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...

Poof!  There goes another week! Here are three things that made for some happiness and gratitude. Here's Three Things, episode 105:                             1. Magic   Juan Tamariz is an up-close magician. The Spanish legend invites his fans not to fill seats in Vegas-style auditoriums, but, instead, to take a chair around a table and watch a seemingly unexplainable card trick transpire before their very eyes. Experiencing Tamariz in close quarters is probably, and guessing here, but probably like what Trevor Zegras felt when Connor McDavid made him disappear with a spin toward the net and a backhander goal against the Anaheim Ducks, which is not the item, but still, it’s worth a how-did-he-do-that lookback when you have a sec. I learned about Tamariz last week in an article in the New York Times Magazine. The author, Shuja Haider, points out that Tamariz is a master of the careful management of the atten...

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 ...

On my bicycle ride into work this morning, this is what it looked like on the 142nd St. service road just in front of the MacKinnon Ravine: With a film of new snow, the street looks like a sheet of paper. And on it, the twisted prose of the boulevard trees and the ghostridings of those who have already made their marks. Farther along, on 102 Ave, and now moving east along the narrow sidewalk (in winter it's the only safe way to travel that section) I saw a bundled pedestrian moving in the same direction. Instead of risking a slip and a crash or a bell ring and a scare, I veered into the museum grounds and toward Government House. And somebody flicked a switch and the hum of the morning traffic on icy asphalt, and the rev of the motors, died away. And this is what it looked like one way. And this is what it looked like the other way. Peering through a hedgerow to the red-lit, white-lit traffic below, I thought of cedar waxwings sharing Mountain Ash...

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...