Glenn Kubish

As we bused back north up Highway 2, the military vehicles streamed south. I was with some ATB Financial colleagues who were finishing up the first leg of a province-wide tour to mark the 75th anniversary of the financial institution born in a disaster of too little water. Now, a disaster of too much.  Heading to Calgary The camouflaged vehicles presented both a welcome and an eerie prospect. Yes, the uniformed men and women were bringing their engineering skill and sandbagging brawn, but the movement of those same vehicles whispered that this was, maybe, a state of nature (and not of the tourism variety) they were heading toward.  Back moving through Edmonton on that Friday afternoon, a scheduled drink at Latitude 53 just ahead of me, the scenes through the bus window were jarring. Not because they were hard to see. They weren't. They were the easy images of friends talking on the steps of the Hotel Macdonald. And of a businessman running to get a waiting cab. A...

This video is a riot. It's gotten more than 7 million views on YouTube, so, I'm not the only one who thinks so. Or who has shared it at home or work with some version of, "Hey, have you seen the video with the drunken guy arrested by the RCMP? You gotta see this!" What it is, besides funny, a decent use of 6:10(x) of your life, and near-conclusive proof of how impervious to alcohol is the human ability to memorize, is RCMP cruiser video of drunk driving suspect Robert Wilkinson of Edson combined with his singing of Queen's Bohemian Rhapsody . That makes it a rhapsody, of sorts, itself. The meaning of the Greek term 'rhapsodize,'  rhapsoidein , Ong teaches (Orality and Literacy, p.22),  is 'to stitch song together' ( rhaptein , to stitch; oide, song). ραψωδία In oral cultures, Ong says in words that remind us of our own time, "originality consists not in the introduction of new materials but in fitting the traditional materials ...