“Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea forever.” — Will Self
A quote like this always resonates. While I’m grateful for things like the notes app on my phone, I prefer to jot things down on paper. I feel uneasy when I reach for the pen almost always on my shirt … and find nothing there. It’s an ever worse feeling when I don’t have a notebook on me.
Yes, I’ve reached for serviettes, fetched sheets from a recycling bin, scrawled things on the top of flyers, jotted contact information into a book. Needs must.
I’m not terribly picky about my notebooks, but I do know what I like. I have a variety of notebooks from Muji, so anytime we’re travelling in a city with a Muji store, Martha and I are going to be stocking up. They’re also economical, and while I love a nice, fancy notebook, I like the thrifty kind, too.
I haven’t been on a bus nearly as much since I retired a few months. But for years, I took the bus to work most weekdays, and had things down so pat that I knew the codes for the various stops on my route (No. 2, as the photo above, snapped in 2019, will indicate) so I could text for bus proximity updates.
If I had left home a bit early, I’d try to get in an extra walk beyond the stop where I usually got on board, though I never wanted to chance missing the bus.
Years ago, a friend who had moved to St. John’s wondered why people in St. John’s thanked the bus driver. Is that a St. John’s thing? he asked.
“There has been, is, and always will be every conceivable type of person.” — E.M. Forster
The British novelist’s astute observation was published decades after he wrote it, in the posthumous novel Maurice, arguably his most autobiographical. Like Forster, his protagonist was gay, and unsure how to navigate his world.
Forster started work on the book around 1913, and would tinker with it over the years, but the world did not get to read it until 1971, after its author’s death the year before. “Publishable, but worth it?” was the well-known note attached to the manuscript, reflecting the author’s doubts about what its content might bring on … reasonable, given how the U.K. persecuted based on sexual orientation until at least 1967.
The image of Forster is a painting by Dora Carrington, a fellow member of what’s called the Bloomsbury group. Emma Thompson brought her to life in Christopher Hampton’s 1995 film Carrington.
Less than two weeks ago, Paddy Daly announced he was done as host from VOCM’s Open Line, as much of a political institution in Newfoundland and Labrador as the House of Assembly itself. I mentioned it in this post, and there was definitely some chatter about what surely must have been going behind the scenes. Nature abhors a vaccuum, but not as much as social media.
As it turns out, there was no drama, no political intrigue, no pending overnight reinventions as a Tory aide or a Liberal candidate.
Daly appeared last week on CBC Radio’s On The Go and told Krissy Holmes he knew in December that he was just not feeling that he could do the show justice.
I was stumbling around the Wayback Machine (the internet archive) for something connected to my old blog, and linked out to a former post from the official Agatha Christie website.
This is from a capture made in April 2006. (Look to the right.)
“I read some excellent scientific research that said that as men and women get older, we get happier. I’ve noticed that in myself: sometimes I’ll be reading something, and I’ll be smiling like an idiot. I’ve spent my life being very judgemental of things, whereas now I watch the most asinine stuff on TV and I’ll notice that I’m smiling.” — Mary Walsh
Actor, writer, director and all-round comedy legend Mary Walsh is not generally associated with a gentle kind of comedy.
From Codco’s earliest days and through her work with This Hour Has 22 Minutes (a still-running show she created, let’s not forget), Walsh has not been afraid to tackle tough topics — or the powers that be. I mean, Marg is not called the Princess Warrior for nothing!
The quote above comes from Walsh’s 2020 conversation with Catherine Clark and Jennifer Stewart for an edition of the podcast The Honest Talk. It’s relatable, as I head into retirement.
In the movie Bend It Like Beckham, there are sequences where the young girls playing soccer football seem like they’re about to fly into the air. They’re moving at speed, there’s joy all around, and there’s bright music on the speakers.
A defining song on the soundtrack is Inner Smile by Texas, who were not from Texas but rather Scotland. Texas were already well-established when they released Inner Smile as a single in 2001. A year later, it was on the Bend It Like Beckham soundtrack, and that helped take the song beyond the U.K.
An interesting bit of trivia. The song was originally titled Inner Child, which from a distance might sound innocuous… until you catch what it would have meant in the lyrics:
Happy weekend. Here are some things I’ve been looking at.
Not all that long after everyone hopped on Facebook in the mid-2000s, we saw a phenomenon play out: people indicated they were planning to go to an event, which turned out to scarcely attended. That disappointment has turned out to be a precursor for a bigger problem playing out in the music industry, in which an artist can appear to have a wide following, but there’s not much there in reality.
1 Million Monthly Listeners. 12 Tickets Sold. Here’s The Scam.
Author Joel Gouveia digs into the warped math of the music business, starting with case examples of an artist that racked up seven-figure streaming figures, but, yes, just a dozen tickets sold. By contrast, there’s a Canadian rapper who has social media numbers that would appear to be modest at best. But that of course is deceiving:
“We can’t just stay with the old. We need to acknowledge and still refer to and still play and be connected to older artists. But you can’t just do that because we’re all dying… Even the young artists, they’re dying as well.” — Joan Armatrading
Joan Armatrading has been a force in the music world since the 1970s; amazingly, it’s been almost 50 years since her breakthrough, Love and Affection, which sounds so crisp, clear and affecting, it could have been made at any time since. She’s timeless.
Meanwhile, here’s a live performance (not the best recording quality, but her joy comes through all the same) of Show Some Emotion, one of my favourite Joan Armatrading songs:
St. John’s has a complicated relationship with winter.
First, it seems like it will never end. We’re weeks away from that period — the time of year when the rest of the country is bursting with spring, and we’re about to lose hope.
Second, winter here is an endurance test of endless obstacles. It’s a walkable city … when there’s no snow. While sidewalk-clearing efforts have improved over the years, it’s still not uncommon to have no choice but to walk in the streets.
It’s a snowy Friday, and I wish you could smell my kitchen. I have two pots on the stove, filled with chicken bones and water. By the end of it, we’ll have stock and plenty of it.
Somewhere along the way (I think we can agree on or even blame health influencers on social media in the 2010s), good old-fashioned stock became branded as “bone broth.”
Um, whatever.
If it helps get people making stock, I’m all for it. I knew the bone broth thing had peaked in an early episode of The Mandalorian, when the title character orders some bone broth for Baby Yoda/Grogu while they’re on the run.
There’s been such a dark cloud over billionaire Jeff Bezos and his handling of the Washington Post, and for such a long time, that it’s perhaps difficult to remember there was a much happier relationship at the beginning.
Bezos bought the Post in the summer of 2013, and there was definitely a honeymoon kind of vibe. The New Yorker last evening published a remarkable essay by a former insider, Ruth Marcos, who for years worked on the paper’s editorial pages.
Marcos also had a front-row seat to the chaos of the recent years, including Bezos’s fateful decision to quash the paper’s endorsement of Donald Trump’s rival, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 U.S. presidential election. The decision — seen as currying favour with Trump (Bezos’s Amazon would soon after pay a stunning US $40 million to license a documentary about Melania Trump, a film that was just now released) — triggered a backlash, with more than 250,000 subscribers cancelling their support.
It was a very different mood in 2013, and for some time thereafter. Marcos writes:
“How extraordinary people are, that they get themselves into such situations where they go on doing what they dislike doing, and have no need or obligation to do, simply because it seems to be expected.” — Margaret Drabble
The British novelist Margaret Drabble provides today’s quotation, which certainly resonates when I think about tasks I’ve done, sometimes with growing disdain, until I’ve realized that no one is being served by it. Sometimes this happened at work (and the tasks were generally self-assigned) and sometimes they were domestic. What a feeling — a little bit of liberation, a little bit of What the hell was I thinking? — when you give it up and move on.
I’m aiming to post a quote here every day, and it has not felt at all like that busy work Drabble describes. Here’s how they’ve been stacking up so far.
Two weeks ago, I launched this website, and with it a revived form of Dot Dot Dot, a blog I first started, um, 22 years ago. (Two weeks, 22 years; time is a construct, right?)
One of the best things is reconnecting with people I’ve not been in touch with for years, as well as connecting with people for the first time. (My email contact is always at the bottom of any page.)
I have been asked (all of twice) about why there are no comments on this site.
