Glenn Kubish

Date: Edmonton, May 24, 2016 Situation: A left-turning bus has just cleared the intersection on an advance green light at Jasper Ave and 101 St, and pedestrians have begun to move east and west on a solid green in the crosswalk. A mother pushes a baby stroller. The VisionZero Quiz Question: Does the SUV turn left in front of the crosswalking pedestrians, or does the driver wait until the crosswalk is clear of pedestrians before making the left turn? And here is your answer: Thanks for playing!

Walter Ong teaches that a characteristic of oral thought, as opposed to thought influenced by writing or print, is its reliance on the aggregative over the analytic. Here is the wise Ong: Oral expression...carries a load of epithets and other formulary baggage which high literacy rejects as cumbersome and tirelessly redundant because of its aggregative weight.  It serves the need of memory (there is nowhere but the mind to store expressions in oral cultures) to describe Odysseus as not simply Odysseus, but wily Odysseus, Athena not just as Athena, but grey-eyed Athena,  Nestor as wise Nestor and so on. This is recall before we could look at a script or a book or hit return in a Google search. The oral Trump  Enter Donald Trump and his collection of adjectives that crystallize themselves onto the modified. Lying Ted Cruz Crazy Bernie Sanders Little Marco Rubio 1 for 38 John Kasich Crooked Hillary Clinton Goofy Elizabeth Warren Low Energy Jeb Bush ...

This will be a collection site for some of the little scenes I see that underline the importance of righting the imbalance of power on public roads. Check back. May 4, 103 Ave, 109 St, pedestrian ignored

Edmonton tells itself a convenient snow-white lie that by May 1 every year has officially run out of the gas it is made of. Politicians are in on it, citizens are complicit in it, the media magnifies it. It has legs. It has traction. It is out in the world. And it has gotten inside. Here is the lie. (These are not my words, but they were actually written and published. Honest. I share them only because they elegantly and efficiently capture the lie.) Bicycles will never be a significant all-season transportation alternative in a city where the streets are snow-covered between five to seven months of the year.  There is no end to this superstitious wailing. With tea leaves, playing cards, pentagrams and horoscopes, Edmonton's winter sky is a medium that, when read by the initiated who can descry these dark things, contains our destiny. And the city's destiny is the automobile. (As an aside, can you imagine what wouldn't have been built if the logic of weather-as-de...

A place I know strikes me as the story of a village that in the glorious old days was visited by a Christ-like figure, a supreme being whose otherworldly talent was recognized at a tender age in the community temples and whose fame was proclaimed far and wide. This Great One grew in power and renown, attracting apostles from their artisan and craftsman lives, some of whom were adept at bloodying with their swords the faces of opponents, some of whom followed faithfully his ability to glide atop water, all of whom were led to the holy grail and the greater world beyond. View from the heavens These few attained a kind of sublime eternity, but many of the residents of this small village, these ones who stayed behind, grew proud, convincing themselves that it was their merit, and not their fortune, that had attracted the blessings of the divine talents who moved, for a time, in their midst. These villagers committed a kind of mass, logical fallacy on themselves, manufacturing out of...

My friend Robin Stevenson is one of the bright, believing band. She is a Chicago Cubs fan. And this is a precious time of year for her. It is the day before Opening Day, and that means the Cubs have yet to open new ways to excite and entertain and, then, ultimately, disappoint her in some newly devised, hardly imaginable way to disappoint her! A couple of weeks ago at work a few of us had to tell short stories about ourselves. Robin spoke openly about her affection for Wrigley's boys of summer. And the beautiful game of baseball. I enjoyed her words. Here they are.  This is why I love baseball. I have loved baseball since I was around ten years old. I love it because you can understand the basics of the game fairly easily. You can see how powerful a home run is by the crack of the bat and how far the ball travels. You can see how graceful and athletic a diving catch is. It is dramatic even in its simplest form. But here’s the thing: I have learned something new about the ga...

Gianni Giordano memorial today, 95 St, Edmonton The political task, with the emphasis on the the, as in  The political task, might be in how we determine the range of creatures we will communicate with. That is the assessment of John Durham Peters, who effortlessly wheels these kinds of weighty aphorisms out of the cornfield deep of Iowa City, where he practises media scholarship at the public university. Indeed, those beings not admitted to a communication network—whether, at various times in history, the slaves or caged hens or the unborn or the dying or the Athabasca River or children or bees or jailed criminals or HIV patients or glaciers or women or undergraduates or immigrants—share in common this: either their volume has been adjusted to zero or the frequency of their voices conveniently escapes the receivers of the political power machinery of the time. And, so, the obverse of the JDP formulation can also be heard. Control the political game by controlling the tu...