Glenn Kubish

Happy end of the week, y’all. Here is my weekly offering of some of the gifts that came my way last week, things that made for some happiness and gratitude. Three Things, episode 106:                              1. Comma  For a year or so I worked editing copy at the Edmonton Journal. It was my job to lay out pages, size and crop the photos, check spelling and grammar and punctuation, write headlines, that kind of pre-automation stuff. The day that a Jamie Hall column ran without a headline, that was me who forgot to write a headline and then pressed send. I did write one good headline. It was the night in January 2006 the Columbus Blue Jackets hosted the Pittsburgh Penguins in a clash of  phenoms. Rick Nash got a goal and two assists, Sidney Crosby was held pointless in a 6-1 Columbus victory. Nash stills young Crosby . It was good enough to get Bill Sass to walk over from Business to say good job....

  Happy end of the week, friends. To keep the noticing equipment from disintegrating, here are three things I noticed I noticed that made me feel happy or grateful. (Just a little longer today. It takes Arendt awhile to get to the point.) Episode 75:                                1. Taking readings   Monday morning’s first stop, even before the bathroom, even before coffee, was the mailbox. The New York Times Sunday edition is delivered overnight. One pound of news. I scanned the headlines. In Ukraine, an ‘Endless Caravan of Death’ ... How Gun Makers Harness Fear to Supercharge Sales ... A Key Hurdle for Prosecutors: Proving What Trump Believed . I am slightly consoled by the mere organization of the newspaper—all this havoc made to fit in boxes, all the power and greed’s copy neatly standing in perfect towers of print, left and right justified. If the message were the medium, a newspaper would b...

  It’s probably the truth that there’s something wrong with you if there’s nothing wrong with you these days. Making note of three things that made me happy or grateful means only that, as Craig Finn has said, there’s some comfort in the ritual. Here is this week's Three Things podcast . 1. A proposal The wind blew and door chimes jingled madly. The wind blew and snow came unfastened in sheets from the street. The giant elm trees in the wind were just giant elm trees in the wind, but they were also, for a second or two, ancient pens, their top branches lashing back and forth like quills chasing turbulent thoughts. All around was wind. A siren rose in the dark. We were in the elements, Auntie Shelagh and I, as we walked down the aisles of snow on 148th Street. It was cold, this wind with teeth from the north. From the sidewalk, I saw people inside their living rooms. A man with the back of his bald head to the front window sat bathed in the blue pulses of his television. At a din...

  Happy. End. Of. The. Week! This is where once a week I try to remember three little things that made me happy or grateful and then record it in a short podcast. Here's Three Things, episode 53 . 1. Showing your routes I fight in myself the modern impulse to bail out of a newspaper story after the first 10 seconds of reading. I always feel I have something else to look at. I’m a child of print swimming in a visual mediascape designed to keep the attention of goldfish. I mean, look: A 30 second TV commercial for a home exercise machine has 18 cuts and all kinds of effects to keep my attention. Lack of attention is assumed by social media. A typical Twitter user takes about three seconds to decide whether a tweet is worth staying with. We scan, we swipe, we scroll, we, basically, confront written material like we are television viewers, trained to expect a new shot every second. Which is exactly how you don’t read a newspaper. Poor newspapers. All that non-moving black print on un...

  Happy end of the week, friends! Once a week here I try to notice three things that made me feel happy or grateful, things I noticed I noticed, so, the shabby noticing equipment doesn’t completely rust over. This week's Three Things podcast is episode 49 . 1. Take a bough 🌲 In Edmonton, the snow is with us again, or least, it’s pushed over to the side and next to us again. The snow falls and the work to remove it happens next. Remove it from sidewalks, streets, driveways, windshields, highways, bike lanes, staircases, remove it from rooftop, from bridge decks and skating rinks, alleys and driveways and bus stops and boots. Remove it from playing fields, too, so, in the case of the snow on the pitch at Commonwealth Stadium, the men’s soccer team could jump into it after scoring that winning goal against Mexico. Okay, it was last month, but ‘tis the season for reminiscing… Where are we again? Right, here. We use brooms, shovels, scrapers, brushes, snowblowers, salt, plows, blades,...