Saturday, February 7, 2026

Tags: Joan Armatrading, Music, Quotations, and Tunes.

A thought on the limits of not updating your musical tastes

“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.

And, evidently, quite wise. The comment above comes from an interview for a podcast last year.

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:

Friday, February 6, 2026

Tags: St. John's and Winter.

Sometimes, like today, St. John’s is gorgeous in the snow

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.

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Friday, February 6, 2026

Tags: Cooking, Food, Home front, and Star Wars.

Making stock is the tastiest way you can recycle

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.

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Friday, February 6, 2026

Tags: Journalism, Politics, and Quotations.

A thought on presidents and journalists

“In America the president reigns for four years, and journalism governs forever and ever.”
— Oscar Wilde

Today’s quote comes from a posthumously published lecture Wilde gave called Decorative Art in America. It appeared in print in 1906.

Here, 120 years on, the quote still resonates, and it should also make us think.

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Thursday, February 5, 2026

Tags: Books, Business, Journalism, and Media.

The Washington Post: A dream burned up, like paper in fire

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:

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Thursday, February 5, 2026

Tags: Quotations.

A thought for when you’re in a miserable, repetitive rut

“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.

Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Tags: Blogs, Digital culture, Dot Dot Dot, Substack, and Writing.

My sandbox, my rules: Why there are no comments here

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.

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Wednesday, February 4, 2026

Tags: Language, Politics, and Quotations.

A thought on not overdoing it with the adjectives

“Adjective salad is delicious, with each element contributing its individual and unique flavor; but a puree of adjective soup tastes yecchy.”
— William Safire

The American pundit William Safire was born in the same year as my dad (that would be 1929), so I naturally associate him with Dad’s generation. He was a political pundit writing from the right, or at least was a conservative in the 20th century sense of the word. He died in 2009, and I would be so curious to read what he had to say about politics in his country in the last decade or so.

Safire was widely respected beyond political circles for his frequent articles and books about language, writing and usage. His 1980 book On Language paved the way for what became, in effect, his main career; he wrote a column in the New York Times Magazine on the subject that ran for three decades straight. His arguments against jargon and in favour of clear and plain language are still potent.

Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Tags: Kate Bush, Music, Tunes, and Winter.

Shovelcrusted, twisting, psychohail and 47 other words for snow (via Kate Bush and Stephen Fry)

Late in 2011, Kate Bush released her 10th album, 50 Words for Snow. The whole project is wintry, with all of the songs connected and fitting a seasonal theme.

For the title song, Bush recruited Stephen Fry, who brings his legend of a speaking voice to the recitation of, yep, 50 different words or phrases that describe snow. Some of them are right out of fantasy, while others — especially on a day like today in St. John’s, where we are surrounded by a heavy, wet, crusty kind of snow — are all too real.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Tags: Business, Comedy, Newfoundland and Labrador, News, Podcasts, Politics, Polling, Recommended reading, and Television.

Traitors, but they’re fictional, and it’s Joffrey, Patsy and Sister Michael (and other things to see)

I got a good chuckle from a post on Facebook this morning. It imagined what the popular TV series Traitors might look like if everyone in the castle was a fictional character.

Some months ago we got a bit hooked on Traitors — the British version, that is. The American one has largely been filled with reality TV “stars” and while host Alan Cumming is hilarious, the American show can sometimes grate. The U.K. show is fun if not fascinating to watch, and I would put last fall’s celebrity version (featuring Stephen Fry, Celia Imrie, Alan Carr, Nick Mohammed and many others) down as one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen in a while.

As for this fictional pitch: Can’t you just imagine Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous in the castle’s bar? Joffrey from Game of Thrones would actually murder other guests — and would 100 per cent be voted out at an early roundtable. And then there’s Sister Michael from Derry Girls, who would already know all the gossip, just from staring at other contestants.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2026

Tags: Comedy, Music, Quotations, Television, and Tunes.

A thought on what goes clear to the bone

“Beauty may be skin deep, but ugly goes clear to the bone.”
— Redd Foxx

Redd Foxx is best-known for playing Fred Sanford in the show Sanford and Son, although many people didn’t know that Sanford was his real surname. Fred Sanford, in fact, was the name of Foxx’s father (and his brother, too, for that matter). The show was based on the British series Steptoe and Son, and transferred the setting from London to the Watts area of L.A. It made Foxx — whose take-no-prisoners style of standup comedy had made him a profane nightclub legend — a household name around the world.

It was also his career peak. He left the show prematurely, and never quite got the combination right to keep a career. Eddie Murphy cast him in 1989’s Harlem Nights, and when Foxx — once a rich man whose wealth slipped away — died two years later, Murphy stepped in to pay for his funeral and burial. “For some strange reason,” Murphy told Vanity Fair, “a lot of people in show business, when they die, they don’t have their stuff in order.”

An underrated part of Sanford and Son was Desmond Wilson, whose Lamont was often the mature one in his many scenes with Foxx’s Fred. Wilson died just last week, at 79.

If you’re of a certain age, you might still be able to hum to the theme for Sanford and Son, or at least nod vigorously. It’s a Quincy Jones song called The Streetbeater, and here it is in full:

Monday, February 2, 2026

Tags: AI, Artificial intelligence, Critical thinking, and Social media.

Monday, February 2, 2026

Tags: AIDS, Culture, Health care, Photography, and Quotations.

A thought on AIDS, the Eighties and what was lost

“In the ’80s, there was a certain freedom, and a sense of immortality, that ended with that decade. AIDS cracked the earth. With everyone dying, everything shifted. Our history got cut off. We lost a whole generation. We lost a culture. We didn’t just lose the actors, we lost the audience.”
— Nan Goldin, photographer, from a piece on her work in the Guardian

Sunday, February 1, 2026

Tags: Covers, Curtis Mayfield, Jazz, Music, Paul Weller, and Tunes.

Move On Up, served 3 ways

Curtis Mayfield’s Move On Up is a firecracker in every iteration, but you need to hear the album version — volume up, please — to get the full effect.

Decades on, it still gets me. It’s almost nine minutes, and worth every moment.

What drives this song? Maybe it’s simply the pitch of Mayfield’s voice, or the rousingly optimistic lyrics. Maybe it’s the seven-piece horn section, which is relentless. Then there’s the rhythm, powered by guitars played by Mayfield and two others.

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Sunday, February 1, 2026

Tags: Psychology and Quotations.

A thought on what makes failure actually succeed

“This thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down, but the staying down.”
— Mary Pickford

Today’s quote o’ the day is from the Toronto-born actor and producer who became one of America’s biggest stars. It originates from this synidcated essay Pickford wrote in 1936, extolling religious belief. (It must have a year of searching for Pickford, a massive star in the silent movie era; her divorce from Douglas Fairbanks went through earlier that year.)

Let’s look at the quote in a fuller context. Here’s the start of the paragraph it comes from:

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