Thursday, March 12, 2026

Tags: Broadcasting, Journalism, Peter Gzowski, Quotations, and Radio.

Peter Gzowski and some of his final thoughts on interviewing — and the patience of the audience

“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.

(more…)

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Tags: Hockey, Sports, and St. John's.

I’m still getting my head around the ultra-violent junior hockey game that dished out 568 penalty minutes

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.

(more…)

Wednesday, March 11, 2026

Tags: Design, Fashion, London, and Quotations.

Mary Quant on staying ahead of the public’s likelihood to get bored

“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.

(more…)

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Tags: Broadcasting, Craft singles, Journalism, Radio, and Training.

I don’t like your (room) tone, or rather lack of it: Tips for getting better sound

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.

(more…)

Tuesday, March 10, 2026

Tags: Quotations and Sports.

A thought on circumstances

“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.

Last year, Pagano came out of retirement to assist the Indiana Colts coaching staff.

Monday, March 9, 2026

Tags: Documentaries, Jazz, Movies, Music, and Tunes.

The train, the river and the opening of a classic music documentary

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.

(more…)

Monday, March 9, 2026

Tags: Journalism, Media, Obituaries, and Photography.

A wonderful photographer’s final advice: ‘Travel more. Take pictures. Have a cappuccino’

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.

(more…)

Monday, March 9, 2026

Tags: Law, Politics, and Quotations.

A thought about war and presidents

“We have long since made clear that a state of war is not a blank check for the President when it comes to the rights of the Nation’s citizens.”
— Sandra Day O’Connor

The U.S. Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor wrote the majority decision in the 2004 case Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The decision came when an American president was under fire for war in the Middle East, and citizens were furious with a government accused of ignoring due process for citizens.

It does feel a bit timely.

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Tags: Books, Graphic novels, Mysteries, Recommended reading, and Research.

Reading list: Some of the books I’ve read so far this year

Winter is a good time to read. Can’t get around much anymore, to tweak the Duke Ellington standard.

I always love seeing people’s reading suggestions (my want-to-read list is hellaciously long), and I thought it might be helpful to recap quickly some of the books I’ve read or more likely listened to in the first weeks of the year. I keep track of these things over at Goodreads.

So, in no particular order …

Dead and Alive: Essays, by Zadie Smith. I admire her novels, but I think essays may be where Smith brings the full force of her talent. I thoroughly enjoyed this book … especially her takedown of the algorithms of social media and their infernal effects on the young.

The Book of Dust Vol. 1: La Belle Sauvage, by Philip Pullman. A mission this year is to read Pullman’s prequel trilogy to His Dark Materials. One down. Oh, and it’s tremendous.

(more…)

Sunday, March 8, 2026

Tags: Books, Feminism, Literature, Poetry, Politics, Quotations, and Women.

A thought on the powerful connections between women

“The connections between and among women are the most feared, the most problematic, and the most potentially transforming force on the planet.”
— Adrienne Rich

The poet Adrienne Rich had a long writing career and a busy activist life; for International Women’s Day, it feels appropriate to use this observation from the heady days of the 1970s.

By the time I got to university, Rich was that anomaly: a poet who was well known. Poems like Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers (which she wrote when she a student herself) were widely read, and as I moved into my university studies, I was absorbed by her collection Diving Into the Wreck, which was published in 1973.

Adrienne Rich was born in 1929 and died in 2012. I’m sure her work and words will inspire students and others for many years to come.

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Tags: AI, Books, Saturday digest, Social media, Sports, and Tech.

Saturday, March 7, 2026

Tags: Books, Quotations, and Writing.

A thought on why it’s perfectly OK to have many books going at the same time

“I am reading six books at once, the only way of reading; since, as you will agree, one book is only a single unaccompanied note, and to get the full sound, one needs ten others at the same time.”
— Virginia Woolf

Captured in one of her many letters, the British novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf steps to the defence here of many readers who will start a new book before finishing another — or finishing several.

I definitely fall into the camp of having several (sometimes many) books in progress at once. Usually, I’m on track with one for a good while, but if I am, say, listening to an audiobook, I’ll have a primary bedside book for nighttime, and another tucked away in my backpack. That’s three there.

(more…)

Friday, March 6, 2026

Tags: Books, Broadcasting, Rolling Stones, Steven Page, Tim Curry, Trivia, and Tunes.

Trivia notes: That time the Stones played Ontario in lieu of a prison sentence

Adam Walsh and I scratched another one for the books today, with the monthly trivia show for CBC Radio’s The Signal. You can listen to the whole thing right here.

I thought it might be fun to recap some of the questions and themes of the show with notes and extra resources.

The Stones’s show after Keith’s heroin bust

I asked listeners why the Rolling Stones gave a concert in April 1979 in Oshawa, Ont., and for whom it benefited. (I erred by the way on air by saying 1978; that was when the trial was.)

(more…)

Friday, March 6, 2026

Tags: Business, Newfoundland and Labrador, Oil, and Politics.

Yep, that’s a spike: Charts that help explain Friday’s big jump in gas prices

UPDATE | In this post from Friday morning, I noted the PUB uses interruptions to make adjustments outside of the scheduled weekly setting … and it did. Early on Saturday morning, prices surged another 12.4 cents per litre.

Gas prices in Newfoundland and Labrador are regulated, which doesn’t mean they’re lower than other places (they’re generally not, as there’s a lot of terrain and a relatively small population in the mix) but at least there’s some transparency and oversight … and a cap on what dealers can charge.

Today, the Public Utilities Board raised pump prices by 6.7 cents a litre, bringing the highest price retailers can charge for self-serve in St. John’s, for instance, to $1.541 per litre. You can find cheaper prices, of course, but we can expect retailers to move with the setting.

The jump of course has to do with the war in Iran, particularly the attacks the U.S. and Israel started last weekend. The Friday price setting doesn’t factor in all the commodity market changes of the last week, which have been sharp.

Take a look at how the price of Brent crude has changed in the last six months … and really in the last six days.

Brent Crude Oil – Daily Prices Sep 2025–Mar 2026 (more…)

Friday, March 6, 2026

Tags: Comedy, New York, Quotations, and Travel.

A thought about how New Yorkers aren’t rude; they’re just in a hurry

“Etiquette in New York is all about time management. In other places, you seem rude if you see someone and don’t talk to them long enough. But here, it’s all about speed. And people are fine with that. It’s like, ‘Hello. It’s nice to see you. Thank you for giving me your kidney. I gotta go.’”
— Amy Poehler

The comedian, writer and actor Amy Poehler wrote those words in 2006 for a New York magazine feature about etiquette. They must have struck a chord, as I used a smaller version for the original Dot Dot Dot back then, and I am, recycling. How virtuous.

Honestly, though, they did strike a chord, because I was struck when in New York City for the first time, several years earlier, how remarkably friendly folks were. Not expansive and overly conversational, but genuinely pleasant. The reputation for rudeness is not deserved.

(more…)

Dot Dot Dot

Dot Dot Dot · Page 9

The Stones’s show after Keith’s heroin bust