Glenn Kubish

Here's this week's   Three Things podcast . Thanks for giving it a listen. Or a read. 1. Showtime  Auntie Shelagh and I were sitting at the back of the Chez Pierre Cabaret when we met Battista, who was at the table next to ours. It was a few years ago. That night, Darcia and Boris, aka the Mercury Opera Company, late of Edmonton, used the infamous strip club to stage La Traviata, in full voice and fully clothed. At intermezzo, the lights came up, conversation rose and we said hello to the neighbours. Saying hello to strangers in Edmonton isn’t like saying hello in other places. Nobody really asks Where do you live? or Where are you from? or What’s your church? to get a read on someone’s beliefs. It’s more, How are you doing? or Are you enjoying the show? Maybe the prying extends to, Where did you go to high school? But looking at Battista’s Roman profile and judging his age to be within three years or so of mine, I knew his high school was either O’Leary or St. Joe’s. I w...

The many formulations for what makes for a compelling story all, by routes straight or serpentine, boil down to something this: "Man starts power tool on first try" is just not as good as "Man struggles  to start power tool." Here, in video from my bicycle commute to work, is why I'm thinking about power tools and stories tonight. So, a few provisional conclusions: 1. Lindi Ortega can sing in my head on the way to work anytime. 2. If that first pull of the cord, or even the second, had brought the machine to life, who cares? I wouldn't have been late to work hanging around wondering what would happen next if it was simply a case of "thing works as it's supposed to." 3. The incongruity of "man pulls cord to start machine, machine responds with nothing" suggests all kinds of  next scenes, including the possibility of violence, and that unknownness, that cloak around what will happens next makes it difficult bordering on i...

The run up to the end in Cambrai of stage 4 of this year's Tour de France delivered a telling moment, my favourite moment in the race, so far. Froome hands off water bottle (Eurosport, steephill.tv) It was there that race leader Chris Froome was captured on video dropping, gently, a water bottle in front of a fan standing on the road side. Of course, the usual move would have been for a cyclist to jettison the water bottle with no small degree of force, launching it in an arc that brought it down in a field or in stand of crops or trees, the goal being to lose ballast quickly, rather than to deliver a souvenir kindly. It was an image television viewers witnessed go by at the speed of it all, but a moment that was then masterfully and thankfully rescued from the flow. "Chris Froome, what a gent," Carlton Kirby, the Eurosport commentator, immediately told viewers. "He takes a big toot on a bidon, thinks about putting it in the cage, 'cause there's ...