Glenn Kubish

Mayor and the conventional media I am, perhaps, reading way too much into four simple, oft-heard, even clichéd words, but when Mayor Don Iveson got up on the stage this morning and welcomed a few hundred charity bicycle riders to a charity bicycle ride before the Tour of Alberta race with "welcome to downtown Edmonton," I think he was doing more than greeting and indicating location.  I didn't reach that perhapsed conclusion as he spoke. As he spoke, it was, honestly, just more of the usual usual. But then something happened. Or, a few other people happened. First, there was the guy who walked up to us as we watched from a City Centre pedway as, below,  the cyclists streamed by. "What's happening here?" he grumbled. Alex explained the Tour of Alberta to him. He listened and then offered this profundity: "And they have to shut down the whole city for this?" He then shuffled away. Content. What is happening here? Then, there was...

The highway sign announcing "Banff 6 km" was not where I expected to come across Mr. William Wordsworth. But there he was, there, that is, his words were, or some kind of idea of his words from Book Sixth of The Prelude, where the young traveller realizes in some anguish that he had, while briefly lost, unknowingly succeeded in his quest to hike across the Alps. The painful news comes from a local peasant: Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear, For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, We questioned him again, and yet again; But every word that from the peasant's lips Came in reply, translated by our feelings, Ended in this,--'that we had crossed the Alps'. The picture conjured up by those words has for decades lingered in my memory, even though I have never been to the Alps, so I cannot really be seeing anything that I have actually seen. And it's not a televi...

The conversation in the change room this afternoon went pretty close to this: Old Naked Guy #1: "Well, it's June now and I guess we can only count on another three months of golf weather!" Old Naked Guy #2: "Or less! I mean, you can usually count on July and August, but September can be pretty cold." ONG #1: "What about that El Niño? We can get that." ONG #2: "Or not. Global warming, eh?" ONG #1: "Yeah, and it's confusing in the fall trying to find your ball on the fairway with all the leaves." ONG #2: "I'd rather be confused on the golf course than confused at home with the wife!" ONG #1: "Huh." During evening walk at Stanford Okay, so, there's more than a few themes here. And, okay,  the locker room is a semi-sacred place, and I shouldn't, perhaps, be replaying a memory of the conversation. But no identities have been revealed. And, even if you saw these guys, you wouldn...

One evening in a fourth-year seminar on Plato's Republic that I eavesdropped on, our political science professor, the bearded, vested, clear-eyed Leon H. Craig, held the Bloom translation and nodded his head and proclaimed with a voice youthful and knowing, "And that is what is meant when the Greeks said 'like to like,'" and those in the room who understood also nodded their heads and scribbled in the margins of their Bloom translations, and Athens was briefly restored on the 11th floor of the Tory Building on the University of Alberta campus. If I understood then, I don't understand know, though the epithet has burrowed into my brain, and I try to riddle out its meaning often. To escape the pain of knowing that I don't know what I might have once thought I knew, I have morphed it into a more easily, though less Greek version: bike to bike. Bike to bike means a lot of things, but, to me, it basically means that if you ride your bicycle to work, then y...

A cyclist was killed this morning in Edmonton, and some of the usual things have happened. There is a ghost bike chained to a pole at the scene of the collision. Chris, good work. The news has covered the event, setting the scene with sentences like "A sunny morning commute turned tragic on Thursday" and "A 50-year-old woman is dead after being struck by a garbage truck while riding her bike Thursday morning." How The Journal's great John Lucas saw it And the photos that are the latest in the bicycle-turned-headstone-as-mourners-who-used-to-be-kids-on-bikes-look-on series. There is the usual kind of statement from the police investigator about not yet being able to determine who was at fault, that the cyclist had a helmet on, and so on. The waste management company issued a somewhat predictable statement, writing, in part, that "our two drivers are seasoned professionals and have been, and will continue to, cooperate in working with local auth...

This is one of my favourite pics. Johnny Cash, Folsom Prison, January 13, 1968. I'm sitting in the second row behind the dude with the hat. :) I searched it out the other day as part of an exercise in the book ThinkerToys that I am reading (and it me) that challenged me to just look at a favourite photo for 10 minutes—straight. That is a very different use of 10 minutes. I don't know what the average time spent viewing any Instagram pic is, but it's not 10 minutes. The goal is to see the photo differently, see more in it, extract from it visual themes that can be transferred to other areas of life. So, what did I see? I see that: Johnny Cash is the authority, listened to my lawman and lawbreaker alike; those microphones are like prison cell bars; he's got one foot on the prison wall; he's singing, but he's also placed a mic at the front of the crowd, to capture the voices of the voiceless, perhaps; the painting of the California coastal cypress (t...

My favourite line from the old Klaatu song Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft arrives about a minute in when, after a second or two of no voice, the singer, presumably making the case to aliens who might be tuned in, sings: We are your friends The song came out in 1976. Four years later, Carl Sagan delivered Cosmos, his popular apology for the search for extraterrestrial life. I loved the song, read and copied quotes from the book and actually spent many hours on my back in the yard looking up at the stars, trying to connect the dots. Looking back, it's little wonder that there was an audience for the song, the book. Those were Cold War days, and the chill fingered its way even into northeast Edmonton where I grew up. Mutual Assured Destruction, SALT, ICBMs, nuclear winter, armageddon, apocalypse—all these terms glimpsed on the pages of The Edmonton Journal. We are your friends Out of nowhere yesterday, the song was on the radio. Actually, not out of nowhere, but ...