Glenn Kubish

The structure of modern life, Carey has said, is that we are being watched. And that we are watching. Lately, I have been watching Cascade Mountain and a few of the buildings at the Banff Centre via the centre's cool  webcam . I check it out in the morning, I guess, to try to simulate the thrill of getting that first view of the mountains when actually lucky enough to be in the Rockies—and disciplined enough to get up early. Occasionally, I use it as a momentary emotional escape hatch out of an office tower meeting pushing an hour that should have been 30 minutes. You get the picture. Laundry out there For a rectangular image that sits on my laptop, the webcam screen is, in a way, enlargening. Typically, when we get back from a vacation, whether to the mountains or wherever, I return resolved not to submit to the tyranny of the now visible. And to remember, for instance, that at this exact moment there are people walking into the Safeway on the corner of Robson a...

Presenting Joyce, Beach This is the hyperreality of my brain. I share this for the good of science. And as an apology for what might make me look like a bad listener from time to time. This afternoon, Mikey was sitting on the couch with his laptop, planning his UAlberta term next fall with one eye to toward educational depth and the other toward having time for lunch. "I think I'm going to take something about galaxies," he said. "Stars. Maybe take an astronomy course." Out of the flow of his words, what extracted itself was the word "stars." Originally, I wrote that sentence in the active voice; that is, Out of the flow of his words, I somehow extracted the word "stars."  But then I delete-keyed over that version, landing in the passive, because I can't really say I had set out to segment the word "stars" in any meaningful way. How that worked, I don't know, but I suppose the word had been circling in another ...

That was one small step, but, man, it was one giant leap for brandkind. Felix Baumgartner sat alone in a balloon-lifted space capsule and, for about two-and-a-half hours, rose above the scrubland of New Mexico. When he got to about 128,000 feet, he went through a 30-point checklist, waited for the air pressure to rise and open the hatch door, and walked onto a balcony about the size of a skateboard. And then jumped back to Earth. He fell freely for more than four minutes before he deployed his parachute. In the process, he became the first spaceskydiver to break the sound barrier. He hit a top speed of 1342 kmh. He fell 38 km. By my math, that's roughly the distance between Edmonton and Millet. And he landed on his feet. Such was the ultra-stunt sponsored by energy drink maker Red Bull dubbed Mission To The Edge of Space. Indeed, Baumgartner was no regular astronaut. Instead of his country's flag emblazoned on his spacesuit, he had the Red Bull logo. For those wondering ...

For the longest time I thought Shelagh Of The Irish Spelling was a little crazy. She would lie there in bed, wired to her iPod, listening to podcasts as she drifted off to sleep, while I talked to her about things important to me, and our marriage. She was listening to things like National Public Radio's Fresh Air, This American Life , and Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me ! And The Splendid Table and Spilled Milk and Stuff You Missed In History Class . And Garrison Keillor's The Writer's Almanac . Of course, Shelagh is a borderline insomniac, but, give her one thing:  she does put her waking time to good use. And she's onto something. I am not at her level in terms of the number of podcasts that escort me into sweet sleep, but I have found one. * It's called Re:Joyce , and it's Frank Delaney's tribute to and guide through and analysis of James Joyce's Ulysses . It is published/shared/posted/whatever the word is these days every Wednesday, and I find...