Carney's Building Canada Strong Policy is Building Canada Wrong

I'm becoming increasingly concerned and more than a little disturbed by the Liberal government's current emphasis on fossil fuel development. In the rush to disentangle the Canadian ecomony from its reliance on the United States, we're emphasizing fossil fuel production and sales instead of weaning ourselves off of greenhouse gas-producing industries.

I'm not the only person who's concerned about this.

Responding to the news, on the eve of the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, that the LNG Canada Phase II project is going ahead, Ketty Nivyabandi, Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada’s English-speaking section, said:

“The science is clear: we cannot build more fossil-fuel projects if we want to have a livable planet. LNG Canada Phase II is a major setback for climate action and puts everyone’s right to clean air, water, land and the fragile ecosystems we all rely on to exist, at risk.

“Our world is in a state of climate emergency. Canada could be part of the solution; regrettably, it has chosen to be a major part of the problem.”

My own take on it is that, instead of giving fossil fuel developments priority, we shold be going all out on eliminating the use of fossil fuels as quickly as possible. We need a Manhattan Project-scale approach. 

In a recent article, Stephen Levy described the National Emergency Briefing held in the UK last November. I highly recommend  looking at the presentations that were given and areading the associated briefing material.  

“It’s not thousands, it’s not hundreds of thousands, or millions of lives that are at risk – it’s billions of lives that are at risk,” if we fail to tackle climate change and preserve nature.

That’s a statement from the first National Emergency Briefing held in London, UK, at the end of November 2025. Ten experts warned of the risks posed by climate change and biodiversity decline.

Starvation, economic collapse, civil unrest, and wars are just some of the risks we face, they warn.

“We risk sliding into a state of permanent crisis management.”

We know how to prevent this grim future; we’re simply not taking these risks seriously.

Photo of the Week - October 4, 2026

This week's photo is of a display of garden mums at a local supermarket. I was struck by the vibrant yellow colour. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro. 

Mums for sale

 

Saturday Sounds - Kamasi Washington - Lazarus

Today's musical treat is a 2025 release from the great saxophonist, Kamasi Washington. Lazarus is the soundtrack album for the Adult Swim original series of that name. I haven't seen it so I don't know how well Washington's mix of jazz, blues, funk, and prog rock fits into the show, but I like it. I'd probably watch it just for the music, but it's on a service I don't subscribe to. Enjoy. 

What Would Happen If Yellowstone Erupted

Although the risk is low, volcanologists continue to monitor the Yellowstone caldera for signs that an eruption might be imminent. That's because the scale of such an eruption would be unprecedented in human history. Phys.org has published an article that describes the effects that such an eruption would have. It wouldn't be pleasant. 

 Despite the scale, no known human witnessed the cataclysm. As far as we know, early humans had not yet reached the continent. Across oceans, perhaps early humans wondered at the hazier skies and unusually vivid sunsets. Volcanic particles circulating in the sky cooled their climate and likely affected their weather patterns and lives. Whether they noted these changes—or connected them to any distant event—is unknowable.

Today, humanity would certainly notice. We already know that a super-eruption on this scale would threaten civilization as we know it. So what exactly would we experience if Yellowstone erupted? We are experts in disasters and volcanoes, and what follows is a thought experiment into what might happen in the worst-case scenario. We've based our hypothesis on research and an examination of how countries have dealt with disasters in recent years.

If you want a fictional portrayal, check out Harry Turtledove's Supervolcano trilogy (Eruption, All Fall Down, Things Fall Apart). I read this a few years ago and it' matches the phys.org article quite closely.  

 

Movie and TV Reviews - September 2026

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in September.

Movies

• Mayday: Jingoistic silly junk riding on the coat tails of Top Gunn. (Apple TV)

TV Shows

• Silo (season 3): We finally learn more about the origin of the Silos, but the rest of the storyline was muddled and hard to follow. I lost interest halfway through. (Apple TV)
• Gone: A tight-lipped school headmaster is accused of murdering his wife. It's reasonably well done, but never quite takes off. (BritBox)
• A Woman of Substance: A period drama that jumps between the 1910s and 1960s following the life of a housemaid with big ambitions. Worth watching just for the performance of Brenda (Vera) Blethwyn. (BritBox)
• Reacher (season 4): Nothing new here. I think they've pushed the invincibility of Reacher about as far as they can take it, and it's getting a bit silly. (Amazon Prime)
• The Gentlemen (season 2): The second season escalates the mayhem even further. If you like Guy Ritchie, don't miss this. (Netflix)
• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season 4). It's well past time to retire the Star Trek franchise. Out of the 10 episodes this season, only three were watchable. (Paramount+)

 

Hyundai IONIQ 5 EV One Month Review

A month ago we replaced our 8-year-old 2018 Hyundai Elantra GT with a new 2026 Hyundai IONIQ 5 (Preferred Long Range AWD) EV. 

TL; DR: We love it.

Note: I don't drive, so comments about driver-specific features are based on what my wife, Nancy, has told me.

Why an EV?

The main reason we went to an EV was the cost of gas. Our daughter lives about 75 km. away and last year our gas bill averaged $250/month. Since Trump's war started, gas prices have gone up almost 50 percent, and I don't see them coming down much for quite a while, if they ever do. At the overnight rate of $.06/kwh a round trip to our daughter's costs us $1.80. In our Elantra, that trip would cost about $27.  We had to pay for the charger and installation, but the payback period on that is short, probably about six months. 

Then there's the cost of maintenance on a gas-powered vehicle, which was running us a couple of thousand dollars a year on average. EVs don't need oil changes and tune ups. They have other costs (increased tire wear is probably the biggest), but that's offset by less maintenance on the brakes because of regenerative braking. 

And we aren't spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. BTW, most of our power in Ontario comes from nuclear power plants or hydro, so no greenhouse gas  emissions there either. 

We considered a hybrid but the fuel savings from a standard hybrid aren't that great given our driving patterns and plug-in hybrids still have most of the drawbacks of an ICE vehicle. 

What We Like

The IONIQ has a more comfortable and smoother ride than our Elantra. It's a bit bigger, which was a consideration because we need to be able to easily fit a baby seat into the back. Acceleration is good, even in ECO mode, which is the one Nancy uses most of the time. Being an EV, it's quiet though not completely silent; there is a noticeable whine from the regenerative braking when slowing down. Nancy adapted quickly to using one-pedal driving and she likes the adaptive cruise control and lane keeping features when driving on the highway. 

We like having wireless Android Auto, which we use instead of the built-in navigation, mostly because Nancy is used to it. (We will use the built-in navigation if we need to find chargers, though we haven't needed to do that yet.) There are more USB ports than on the Elantra, which is good.  The IONIQ has a glove compartment and a rear windshield wiper, features that seem to be missing from most other EVs we considered. Hyundai has thankfully kept some buttons and knobs for the climate control and infotainment system. We have yet to explore all the features available through the screen interface; there are many more than on the Elantra.

What we don't like

The sound system is just OK. We had to adjust the equalization as the default sound was rather thin and trebly. I'll fiddle with that soon to see if I can punch it up a bit. We mostly listen to SiriusXM and at low volume; it may sound better when cranked up a bit. 

The back lift gate is heavier than that on the Elantra and is difficult to close with one hand. We don't have the powered lift gate and I now understand why people want it. 

The MyHyundai BlueLink app is not great. It does give you control over some car functions but the reporting features are pretty basic. I've thought about getting an OBD dongle, but will hold off until EV Dashboard has an Android version.

I don't like the pop out feature of the door handles. Nancy and I differ on that one so I'll just have to live with it. 

What we miss having

Some of the features in the Premium trim, which was out of our price range, are pretty glitzy and not to our taste (coloured ambient lighting, sunroof). Others, like the powered lift gate, would be nice to have.

The only missing feature that I consider essential is vehicle to load (V2L), which lets you use the car's big battery to power external devices (a shop vac, for example) from a standard outlet in the car. We don't have that. Hyundai does sell a V2Ladapter, and I will probably buy one at some point.  We have had a few multi-day power outages and having the ability to run our freezer or fridge from the car's battery would be good. 

That will do for now. I may post an update in a few months after we've had more time with the car. 

Photo of the Week - September 27, 2026

I took this picture yesterday, late in the afternoon, looking west onto Frenchman's Bay. I had to walk along the shore for a couple of minutes to get the swan in the path of the setting sun. I'm surprised it turned out, considering how hard it was to compose the shot shooting into the sun on my phone, I straightened the horizon in Google Photos and applied the Dynamic filter for a bit more contrast. It is a colour photo, BTW. 

Swan swimming into the sunset

Saturday Sounds - MOSHPIT

Today, instead of featuring a single recording or performance, I'm featuring a website. And it's a good one.

MOSHPIT  is an archive of live music performances from a variety of sources including the Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals, Bill Graham Presents, the King Biscuit Flower Hour, and several other syndicated programs. It's huge.  They claim to have over a quarter million recodings from over 11,000 performers with performances (and some interviews) from the 1950s through into the 2020s.

Unlike the Internet Live Music Archive, most of the recordings are professionally recorded concerts with decent to excellent sound. The site is searchable and you can browse by performer or through their catalogs of sources like the King Biscuit Flower Hour, which includes over 1600 performances alone. Performances are playable track by track and web pages include links to other performances as well as interviews. 

I do wish they had an Android app for it though. 

I'm going to include links to three performances that I picked, more or less at random. 

• Richard Thompson Band, The Music Hall, April 22, 1994
• Miles David Quintet, Newport Jazz Festival, July 4, 1966
• William Prince, Paste Studio ATX, March 16, 2023

That's just a very small sample. I'm gong to be spending a lot of time browsing through MOSHPIT. 

Clear Language and Design Thesaurus

I was cleaning out some old files and came across a printout of the Clear Language and Design Thesaurus. CLAD was an organization in Toronto that promoted clear language. If my memory is correct, were working with the TSX and their business communication staff around the time that I started working there. 

I found their thesaurus quite useful and used it and another internal document of mostly business-related jargon to create a wordlist that a Word macro would scan for words and phrases to avoid. I was often asked to copy edit documents written by business analysts and project managers, and this saved me significant amounts of time. 

As far as I can tell, CLAD as an organization is now part of the Toronto Centre of Learning and Development. The thesaurus lives on as a PDF file and is still useful. The resources listed on their website may also be useful, though the pages are now rather dated.  

Photo of the Week - September 20, 2026

This week's photo is of some dying trees that I took with my Pixel 8 Pro earlier this week. I thought the composition was interesting but that it would look better in black and white. I converted it in PIZLR Editor using the Monochrome filter set to Kodak Tri-X, which used to be my film of choice when I was shooting black and white with a film camera. I guess I was channeling my inner Ansel Adams. 

Dying trees by the side of the road

Saturday Sounds - John Coltrane

YouTube keeps surprising me with great videos that randomly pop up in my feed. Last night, Nancy and I had just finished watching season 4 of Reacher and we didn't have time to watch another show, so I opened YouTube and it came up with a video of John Coltrane performing "Afro Blue". Given when Coltrane was performing, it had never occurred to me to look for videos of his performances. But lo and behold, there are quite a few. 

So today's musical treat is a selection of live performances by John Coltrane and his quartet. I was a bit too young to have a chance to see him live (though I did get to see McCoy Tyner and Pharoah Sanders several times), so this will have to do. Given the era, the video quality is not great, but the sound is just fine. 

First up, the John Coltrane Quartet live in Dusseldorf, Germany in 1960. 

Next, some performances from Ralph J. Gleason's Jazz Casual TV show: "Afro Blue", "Alabama", and "Impressions". 

Finally, here's a spectacular performance of "My Favourite Things" by the John Coltrane Quartet in Comblain-La-Tour in 1965.

YouTube has many more videos of Coltrane performing, but that will have to do for now. Maybe I'll do another post one of these days. Enjoy!

Interview with Peter Watts

Peter Watts is a Toronto-based marine biologist, science fiction writer. and futurist. If you haven't read any of his books or stories, you're missing some of the most intense and well-thought-out SF published in the last couple of decades. I highly recommend his work, including his novel, Blindsight and his Rifters trilogy. And check out his blog, No Moods, Ads or Cutesy Fucking Icons.

He has a new collection, Fold Catastrophes, which he discusses at length in this interview published in Clarkesworld. Here's an excerpt. 

Back when Beyond the Rift came out, my clenching gut said Wake up, people, we gotta hit the brakes before we go over the cliff! But in the years since, things have only got worse—and not only have we failed to hit the brakes, we’re actually flooring the accelerator. The planet falls apart faster than our worst-case scenarios predicted, and we care less than we ever did. The world is on fire, and the nations of the world have scuttled forty-five climate-related initiatives in the past year alone. And while it’s easy to blame the plutocrats and the oligarchs, to say j’accuse at the handful of multinationals responsible for most of the devastation, you have to wonder how those assholes got their hands on the levers in the first place. And the answer is: we put them there. We didn’t see the writing on the wall, or if we did, we ignored it.

Don’t say we weren’t warned. Don’t say nobody told us. Sure, Exxon knew the truth back in the seventies, and they hid it from us. But you know who was talking about global warming back then? Weird Al Yankovic. He wasn’t a scientist. He had no access; there wasn’t even a public Internet in the seventies. He was a nerd who played novelty accordion, and he ranted about the melting of the ice caps during his high-school valedictory address. Sure, he played it for laughs, but it wouldn’t have landed if it wasn’t already part of the zeitgeist—and that was 1976. He saw it coming. A lot of us did. Not enough, clearly.

Now it’s 2026, and it doesn’t even matter if Trump gets the boot at this point. The fact that he ever polled above single digits in any capacity is perhaps the most scathing indictment of the ‘Murrican Mindset one can imagine, and the US is hardly the only villain on the field. So who put those sociopathic shitstains in power, hmmm? There were always alternatives, and we were always told that they were fringe, that voting for an environmentalist would be throwing away our vote, and anyway, it was the Economy, stupid. Enough of us swallowed that line to go out and make it true, year after year, after scorching, drowning year. Now we’re wiping out somewhere between 60,000 and 130,000 species annually (according to the estimates I’ve seen); next year’s shaping up to be the hottest of our lives (but let’s not forget, the coolest of the rest of our lives). And we’re still hitting the gas.

So my gut has long since given up on saying We’ve got to stop before it’s too late, as it did during the Beyond the Rift era.Now it says Fuck you; you had it all, and you threw it away. Enjoy the apocalypse, assholes. I hope you enjoy watching your children burn in the shade. I know I will.

I'm looking forward to reading his new collection, though I probably won't be devouring it in one sitting.  

Google Docs Is Getting Better

Back in the before times, a couple of years before I retired, management at the TSX decided to change the office systems from SharePoint and Microsoft Office to Google Workspace. I fought hard and managed to convince the PTB that I really did need Word and Adobe FrameMaker to do my job, but I still had to use Docs and Sheets for some of my work. 

Since then, I've gradually transitioned most of my personal writing and home accounting to Google Docs and Sheets. I actually prefer Sheets to Excel, mostly because it has far better dark mode support than Excel, and is generally easier to use. As for Docs, I now use it for the few documents I need to create and have even used it to edit a friend's book. I'll probably not renew my Microsoft 365 subscription when it comes up for renewal next year. 

In the eight years since I left the TSX, Google has gradually added features to Docs. Jeremy Caplan at Wonder Tools has published an article listing his 20 favourite Google Docs features. Most were not available when I was at the TSX some duplicate features available in Word. Some require Gemini, which might be a problem in some organizations. 

Here are a few from his list. 

• Match a prior doc's format. This might be easier for some people to use than creating a document from a template.
• Add a quick link to any text. May be easier than Word's linking feature. 
• Create typing shortcuts. Similar to Word's Autotext but probably easier to use.
• Use markdown for formatting. Developers will love this.
• Insert interactive elements. Similar to Word's fields or Quick Parks.

There's more, like tables of contents and sections, which Docs calls tabs. I don't see any support for indexing though, which is something that I needed for some larger documents. 

I think it's clear that Docs is now a suitable tool for many technical writers. Those who are working with large documents, need complex print formats,  or features like footnotes/endnotes or indexes, will probably want to stick to more established tools like Word or FrameMaker. 

My Home Town in the Times

My home town of Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario has been featured in an article (gift link) in the New York Times. The subject is, of course, the ongoing tariff war between the US and Canada, and how it's affecting the Sault (or just Soo, if you're local). It's not affecting it in a good way. 

To cite just one example:

More than half of the steel produced in Sault Ste. Marie used to be shipped to the United States, and the 50 percent tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have devastated the company’s finances.

In March, Algoma Steel, one of only three major Canada-based steel producers, abruptly laid off 1,000 workers it had planned to phase out over two or more years through retirements and reassignments.

Mr. Shoemaker believes the real toll could reach 3,000 jobs, once the layoffs’ full impact makes its way through the city’s broader economy. And things are not getting better soon.

This makes me sad. Growing up in the Soo, my family and friends never paid much thought to the border. My eye doctor was across the river in Soo, Michigan. I had an exhibit in a science fair at Lake Superior State University. My parents would gas up the car over there and come back with cheap bread and I'd bring back Estes model rocket engines (you couldn't buy them in Canada). In later years, when I was visiting family, we'd go over the bridge to the casino to lose money and see a concert. 

But for most people, that's now changed. Traffic across the bridge dropped by 25 percent last year and is staying down. If I'll be going across the river to visit family, I'll leave my phone at home. But that's the only way I'll be visiting the US as long as Trump or the Republicans are in power. 

Photo of the Week - September 13, 2026

This week's photo is from my walk this morning along Frenchman's Bay, which is a major bird habitat. Today there were over a dozen swans in the bay, but most were out too far to make a good picture. But this one was closer. Taken with the 5x zoom on my Pixel 8 Pro. 

Swan on the bay

Saturday Sounds - Still Inside - The Tony Rice Unit

Today's musical treat is an album that I've been trying to find for several years, Still Inside by The Tony Rice Unit. Although best known as a bluegrass musician, he had a jazzier side, which is in full bloom on Still Inside. AFAIK the album, originally release in 1981, has never had a CD release, but it has shown up as a playlist on YouTube Music. Some of the tracks appeared later on his album, Devlin. 

From Wikipedia:

Following that with the Tony Rice Unit, he pursued experimental "spacegrass" music on the Mar West, Still Inside, and Backwaters albums. Members of the Unit included Jimmy Gaudreau (mandolin), Wyatt Rice (guitar), Ronnie Simpkins (bass), John Reischman (mandolin), and Rickie Simpkins (fiddle).

I'm not sure I've head the term "spacegrass" before, but it seems appropriate. It's jazzy, improvisational acoustic music with bluegrass elements, much like that played by David Grisman and Jerry Garcia in the 80s and 90s. I love every note of Still Inside and I hope you will too. 

Timothy Snyder on the 25th Anniversary of 9/11

Timothy Snyder has posted another thoughtful essay, written from Ukraine on the eve of the 25th anniversary of 9/11. It's about our response to terrorism, in general and that attack specifically, what it lead to, and how we can do better.

I was particularly struck by this passage from near the beginning of the essay.

When spectacular terrorism comes, you have to think even as you suffer. Your suffering, though desired by those who caused it, is not the terrorists’ ultimate aim. They push you into a frame of mind so that you then hurt yourself even more. History is full of acts of terror.

The real question, I told the students, is what you do next.

You cannot prevent every terrible thing from happening. But your freedom begins with your response.

Sadly, Americans in power responded as the terrorists would have wanted; indeed, we exceeded their expectations, making the world much worse for ourselves and everyone else.

Americans let the terrorists set the terms: their violence and our violence. We had an opportunity to see 9/11 more deeply, and to react in a way that would have created a safer world for generations to come. And we did not take that opportunity.

The basic American policy response to 9/11 should have been to liberate ourselves from fossil fuels. Without our dependence on oil, we would never have been entangled in the Middle East in the first place. Most of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis, citizens of an oil kingdom that we helped to build, our “ally.” The right reaction in September 2001 -- as I wrote to a friend in the White House -- was to fund fusion and other clean energy sources. Had we done so, we could have headed off global warming, prevented further Middle East wars -- and indeed prevented the rise of Vladimir Putin’s hydrocarbon oligarchy and his invasions of Ukraine.

Today we face the reality of rising oceans, vast fires, and resource conflicts. We were given a chance to halt all of that.

But we did not take it. 

He goes on at length to discuss the distortions to our political system and foreign policy caused by our reliance on fossil fuels, the rise of Homeland Security and the systems that promise security but don't provide it, links all of that to Putin and the invasion of Ukraine, and the possibility of another large scale attack and what our response should be. 

Tying it all back to 9/11, he finishes by saying:

Commemoration is a singular chance to reflect. Americans in power will try to use this anniversary to that everything happened exactly as it had to, and that we should bow our heads rather than use them.

We went along twenty-five years ago. We should not do so again. Thinking about the last quarter century, we can choose to think differently.

And what we failed to do then we can do now. We can think of our security as part of our freedom, as our education and our health and ability to realize our best selves. We can turn from sources of energy that kill to sources of power that enliven. We can love our country but recognize that our only homeland is a common one, the earth itself.

Be Careful With Word's New Linking Feature

Microsoft has added a new feature to Word that lets you share a link to any paragraph in a document. It sounds like it could be handy; you could, for example, email someone with a link to something in a document that you need them to review. But be careful. Office Watch points out that there are some gotchas. 

For one, the document has to be stored on a SharePoint server or on OneDrive. Even more concerning, the default behaviour of the link allows the recipient to edit the document. 

The article goes into a lot of detail about how the linking feature works,  including what you can use as an alternative. If your organization uses Word with SharePoint, it's worth looking into, but be aware of the risks. 

How Long Does It Take?

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been reading a series of posts by Dean Blundell, who is travelling through Germany with his son. Why? 

Steve Schmidt, our two sons and I just spent eleven days tracing the route the US Army took through Bavaria in the spring of 1945, asking one question at every stop: how long does it take to get your country back once you hand it to a strongman? The answer is lifetimes.

Update: Dean has posted a summary article that covers all of the articles with links back to the original full posts. Or you can use the links below.

Here are links to the posts so you don't have to wade through Substack's confusing interface.

• Day One: Marienplatz and the Hofbräuhaus. HOW LONG DOES IT TAKE. I Brought My Son to the Bar Where Fascism Was Born to Find Out.
• Day Two: The NS-Dokumentationszentrum. My Gen Z Son Just Summed Up America’s Collapse in 11 Words.
• Day Three: Dachau to Tegernsee. Dachau Concentration Camp For ‘Undesirables.’ Sound Familiar?
• Day Four: Obersalzberg and the Eagle’s Nest. The View From Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest

There's one more part to the series in which he asks a related question:  What do you do with the buildings?

Trump Is Building Hitler’s Arch. The Next President Has To Blow It All Up. Period. Stop. We spent 11 days walking Hitler’s Germany with our sons. Here’s what the Allies did to his monuments, and why Trump’s arch, ballroom and name all have to come down. 

These posts are the best writing I've seen from Blundell. They should be required reading in every civics class in the United States (and Canada too, for that matter).  

Taking the Rest of the Weekend Off

It's Labour Day weekend up here in the Great Stormy North. We got about 120 mm. of rain from the recent round of storms, so I'm hoping for a few sunny, dry days. I'll be back here on Tuesday or Wednesday depending on how long it takes me to recover from my grandson's birthday party.  

In the meantime, here's a picture of sparrows eating the seed knocked out of our bird feeder by a squirrel. Until we got the feeder, I had no idea how many birds (and how many different species of birds) lived in our neighbourhood.. 

Hungry sparrows

Saturday Sounds - Jethro Tull - 1977/11/21 - Landover, MA

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 

1:11:32 Minstrel In The Gallery 

1:17:12 Cross Eyed Mary 

1:21:58 Aqualung --- 1:30:56 Instrumental Improvisation 

1:34:28 Wind Up 1:39:24 Back Door Angels / Guitar Improvisation / 1:44:43 Wind Up (Reprise) 

1:47:06 Locomotive Breath 

1:53:00 Land Of Hope And Glory / Improvisation / 1:55:43 Back Door Angels (Reprise)

track listing and time, thanks to Tony Taurus

Movie and TV Reviews - August 2026

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))

2026 Hugo Award Winners

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. 

The Trouble With Normal

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". 

 

Photo of the Week - August 30, 2026

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. 

A quiet Lake Ontario at sunset

 

Saturday Sounds - Miles Davis Live in Berlin 1969

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!

The US Versus Canada 17

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). 

• The Gordie Howe Bridge Is What American Betrayal Looks Like. "Canada spent billions on the crossing. Trump turned it into a shakedown."
• Trump Wanted to Punish Canada. American Workers Paid the Price. "The tariff war has cost US border towns thousands of jobs, and the damage will be hard to undo."
• 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?"
• Trump Wants To Control Canada. They Said, “Eh, Screw That.” "Add another trade war with Canada to the list of Trump blunders right before the midterms."
• 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."
• We Are Not Red or Blue. We Are Canadian. And MAGAmerica/Trump Are On the Menu. "Trump and MAGA keep trying to read Canada through an American lens. That’s why they keep losing. Here’s who we actually are, with receipts."

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. 

Some Short Book Reviews

I'm trying to up my reading game, spending more time reading (which includes having the book read to me by Google Play or the Kinde app), and less time listening to podcasts or doom scrolling. This was also motivated by the need to read a few of the nominees for the Hugo Awards, since I bought a supporting membership to get the voters' packet.

So here are some short reviews of some of the books I've read in the last few months.

• Children of Time/Children of Ruin by Adrian Tchaikovsky: I've been meaning to read something by Adrian Tchaikovsky for quite a while after recommendations by friends and family members, and I'm glad I did. Both Children of Time and Children of Ruin were highly readable SF with interesting and believable aliens, solid world building, and well-developed characters. I found the plot of Children of Ruin a bit hard to follow in places, but other than that I thoroughly enjoyed both books. 

 

• The Regicide Report by Charles Stross: With The Regicide Report, Charles Stross finally completes the main story arc of his long-running Laundry Files series. I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't read at least some of the other books in the series. Given that the events in the book take place before the sequel New Management trilogy, it felt a bit redundant. 

• Death of the Author by Ndedi Okefor: This is a Hugo nominee and I might not have read it otherwise. In the near future, a university teacher of creative writing gets fired after criticizing a student and decides to write a science fiction novel. The book becomes a huge success, completely altering the author's life. In alternating sections, Okefor includes parts of the author's novel, gradually integrating the two stories. It's well done and very readable, if a bit heavy on family drama. 

• The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow: I am not a big fan of fantasy novels, but decided to read this based on some glowing reviews and its Hugo nomination. It's a riff on the Arthurian legend, with a time travel loop thrown in. I found it quite compelling; the setting, pacing, and characterization are first rate and Harrow is a top flight prose stylist. It may win the Hugo award this year and it would be well deserved. 

• Ancestral Night/Machine by Elizabeth Bear. I have read and enjoyed several shorter stories by Elizabeth Bear but have not read any of her novels until now. These are space operas with a large cast of aliens and a diverse human culture spreading through the galaxy. I liked the setting and stories but there was too much character introspection for my taste, and I found myself skimming a lot. I will read the third book in the series, Folded Sky, soon.. 

 

Coming soon, a review of Biological War: A Scenario, by Annie Jacobsen.

Photo of the Week - August 23, 3026

Today's photo is of marigolds that we planted along the side of our garden to attract pollinators. We've planted them before, but this year they really took off. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.

Marigolds

Saturday Sounds - The Tragically Hip - Live July 22 - August 20, 2016

Today's musical treat is something very special, especially if you are Canadian. Live July 22 - August 20, 2016 is a live album culled from the last concert tour of Canada's most beloved band, The Tragically Hip. 

That isn't hyperbole, by the way. Their last concert was broadcast live over the CBC and watched by an estimated 11, 700, 000 people, about one third of all Canadians. (The CBC will be rebroadcasting it tonight at 7:00 p.m. eastern, on TV and radio, CBC GEM on the web, Sirius XM and YouTube. I will be watching, with beer and Kleenex in hand).

As for the album, I think it will eventually become known as one of rock's greatest live albums. The band, and especially lead singer and lyricist Gord Downie, who was dying of brain cancer during the tourn, gave it their all. It's far more than a greatest hits album; the hits are there, but so are a large number of deep tracks from their catalog, all brilliantly played. If you are new to The Hip, check out "Nautical Disaster", "50 Mission Cap", "New Orleans Is Sinking", or "Bobcaygeon", to name a few of their most popular songs..

Play it often and play it loud.

 

Getting a Better List of Styles in Word

Styles are one of Microsoft Word's better features but Microsoft has never made them particularly easy to use and especially never easy to manage. In my last job, I eventually created a small set of templates with a common set of style names but with differing formats. Some documents could have more than thirty styles. Tracking changes to the styles across differnt documents was painful. 

Office Watch points outs that you can use AI tools like Copilot or Gemini to help you analyse and manage your styles. 

Copilot or any AI (Claude, ChatGPT etc.) can read a Word styles document and reorganize the contents into something more useful, such as:

• Hierarchy table
• Grouped Styles
• Style Guide
• Design System Diagram
• Visual Table
• Style Compliance Table

The article includes a sample prompt and some examples of reports and diagrams that you can create. 

As I recall, Adobe FrameMaker doesn't have many features for reporting on style properties, but there are third-party tools that you could probably use in conjunction with AI tools to create similar reports.

How Journalists Are Using AI

The Nieman Journalism Lab has published an article showing how several Pulitizer Prize-winning journalists used AI tools in their work. 

 A translation of a mass shooter’s cryptic journal in the days after an attack. A public records review that revealed failures to install flood warning systems in Central Texas. An exposé of American technology companies’ complicity in building the Chinese surveillance state. An audit of the SEC’s crypto lawsuits that showed weakening enforcement under the second Trump administration.

On May 4, the Pulitzer Prizes recognized these stories among the winners and finalists across 15 journalism categories. The reporters behind each of these stories also disclosed using AI to the judging committee. Ultimately, five award winners and three finalists this year disclosed AI adoption in their submissions — the most since the disclosure requirement was added in 2024.

The journalists use of AI fell into several key categories:

• Searching for information in a large number of public records
• Translating under deadline pressure
• Making a trove of documents searchable
• Checking other writers' work

Looking at the details of how these tools were used really makes me wish I had had them available when I was working as a technical writer at the TSX. Just the ability to search through the job control system or QA test databases would have been very useful. 

Photo of the Week - August 16, 2026

This week's photo is of our garlic harvest for the year. It wasn't our best; we got 30 heads out of about 36 planted, and they were mostly on the small side. Still, it's not a lot of work and they taste better than most of the supermarket garlic. 

Our garlic harvest for 2026

Saturday Sounds - Girma Woldemichael - Nafqóté

This week's musical treat is from Girma Woldemichael, an Ethiopian-Canadian saxophonist living in Toronto. I was completely unfamiliar with him or his music until hearing an interview with him on CBC radio. His music synthesizes African elements with jazz, and funk and I quite like it. Nafqóté is his most recent album. You can find several more on YouTube Music. 

It's Called a Polycrisis and We're In One

Recently, I read an article by Charlie Angus:  What Keeps Me Up at Night. 

In it he says: 

We are like the three little pigs hanging out in a straw house.

The war in Iran, climate fires across North America and Europe, the political chaos of Trump — would be a serious test of global resilience at the best of times. But now these issues are beginning to lay across each other like terrible ley lines.

So let me lay out four areas where global leaders have left us dangerously vulnerable.

He goes on to discuss four areas of vulnerability in more detail.

• The Strait of Hormuz and the Fertilizer Crisis
• A Planet on Fire
• Regulatory Suicide
• The Marine Super Spreader Event

For more on the El Nino event that Charlie Angus discusses in his article, see this: Okay, These El Niño Forecasts Are Getting Ridiculous.

An analysis published Wednesday by the United Nations’ World Food Programme shows that the strengthening El Niño is on track to significantly worsen food insecurity in some of the world’s most vulnerable countries. The record-strong El Niño that occurred between 2015 and 2016 impacted the food security of 60 million to 100 million people, and WFP’s preliminary analysis shows that the 2026-2027 El Niño could push at least 49 million more people into acute food insecurity by the end of 2027.

“El Niño is a massive threat to the food security of millions who are already vulnerable,” Carl Skau, WFP’s acting executive director, said in a statement. “The sooner we help families to prepare for these climate shocks, the greater our ability to save lives and protect livelihoods.”

All these events (and more) are part of a larger event: a polycrisis. 

Per Wikipedia:

A polycrisis is a situation where many different and separate crises happen at the same time. These problems mix and make each other worse. The total damage is much bigger than just adding the problems together.

Key Features of a Polycrisis

• Simultaneous timing: Multiple major shocks happen right next to each other or overlap. 

• Interconnection: Systems like the economy, the environment, and politics link together. A failure in one area feeds into another. 

• Amplification: Fixing one problem can accidentally make another problem worse. 

• Overwhelm: Governments and leaders struggle to handle everything at once

Things were bad enough before the current and burgeoning El Nino and the multiple economic and political crises caused by Trump's abysmally stupid attack on Iran. 

But now? There's another term for the situation we find ourselves now, coined by writer William Gibson in his wonderful novel, The Peripheral. The Jackpot. I hope I'm wrong about that, but I am very afraid that I'm not.  

2026 Aurora Award Winners

 The winners of the 2026 Aurora Awards for the best Canadian science fiction and fantasy were announced last weekend. 

These are the fiction winners.

• Novel: The Downloaded 2: Ghosts in the Machine, Robert J. Sawyer
• YA Novel:  Breath of the Dragon, Fonda Lee & Shannon Lee
• Novelette/Novella:  The River Has Roots, Amal El-Mohtar 
• Short Story: “The Stone Played at Tengen”, R.H. Wesley
• Graphic Novel/Comic: Shark Girl, Kate Beaton

A Brief Trip on Toronto's Eglinton LRT

Last week, I had to be up in North Toronto so I took a ride on the new Eglinton LRT. I got off the bus on the southeast corner of  Avenue Road and Eglinton but had to cross to the northwest corner  to get to the LRT station. 

I was surprised at how deep it is, nine flights of stairs or five escalators to the platform level. The train cars are more like streetcars than subway cars. I didn't think the layout and seating made good use of the space and the doors are very narrow. The cars are also noise in the tunnel than the subway.  It was half full at around 2:00 p.m. which is a good sign.

I got off at Eglinton and took the elevator up to the subway level. If you do that, make sure you go two stops up to the upper concourse. (I mistakenly got off first on the lower concourse.) I don't know why there is a lower concourse as it doesn't seem to go anywhere. 

It's unfortunate that Metrolinx didn't run the line the extra mile to Eglinton GO station instead of ending it at Kennedy. That would have made an easy connection for anyone coming in from the east and wanting to take the LRT to midtown. As it is, I probably won't be using the line much. 

First and second sets of nine escalators

The platform at Avenue Road station

Photo of the Week - August 9, 2026

This week's photo is of the marina at the foot of Liverpool Road. I should have taken a picture of the excellent ice cream cone I had just before taking this picture. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro and unedited.

The marina at sunset.

Saturday Sounds - Philip Glass

I recently broke down and subscribed to YouTube Premium because the ads were getting too annoying. A subscription to YouTube Music Premium was also included, and I've been browsing through the music library. So today,  here are three recent albums of Philip Glass's music and one special treat. (YouTube Music doesn't allow embeds so I'm just providing links to the albums). 

• Einstein on the Beach: Ictus, Suzanne Vega, Collegium Vocale Gent, and Tom De Cock. Einstein on the Beach is perhaps Glass's best known work but its a monumental piece and rarely performed in its entirely. I was fortunate to see it in Toronto in 2014, and it was one of the musical highlights of my life. This recording is a new arrangement for performance as a concert and is somewhat shorter than the original opera. It's been performed in Europe since 2018.

• Knee Plays from Einstein on the Beach: Arranged by Vox Sarenrae. The Knee Plays are my favourite pieces of music from the opera so I'm glad to see them excerpted in an album. The orchestration makes me think of what Einstein on the Beach would sound like if it had been performed by Emerson Lake and Palmer. 

• The Tao of Glass: Philip Glass and Phelim McDermott. This EP has five of the pieces of music featured in the theatrical production currently playing in London. You can buy the EP on Bandcamp. 

• And finally, we have this: Philip Glass: Etudes Polka by Joseph. C. Krause. It's short, which is probably a good thing. 

Movie and TV Reviews - July 2026

Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in July. 

Movies

• Remarkably Bright Creatures: A quirky romantic drama featuring Sally Field and octopuses. We liked it a lot. (Netflix)
• Enola Holmes (1 - 3): A wildly implausible but entertaining series of movies featuring a teenage sister of Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes. Light but well made. (Netflix)
• Afterburn: Half the Earth gets hit by a super solar flare and the bad guys take control. B+ for the production values; B- for everything else. (Amazon Prime)

TV Shows

• Beyond Paradise (season 4): The Death in Paradise spinoff continues. Light but likeable. I like it that not all the plots involve murders. (BritBox)
• Criminal Record (season 2): A gritty British Police procedural. More intense than the first season but not quite as good, though Peter Capaldi is great, as usual. (Apple TV)
• One Piece (seasons 1 & 2): A live action remake of a long-running anime series. Not very deep but fun to watch. (Netflix)
• Widow's Bay: This series starts out as a comedy following the mayor of a small town in Maine trying to get more tourist visits and shifts into a horror mode. I thought the comedy element was more successful.  (Apple TV)
• Blue Lights (season 3): A police procedural set in Belfast. Gripping and intense. One of the best examples of the genre. (BritBox)
• Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed: A comedic drama featuring the wonderful Tatiana Maslany (star of Orphan Black) "as a divorced fact checker who falls into a web of murder, blackmail, and youth soccer." Fast moving, funny, and worth watching just for Maslany's performance. (Apple TV)

Off for the Long Weekend

It's another long weekend up here in the Great Green North; this one is known as Simcoe Day in Ontario. July wasn't as hot as last year but the episodes of wildfire smoke were worse, so enjoying the outside was difficult. This weekend looks more pleasant, at least when it won't be raining, so I'm taking the weekend off to enjoy it and give my yard some TLC. I'll be back here on Tuesday. 

In the meantime, here's a picture of a couple of sailboats on Frenchman's Bay. I wish I was out there with them. 

Boats on the bay

The US Versus Canada 16

It's time for another compilation of articles about the continuing frosty relationship between Canada and the US. At least the Gordie Howe bridge is finally open and the wildfire smoke has abated somehat, here at least. 

Trump’s New Tariffs Are Designed to Tear Canada Apart. "Washington can now reward some provinces and punish others. The political danger may be considerable."

Lessons We've Learned from Gordie Howe - Elbows Up and Beyond. "his new Canadian built and paid for Gordie Howe Bridge celebrates a Canadian icon who played all his hockey for American teams but was always one of ours."

As Wildfires Ravage Canada, A Trump Puppet From Michigan Is Now Threatening Canada To "Stop The Smoke" Or Else. LOL. "Toronto has the worst air on Earth this week. The north is burning, people are fleeing their homes by boat, and a Congressman from Michigan thinks the problem is that Canada won’t rake its forest."

Mark Carney won’t let Donald Trump see him sweat, but it comes at a cost (gift link). "Watch Mark Carney, not long ago thought to be a political novice, work a press scrum. We’re now used to the half-beat pause before the prime minister answers, the banker’s habit of restating the question in duller language, draining it of drama, and the refusal, almost physical, to take the bait. That composure can come across as a personality quirk but it’s more likely a construction. This week, a remarkable two-part Wall Street Journal (WSJ) investigation shows us what it was built to withstand."

Canada is taking an outsized role in the construction of the post-American world. "Mr. Carney is a continentalist, too – he just has a different continent in mind. But his ardent pursuit of the European connection is in the same counter-balancing mould, not only of Liberal leaders past, but of statesmen through the ages: calling the Old World back into our existence, to redress the balance of the New."

Trump's Threat to Canada is Deadly Serious. "A new report in the Daily Beast has revealed just how far the White House is willing to go to upend international law and to attack allies."

Midwestern Republicans blame Canada, level threats for drifting wildfire smoke. "'FINAL WARNING TO CANADA: Manage your forests to prevent these fires. American lungs are paying the price for Canadian inaction, year after year,' wrote a Michigan congressman running for governor."

Why this Toronto man is being flooded with requests from Americans about their Canadian ancestors (gift link). "The Canadian Citizenship Act has opened doors to foreign nationals who want to reclaim citizenship by descent. Archivists are suddenly in demand."

The Future File 3 - Will Putin's Russia Collapse?

Here's another predictive post from Dean Blundell, who does like predictions. This is from Russia Is Out Of Gas. Literally. And Trump Just Switched Teams Mid-Russian Collapse As Ukraine Overwhelms Russia EVERYWHERE posted on July 24. 

Why This Might Actually Be The Beginning Of The End In Moscow

Here’s the historical part, and I want to be careful: nobody can predict the end of a regime, and Putin has survived plenty. But Russian regimes don’t fall to elections. They fall to lost wars. The Russo-Japanese War gave you the 1905 revolution. World War I ended the Romanovs. Afghanistan helped bury the Soviet Union. The pattern is losing a war while the economy collapses and the elites lose faith — and check the scoreboard: growth stagnant at 1 percent, the deficit doubled, Putin reportedly passing the hat to oligarchs for “donations,” fuel rationing for 50 million people, an army losing more men than it can recruit, and Sberbank’s own CEO, German Gref, telling shareholders in June that nobody in Russia cares about anything except ending the war as fast as possible.

That’s the head of Russia’s biggest bank saying the quiet part into a microphone. When the money men start talking like that in public, it’s because they’ve already said worse in private.

It's a bit loose as a prediction, but I think the intent is clear. Let's check on this one on October 31. 

 

Photo of the Week - July 26, 2026

This week's photo is of our younger cat, CJ, who found the perfect spot to rest. Cats and boxes is a real thing. 

CJ in a box

Saturday Sounds - The Rolling Stones - Foreign Tongues

This week's musical treat is a new album from none other than The Rolling Stones: Foreign Tongues. It's a good one, as the last couple of their albums have been. It's not Exile on Main Street but it's a pretty decent effort for a group of 80-year-olds. Play it loud.