted information. The news: Apple is either or both refusing to help FBI agents trying to crack into Syed Farook's iPhone—Farook and his wife Tashfeen Malik killed 14 of Farook's work colleagues at a holiday party on December 2, 2015, in San Bernardino before being killed by police—or saying it is technically impossible, or that it could have been possible had a state official not reset the pa...