This week's musical treat takes us back to late 1977 for a concert by Jethro Tull. I saw Tull at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto about a year later and this concert brings back some memories. Tull was much better and more powerful live than I expected from their recordings and this concert covers a full range of their music.
The video doesn't look like it's been upgraded with modern tools but the sound quality is just fine. Setlist is below. Enjoy!
Setlist:
0:00:00 Wond'ring Aloud
0:02:33 Skating Away On The Thin Ice Of The New Day
0:06:53 Jack-In-The-Green
0:10:28 Thick As A Brick
0:24:13 Songs From The Wood 0:30:15 Instrumental / Drum Solo Improvisation
0:37:00 To Cry You A Song
0:39:32 A New Day Yesterday
0:42:27 Flute Solo Improvisation / 0:45:55 God Rest Ye Gentlemen / 0:48:34 Bouree
0:50:40 Living In The Past / 52:19 A New Day Yesterday (Reprise) ---
0:53:17 Second Half Of The Concert – Opening
0:54:55 Velvet Green
1:01:20 Hunting Girl
1:07:10 Too Old To Rock 'n' Roll, Too Young To Die
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in August.
Movies
The End of Oak Street: The best dinosaur movie since the first Jurassic Park film. (Cineplex)
The Tragically Hip: Anniversary of a National Celebration. One of the best concerts I have seen filmed. The original broadcast was watched by 1/3 of the population of Canada.
TV
Miriam Margolyes Discovers New Zealand: A midling good 2-part travelogue. The best part is the scenery,. (Knowledge Network)
Legends: A well done, if somewhat implausible, drama about customs agents in the UK going undercover to take down a major drug ring. (BritBox)
Prey: Another variation on the widowed detective trying to track down his wife's killers. The first season was OK but I found t he second season unwatchable. (BritBox)
Sugar (season 2): A combination of LA detective noir and X-Files SF. Enjoyable but not great. (Apple TV)
Star City: The Soviet side of the 1970s space program. This was darker and more intense than For All Mankind. Unfortunately, the final two episodes completely neglected any scientific or technical plausibility. (Apple TV)
House of the Dragon (season 3): I watched a recap of seasons 1 and 2 before starting this season. It made no difference. I enjoyed this season more than the other two though it's still not as good as the original Game of Thrones. (Crave/HBO))
The winners of the 2026 Hugo Awards for the best science fiction and fantasy of 2025 were announced at LA Con V, the World Science Fiction Convention on the weekend. These were the winners of the fiction awards.
BEST NOVEL: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
BEST NOVELLA: The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
BEST NOVELETTE: “Never Eaten Vegetables” by H.H. Pak
BEST SHORT STORY: “In My Country” by Thomas Ha
I was pleased to see that The Everlasting won for Best Novel. I read and enjoyed it, somewhat to my surprise. I did try to read The River Has Roots and gave up after about 20 pages; I may give it another shot. BTW, the author is Canadian. To (I am sure) no one's surprise, John Scalzi won the Hugo for Best Series.
A Substack post by Mary Geddry last week hit a chord with me. In Gradually, Then Suddenly she looks at the effects that climate change is having on the world and the implications for our society.
It starts like this.
There is a famous exchange in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which one character asks another how he went bankrupt.
“Two ways. Gradually and then suddenly.”
That line came up in one of the climate interviews I was watching this weekend, and it has been rattling around in my head ever since because it turns out to be a pretty good description of how complicated systems fail.
After a discussion of ocean warming, she gets to, what for me, was the key point of the essay.
We frequently talk about adaptation as though the climate were moving from one stable setting to another. Build higher seawalls, install more air conditioning, enlarge the culverts, move the flood maps, plant different crops and then carry on.
Horton’s deliberately provocative formulation is that adapting to the climate of 2026 is “pointless” if we mean adapting once and declaring victory, because the climate of 2027, 2028 and 2029 will continue changing unless we stop adding greenhouse gases.
Adaptation itself is obviously not pointless. Horton spends considerable time explaining how urgently we need it.
The moving baseline is the problem. You cannot build resilience around yesterday’s definition of normal when normal itself is moving.
And a little later.
Climate change does not necessarily need to blow infrastructure apart to make it fail. It only needs to invalidate the assumptions under which it was designed, and do so faster than we can redesign the infrastructure.
We're seeing this now, with sea level rise, the increase in wildfires, and the strengthening trends in tropical storms.
On August 27th, she followed it up with another post on the same theme, tied to the disaster in the Himalayas.
What failed was the mountain itself, its structural integrity, built up and eroded over a timescale that has nothing to do with news cycles, finally giving way in the time it takes to read this sentence. If “Gradually, Then Suddenly” was about systems reaching their breaking point, a river too shallow to cool a reactor, an insurance market too strained to underwrite a coastline, Rasuwa district is what happens when the system is the mountain, and the villages built beneath it never had a say.
Climate change happens gradually. Structural failure happens all at once. Nepal is the second half of that sentence.
She goes on to discuss the importance of monitoring.
Journalist Leela Jasinto pointed out that it is also a region under real development pressure; hydroelectric projects, infrastructure expansion, population growth pushed into terrain that is, by any geological measure, still geologically active. The same steep, unstable, glacially-fed valleys that make this terrain dangerous are also what make it valuable for trade routes, for hydropower, for the water itself. Nepal’s government now faces the same question in the aftermath that it faced before Wednesday, only louder: how do you develop a landscape that is actively, geologically alive, without eventually building directly in the path of what it’s going to do next.
That’s what the monitoring gap actually costs. It’s the difference between a government that can weigh economic development against geological risk honestly, and one that finds out the terms of that trade-off by accident.
This is Tendon, Not Fat applied to the physical world: the monitoring station that watches a glacier for twenty uneventful years looks like bureaucratic overhead until year twenty-one, when knowing that glacier is moving becomes the difference between a warning and a body count. Monitoring is a bit of an abstraction. It’s satellites, gauges, staffed research stations, the unglamorous infrastructure of simply knowing what a warming planet is doing before it does it to you. This is the boring stuff you fund during “gradually,” when it looks unnecessary, so that “suddenly” doesn’t catch you empty-handed.
And as she points out, the Trump administration is doing everything it can to disrupt or remove the systems that help us track the effects of climate change.
I'm going to post something I wrote here in 2020 in a post titled The Pandemic and a Fragile World that is still relevant and ties in perfectly to Geddry's posts.
I hadn't really thought much about our modern reliance on optimization and how it affects supply chains until reading Vernor Vinge's, A Deepness on the Sky, a couple of decades ago. In this novel, an interstellar trader visits a world that by most standards would be called a paradise. But it relied on a highly optimized system for food production. A hundred and fifty years later, when the trader returned, the planet had reverted to savagery because of a series of unanticipated catastrophes. That got me thinking.
We've seen examples of problems caused by super-optimized supply chains before the pandemic hit. A cyberattack on the Maersk shipping company disrupted commerce across the world. A fire at a resin-producing factory knocked out 90 percent of the world's production of resin used to make vinyl records. Now our reliance on Chinese factories is causing shortages of everything from drugs to smartphones.
Pandemic. Mideast war. Climate change. All of these are a threat to a stable world.
I'm going to end with a rather prescient song from the 1980s: Bruce Cockburn's "The Trouble With Normal".
This week's photo is of the Lake Ontario shoreline in Pickering near sunset about a month ago. And yes, that is the correct name of the lake. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
YouTube's algorithm keeps presenting me with some real gems, and today's post is one of them: Miles David Live in Berlin 1969. I don't know anything about the video other than it appear to be from a German jazz festival and I'm guessing it was shown on German TV. The video quality is about what you'd expect from 1969 but the sound is fine.
In any case, it's a spectacular performance featuring, along with Davis, Jack DeJohnette on drums, Dave Holland on bass, Chick Corea on keys, and Wayne Shorter on sax. You can't ask for more, except maybe for a longer video.
Here's the tracklist.
00:00 - Introduction
02:02 - Directions
08:52 - Bitches Brew
22:41 - It's About That Time
37:22 - I Fall in Love Too Easily
40:50 - Sanctuary
44:27 - The Theme
It's interesting to hear early versions of some of the material ("Bitches Brew" and "Sanctuary:" that ended up on the Bitches Brew album the next year. I have to wonder what the audience thought of the new material. Enjoy!
Now that trade talks between Canada and the US have broken off, it seems that we are now in a full scale trade war. Before I get into the heavy stuff, let's start with this wonderful video,
Now fo the heavy stuff (oldest articles to newest).
Never mind the insults. It’s time for Canada to hit the U.S. where it really hurts (gift link). "Now comes the hard part. There was good reason to bargain long and hard for an iffy deal if it saved the furniture. But when all was said and done, a bad deal would have undone our economy and unravelled our sovereignty. Walking away was the wise move. So what’s our next move, exactly?"
It Has Begun. "We are at war. This was never about tariffs on steel or the fee structure on the Gordie Howe Bridge. From the opening days of the Trump administration, Canada was subject to a new form of warfare — constant harassment and intimidation with a focus on breaking our economy and making us beg to be a vassal territory."
IT IS TIME FOR CANADIAN COURAGE. "Premier Smith is the weakest link in Team Canada’s effort against Trump’s tyranny against us. Don’t let her play games with our provincial well-;being and our national sovereignty."
This is just a small sample from my feeds and news sites over the last couple of weeks. If you want more, the sites of the articles in this post and previous posts in the series.
