Glenn Kubish

If I had a happiness and gratitude sonar, these would be the three pings from last week.   Three Things, episode 140:                               1. Experts   Before social media and the democratization of knowledge made everyone an expert, there was a class of people called, well, for lack of a better term, experts. Newspaper editors. Doctors. Politicians. University professors. Civil servants.   It wasn’t necessarily the best of times. Many other voices weren’t heard, lots of experience was somehow ruled to be of no value.   I worked in newspapers as the hierarchy of knowledge came crashing down on some bewildered gatekeepers who I can still see walking out through the debris of fallen pillars as the influencers sashayed in. Those technocrats are not the experts I want back, but I do miss some experts. Or, at least, one specific category of expert. I miss the disc jockey. I still pref...

Happy end of the week, y’all! Here are three things from slightly off the path that left behind some happiness or gratitude this week.  Three Things, episode 79:                                             1. Local news 🪰 Of all the news that has broken in the past week, of all the voices that I’ve heard talking about everything from the heat to Hockey Canada, of all the stories watched or read that I can’t quite recall, the story and the sound that have stayed with me were <Jeopardy music here>...cicadas. You’ve all heard them, but did you know they were here? I owe the fact that cicadas are in Edmonton to Taproot Edmonton reporter and recorder Brett McKay . I enjoy their sound. I like the sound of the word itself—cicada, three syllables, unstressed, stressed, unstressed, which makes it an amphibrach, the name for that kind of foot in poetry. Like Versace or Fi...