Glenn Kubish

It's the end of the year as we know it, and a fine time for looking back, peering ahead and, most importantly, making lists. By my count, there are at least five good reasons for making year-end lists: 5. "Five" suggests but doesn't guarantee the movement to "four" which, in turn, delivers that same sense of hanging on the way to "three" and so on. There is an inherent suspense in list-making. Year's end also contains that mix of excitement and anxious uncertainty. Like a rocket's liftoff. 4. Lists impose a kind of precious order on the chaos of events and information we at turns swim and flail in. Compose a list and you get a feeling of the power of putting that note in the melody, and, just as importantly, keeping that note out. Facing a new year, we have yet to have that sense of control pummelled out of us by the passage of time. That happens around the second week of January. 3. It's a thrill to get to the end of a countd...

It's not quite "Hark, the herald angels sing," but "Mrs. Peacock with a knife in the study" sounds like Christmastime just the same. In the basement of the north-end house I grew up in was a rumpus room done up in homage to John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. There were wagon wheel chandeliers, log panels, swinging bar doors, gun holsters, and I think there was, as a nod to the emerging multiculturalism, a couple of sombreros on the wall. At the far end of the room, in front of the fake brick wall, stood a long bar stocked not with rum and whiskey, but with board games. Ludo There were chase games, like Ludo, Sorry, and Trouble. And the classics, including Monopoly and Clue, checkers and chess. We had goofy games, like Barrel of Monkeys and Buckaroo. There was Stratego and Rummoli. Ker Plunk. Twister. Operation. Mousetrap. Let's Make A Deal. Emergency. Mastermind. Waterworks. Battling Tops. Hungry Hungry Hippos. Snakes and Ladders. We had a CN Rail boa...

I'm gonna call it cyblorging, and we'll see where it takes me. Cyblorging: the act of blogging about cycling as captured on video. And this is shaky, and attempt #1 didn't survive a UMG music license challenge, but you get the picture. I got the video by thinking like a cyborg and putting an iPhone 4 into my ski goggles that were attached to the top of my bike helmet. (It's minus too cold C here today, but you gotta move through it!) It's a primitive mounting system, and the video isn't great, but it does capture the sense of cycling in a wooded ravine and emptying out on the banks of the North Saskatchewan River on a stunningly vivid Christmas Eve day in Edmonton. For me, it's always been thrilling to move through a corridor and out into an open area. I suppose I first experienced it as a minor hockey player walking down the rubbered ramp hallway of Grand Trunk Arena and then out into the brilliant lights and the diamond ice. Walk through the low, ...

Not all conversation bridges are built. Joe Strummer died 10 years ago today. He would have had something to say about Newtown. Maybe he already did.

Somewhere in the mists of my undergraduate learning is a remnant of a memory of a teaching about laughter being no laughing matter. Seriously, that's all I've got. Maybe it's Rousseau in his letter on the theatre or somewhere in Hobbes or maybe it was from Bloom's book or in a lecture from Craig or Carmichael. I can't recall it. And we know what we can recall, said Ong.  Whatever it is that is left floats in and out as I get ready to form an actual research question for my final essay project toward a master's degree in communications and technology. That essay will have something to do with laughter.  You will recall :) that I have spent the last few years circling around the Duckett Cookie Video artifact, trying to gain theoretical perspectives on its meaning, its impact, its lessons. Not yet in the form of a research question, my interest in that video text, which has attracted nearly 350,000 views, will, I feel, reflect my newfound perspe...

We were in Vancouver last month for the Springsteen concert , and, with a couple of extra hours to kill before show time, I showed our youngest son, Mike, the place where I used to live:  1516 Burnaby St. I brought a couple of black-and-white photos from that time and tried to better use the photographedmonton  technique I discovered here . This time it worked better, so I was happy about that. But I should have experimented with the now shot in colour for a different effect of the passage of time. Then, Mike gave it a shot with a different photo from back in the day: What I didn't realize until looking at the two now-and-then pics was the passage-of-time effect achieved by having my left hand turn into his. That will always be a thrill of my low level of photography: seeing what you didn't see at the time, even if it was right at your fingertips. Tweets by @Kub64

Wow, things got ugly, and fast, when Piers Morgan interviewed Larry Pratt, the Gun Owners of America executive director, on CNN tonight. The general topic was where Newtown should point American society on the question of gun control. It turned into a yelling match, with Morgan calling Pratt a stupid man, a dangerous man, an idiot, and Pratt openly suggesting that Morgan shared responsibility for the Newtown murders. Those viewers who had clung to the belief that discussion in the electronic public square should be fuelled by opinion intelligently rendered, and respectfully clashed with, came loose and hit the ground during the segment. But, on a few fronts, it was, nonetheless, interesting and insightful. There is an anti-European animus, barely disguised, in Pratt's attack. In his first answer, he cites mass murders in Europe, where the violent crime rate is allegedly higher. Soon after, he mentions murder rates in Europe. Pratt then refers to Morgan's interrupt...