Glenn Kubish

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...

Here are three new words now ready to be sent into the world! improvidence  noun          The sense of the protective care of God, nature, or alcohol as a spiritual power during a live comedy performance in which the technique of making up the scene and dialogue on the spot is employed. In this pic from the Sherwood Park News, comedians Donovan Workun, Mark Meer,  and Graham Neil  surrender to the embrace of improvidence litternature  noun         Written works, especially those of stylized nature and of superior and enduring artistic merit, or not, describing the fast-food detritus thrown from passing vehicles in national parks by idiots willing to leave crap in their bodies but not the crap it comes in in their cars and trucks. This tweet is an example of litternature replyrony  noun           The expression of one's stated meaning in exhorting colleagues to ...

A couple of nights ago I was standing with my work colleagues in the basement of the Oldtimers Cabin on 99th St., listening to Donovan Workun, Graham Neil and the Atomic Improv troupe explain we were standing on a beach. Or in France. Or on a tightrope over a gorge. Donovan and Neiler  It was a team-building experience, and the lesson was brilliantly simple: if improv comedians can't agree between themselves that the wooden floor is really a sandy strand, then there is no common space, imagined or not, and if there is no common space, there is no improv. That's the fact on which the performance is built. The stage isn't as real as that fiction. Compare for power of spell cast, or not, an actor suggesting to his partner that "the sand on this beach is gorgeous" and being greeted with a delay and silence, or a shrug, or only a tentative nod of consent -- or, then, an enthusiastic, positive tag-taking and a comeback that "the tide is due to roll in in a...