Glenn Kubish

The front tire wasn't a front tire as much as an oversized windshield wiper clearing snow from the glass. The transformation was rapid, and complete: Now I was pedalling down a riverbank utility road, and now I was thinking how lovely it is when the brown city gets a fresh set of linens, and now my front tire was skidding across the ice hidden beneath the snow—and now I was clearly falling. And now, sitting propped up on an emergency room stretcher, I was signing my name to a form without lifting the pen off the page before things went black under a veil of fentanyl and propofol. The scan shows the dislocated shoulder bone  back in place (it looks like a pork chop) and the chunk of bone that fractured off. Frickity fracture Here is another view inside: The fall happened on March 30. I was riding back home with a friend from a meeting of Coffee Outside. For more than three years a growing group of bicycle commuters in Edmonton have met on Friday mornings in a...

Strong-armed Lance Taking a page from Oprah's hit-the-beach-spitting-machine-gun-style-questions interview strategy manual, the thoughtful Tom Walters starts a new blog by asking: Are we looking looking for heroes in the wrong places ?  To which, mimicking the style of fallen hero Lance Armstrong, we can reply, yes or no: Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It can't be a revelation that since about the time of Achilles we just don't get right the gift of our public admiration. The question isn't do we look for heroes in the wrong places. The question, simply, is why?  And it's not an easy question. Part of the answer has to do with the feeling that we don't really, with passion, go looking for heroes, at all. Rather, their images, like predators, come looking for us. And they find us as we see them on billboards, in commercials, on television.  If you have read or seen Shakespeare's The Tempest ( and following an old professor here)  you ...