His name was Harold Williams, and he was often called Hank Williams. Like the country star, he had musical talent — he could expertly play the fiddle and the accordion — but, if I can get away with a pun, rock was more his thing.
Or rocks, really. Rocks that he said had a mighty story to tell, if we would stop, look closely and learn.
Williams was a remarkable geologist, and his work advanced what we now accept to be true about plate tectonics and how the continents formed and reformed over many hundreds of millions of years.
He earned a stellar international reputation as a scientist, although in his own much-loved home, he was not very well known. Williams died in 2010, and I believe that he is still under-appreciated to this day.
“While it’s fun to watch James Bond kick ass, we don’t really identify with him. Most people — myself included — feel overwhelmed by life from time to time. And we can more easily understand and empathize with a character who is in over their head and barely keeping it together.” — Andy Weir
The author Andy Weir made these comments during an interview in 2022, while discussing the release of his book Project Hail Mary. I started digging into the book over the weekend, and plan to see the film adaptation coming out in a few days, with Ryan Gosling in the lead.
Like his prior book The Martian, Weir has dreamed up a story that focuses on someone who is ordinary (well, sort of) but in extraordinary circumstances. In this case, it’s a science teacher who awakens from suspended animation, unaware of who he even is, gradually piecing together the save-all-humanity mission that gives the spaceship and title its name.
Here’s a Cosmic Shed podcast from almost five years ago featuring an interview with Weir.
A young man who believes hammering his face bones is actually making him attractive — and who gets attention by demeaning women, acting like a jerk, getting arrested and rage-baiting millions — has been making me wonder a lot about the state of the world, and our immediate future.
Clavicular is the nom-de-stream of a 20-year-old American named Braden Peters, whose handle has become synonymous with a you-can’t-make-this-up trend called looksmaxxing.
This is a thing that has been part of incel culture, itself something we’ve been living with (and studying) for years. It all gets weirder and more dangerous as the years pass.
Incels get their name from supposedly being involuntary celibate. They typically are young men who loathe and mock women, who are seen as not only rejecting incels themselves but their supposed place of being subservient to men. Over the years, the movement has radicalized young men whose rage at the world has turned to horrific violence. In Canada alone, incel culture has been behind the 2018 van attack murders in Toronto and a murder at a Toronto massage parlour in 2020 so severe it was designated terrorism.
His illustrations alone appeared in numerous publications. The detail in his work is remarkable, including this one from a series on the alphabet, using Queen Victoria as his muse:
The idea of mailing a manuscript is romantic now, and actually has been for years.
So too is the notion of actually getting it back.
Or, for that matter, getting a call back.
I’ve done freelance work throughout a lot of my career, not only while I had day jobs but especially when I was on my own. I kept myself going for well over a year between 2000 and 2001, and I was struck then by how much I had changed since I was doing a lot of freelancing in the early Nineties.
The biggest change: many pitches, which had moved by that time to email, to newspapers, magazines, etc., would go unanswered. Not a peep. Phone calls would often go to straight to voicemail, and again, not being answered was the norm.
That was a long time ago, and I understand from freelancer friends that things are even worse, as a rule.
When I was handling freelance pitches at CBC in St. John’s, I made it a point — at the very least — to reply to a pitch in writing. I made time for chats, over the phone, by video call or (preferably) in person. If I ever did not reply to a pitch, I truly apologize: I know from first hand experience how disheartening the silence can be.
Another freelancing lesson I brought forward, including when I was editing at the St. John’s Telegram in the late Nineties: I did what I could to expedite payment. It bothered me that I had to nag (and nag) some publications to get paid for work done in some cases months earlier. I couldn’t necessarily speed up how payroll worked at my former employers, but as soon as something was certain and/or met approval criteria, I got the paperwork in to speed up the process.
I think it was the Graham Chapman one that made me laugh out loud.
It was one of those reels that are all over Facebook: AI-generated matchups that “reunite” the supposed original actors with the contemporary versions of the actors.
Except if the actor is dead.
In that case, they usually walk on, flash a smile, embrace or touch their younger self and often wave at the camera … all while sporting wings.
No matter what you believe about the afterlife, if someone is famous or at least was on TV, you get to go to a heaven with wings.
“Pictures just come to my mind and I tell my heart to go ahead.” — Horace Pippin
The painter Horace Pippin made this comment in an interview for American Artist magazine, published in 1945, the year before his death. One of the foremost Black artists of the 20th century, his subject matter ranged widely, from self portraits to religious themes to racism in Jim Crow America.
Dozens of people dressed in red, wearing stockings and black sashes, waving their arms just like Kate Bush in the most famous video she made for her 1978 classic Wuthering Heights.
For more than a decade, fans of Bush have been putting off mass communal dances called the Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever. They’ve been held in multiple countries (including Canada), but no one seems to take to them like the Australians.
In Melbourne, apart from getting together and having fun, fans use the event to raise money for an organization that helps women and children get out of abusive situations.
Their numbers, as you’ll see, are well into the hundreds. Here’s the group performance from 2024:
“People will be sympathetic to you if you are thinking out loud. If you seem to be grasping your way, trying to get a handle on what you’re learning and where you want to go next, if you have a long-term plan… for that interview, they’ll follow you. They’ll be patient with you. And my writerly disciplines helped me a great deal in the art or the craft of the radio interview.” — Peter Gzowski
Months before his death in January 2002, Peter Gzowski made this observation during an interview with CPAC’s Ken Rockburn. You can watch the full interview here.
Gzowski was a remarkable interviewer. There were elements of his style that I really admired; there were others that, to be honest, I found a bit grating. I will say that as I got older, I appreciated his ability to command an interview, and enjoy the opportunities he had through CBC Radio’s Morningside in particular to “go long” with a subject.
I first heard Gzowski growing up, I guess through broadcasts of This Country in the Morning when I was not at school. My mom in particular enjoyed listening to him. Morningside, which he joined in 1982, ran until 1997.
Gzowski was always very proud of his background in print. He got his start (like, ahem, many talented journalists) at a student newspaper, in this case the Varsity at the University of Toronto. He was smart and driven, and it says something he became managing editor at Maclean’s while he was still in his 20s.
What would you think about a small group of people who started yelling at teenagers in, say, an atrium at a shopping mall? How would you react if they followed the kids up and down the corridors, swearing at them and yelling insults and other abusive language?
No one would put up with it.
And yet it’s much too common at hockey rinks.
So too is fighting on the ice, and off.
The most recent wild example happened this weekend in the Goulds neighbourhood of St. John’s. It was junior hockey, where the age range is from 16 to 21 (depending on when birthdays fall, for the oldest players). In other words, many of the players are still in their teens.
On Saturday, the St. John’s Junior Caps and Southern Shore Junior Breakers played a game in a playoff series, although they did not so much play as beat the crap out of each other.
“All a designer can do is to anticipate a mood before people realize that they are bored. It is simply a matter of getting bored first.” — Mary Quant
The designer Mary Quant was synonymous with the Swinging Sixties in London, especially for advancing the mini-skirt and other fashions that felt like a liberation from the tighter rules of early years.
If I were to play you two slightly different versions of a radio news report, or perhaps one for television, I wonder if you could tell the difference. I bet you could.
The content, structure and writing would be the same, the clips would be the same, the length would be the same … and yet one just, well, sounds better.
I’ll cut to the chase. A radio piece with proper mixing will usually sound so much better than one without.
During compare and contrast sessions I’ve seen through the years, a listener will generally prefer the mix with ambient noise included. Asked to identify what’s missing (without having been told the difference), they’ll say the one with just voices sounds “cold” or “sterile” or “flat,” or descriptions of that nature.
“Regardless of our circumstances, they do not define us — not unless we give in and let them. Circumstances never determine who we are; they reveal who we are.” — Chuck Pagano
A former player himself, Chuck Pagano found his true calling as a football coach. The quote above comes from his book Sidelined, which covers not only his coaching career, but his battle against cancer.
Jazz on a Summer’s Day was released in 1959, and was filmed the preceding summer at the Newport Jazz Festival. Its opening moments combine the dappled, reflected sunshine in a harbour with a jazzy rhythm.
The piece is The Train and the River, performed by the Jimmy Giuffre Trio. Have a look, and a listen.
As jazz combos go, the Jimmy Giuffre Trio — at least at that moment of the late 1950s — was unusual: the leader on saxophones and woodwinds, accompanied by emerging jazz legend Jim Hall on guitar and with Bob Brookmeyer on valve trombone. An earlier iteration had a bassist, but by this point Giuffre was playing without a conventional rhythm section, nor with a piano, either. That certainly set him apart from what was dubbed cool jazz, or just modern jazz.
When I lived in Ottawa, I was always so impressed by the late, great photographer Bruno Schlumberger, who knocked it out of the park over and over and over again for the Citizen.
Schlumberger had already won a National Newspaper Award by the time I moved there. He would win another five — more than any other photographer. The photo above, a 2007 photo of veteran René J. Piché at the National War Memorial, is one of them. (Click here to see more.)
In those mid-Eighties years, the Citizen was — like the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette and Edmonton Journal — part of the Southam newspaper chain, during a time when the editions were thick with ads, rich with editorial content, and gave pride of place to feature photography. Looking back, it feels like a golden time.
