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 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. 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 drpped 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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).
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..
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
This is part of a series of posts to feature articles that make verifiable predictions. My intent is to review them at a later date to see how accurate they were.
Here’s the punchline, and you already know it: these tariffs don’t take effect for 30 days.
Thirty days. The standard Trump escalation window. The exact runway he always builds himself so he can strut, threaten, watch the markets gag, watch American consumers scream about prices, watch the lawsuits pile up — Section 338 is going to get shredded in court, just like the Supreme Court already shredded his emergency tariffs in February — and then “graciously” announce a pause, a deal, a framework, a beautiful letter from Mark. Trump Always Chickens Out. He did it after “Liberation Day” cratered the markets. He does it every single time the bill comes due.
This week's musical treat once again features the music of Philip Glass. It's a live performance by pianist Anton Batagov of Glass's music for the soundtrack of the movie, The Hours.
I've heard some of this played by the Philip Glass Ensemble, but I much prefer the solo piano version. It's lovely, contemplative music; just what I need to take my mind off the chaos of the current political scene. Enjoy.
I'm starting a new series of posts to feature articles that make verifiable predictions. My intent is to review them at a later date to see how accurate they were. Today, I'm starting with two articles.
This could be the strongest El Niño on record. "With the July runs now in from 667 ensemble members across 14 different seasonal forecast models, it looks like this year’s El Niño is not only very likely to be the strongest event since reliable records began – it may end up the strongest by a truly mind-blowing margin." Review on November 30.
The Forever War Gets Scary. "But we are really now at the point where it’s pretty clear that Trump and the people around him have given up on actually winning the election. They’ve decided instead that somecombination of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, and possibly massive illegality is their way forward." Review November 15.
This week's photo is of a sail boat in Frenchman's Bay. Despite there being a couple of marinas on the bay, we don't see a lot of boats on the bay, probably because it's shallow and gets choked with vegetation by the end of the summer. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro using the full 50 MP sensor setting.
Today's musical treat is from Don Was, a Detroit-based musician and producer who, over the last few years, has been playing bass with Bob Weir and Wolf Brothers. He's currently touring with a new group, Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble. It's a large group, playing jazz, funk, and R&B; as he says in a "mission to chronicle the native sounds of our home city, Detroit". It reminds me a bit of Kamasi Washington's band. To sweeten the mix, he's been throwing in some Grateful Dead covers into his sets.
They'll be playing in Toronto at Koerner Hall on January 30, 2027. I might go.
Here are three recent sets that have shown up on YouTube.
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble: Tiny Desk Concert
WNRN In-Studio Session: Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble
Don Was and the Pan-Detroit Ensemble - 15 January 2026 - The Atlantis, Washington, D.C. (full show)
Canada and the US celebrated their respective national anniversaries this week, so it seems like a good time to post another set of articles about the relationship between our two countries. Let's start with Bryan Adams and his new song, "51st State".
The Threat to Canada Is Coming From the White House. "This past week, the ambassador of a foreign country, Pete Hoekstra, publicly stated that Canada’s sovereignty would be a “great discussion” in the upcoming trade negotiations with the Trump administration."
Today's photo is of a yucca growing in our front yard. We had a brief thunderstorm yesterday afternoon and after the sun had come out, the rain drops were glowing like diamonds on the top of the yucca. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
This week's musical treat is a live performance by Garnet Rogers, who Nancy and I have seen more times than I can remember. We haven't seen him perform in a couple of years, so finding this recent performance is a treat. I don't know anything about the venue, but it's a professional recording with good sound. Enjoy.
This article by Charlie Angus eviscerates the oil companies and the Carney government for caving to them. The government's capitulation to big oil is going to hurt us all in the long run and shows a distinct lack of vision.
It seems darkly ironic that, in a summer of heat domes and climate stress, the PM has announced his “win-win” strategy to build another pipeline.
There is zero business case for this pipeline. It is a total subsidy to the industry. Nonetheless, Mr. Carney assures us it will be a “public-private” partnership.
It is the public who will pay.
The private interests of the oil giants will make out like bandits. They win.
I found this article by historian Timothy Snyder particularly insightful. Coincidentally, I've been reading a series of novels by S. M. Stirling, (TO TURN THE TIDE and THE WINDS OF FATE). They postulate time travellers trying to avoid a nuclear war by returning to the Roman Empire of Marcus Aurelius and changing history. Marcus Aurelius, the subject of Snyder's article, is an important character in the novels. .
In the late second century AD, the Roman Empire confronted armies that had crossed the border at the Danube River and even broached the Alps in northern Italy. Among them were the Iazyges, speakers of an Iranian language, who hailed from the Ukrainian steppe.
In Ukraine this February, I was learning about an archaeological find which reveals the interactions of the Romans and the Iazyges, which included alliance as well as enmity. The Roman war against the Iazyges allies was commanded personally by Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who spent the years between 171 and 180 AD at the front. During that time he kept a philosophical diary, probably written at night in his tent. Discovered after his death, that text, known as the Meditations, is a great work of Stoic philosophy.
I turned to the Meditations to see if I could learn anything that would help me to understand the work of Ukrainian archaeologists about the interactions between Romans and Iazyges. I found something else: perspective on the wars of today, and a sense of why, beyond his obvious incompetence in military matters, Trump had to lose his.
Short reviews of movies and TV shows I watched in June. Now that we're watching the Blue Jays, there won't be as much here.
Movies
Disclosure Day: It was good, not great. I enjoyed it, but it was overlong and a bit muddled in the final third. Emily Blunt is really good. Overall, it was more X Files than Close Encounters. (IMAX)
Sheep Dogs: I didn't think I would enjoy this, but it turned out to be bettr than I expected. It's a witty sendup of the murder mystery genre with some sharp and funny writing. (Amazon Prime)
TV Shows
For All Mankind (season 5): Most of this season focused on the increasing conflict between Earth and Mars over asteroid resources. The best part though was the subplot about the search for life on Titan. t's still a great show but I hope the final season is more SFnal. (Apple TV)
The Boroughs: The tag line for this could be "Stranger Things for Boomers" A widowers family consign him to a retirement community in the desert and bad things start happening. It's funny, touching, and scary. I liked it a lot. (Netflix)
Bon Cop: Bad Cop: This is a limited series based on the excellent Canadian films. I was really looking forward to this one but it was unwatchable. Reflecting the French/English Canadian duality, the dialog is pretty much evenly split between the two languages with subtitles. Unfortunately, the dialog is too fast-paced and neither Nancy or I could keep up with it. We gave up after half an hour. What we could follow was good. (Crave)
The Gentlemen: This is another series based on a movie. I enjoyed the original film and the series, created by Guy Ritchie, is just as enjoyable. (Netflix)
Celebrity Antiques Road Trip (season 4): Continuing on with our tour of the antique shops of Britain. (BritBox)
Death in Paradise (season 15): The cast keeps changing but the murders still keep the cops of Sainte Pierre busy. (BritBox)
Silent Witness (season 29): The forensic experts at the Bowman Institute continue on in Birmingham. Still the best of the forensic TV shows. (BritBox)
Today is Canada Day, the celebration of our nationhood. I'll probably watch the Blue Jays game in the afternoon as they play in their Canada Day red and white uniforms. There will be fireworks, of course, and if it doesn't rain I'll be out in my front yard watching them.
I am proud of Canada. We're not perfect and there are many things I would change if I could (better treatment of our indigenous peoples, and an government that wasn't so in thrall to the fossil fuel industry, to name just two). But all I have to do is look south to know how lucky I am to have been born here.
Coincidentally, I came across this article this evening and thought I should include it here. Anyone who grew up in Canada in the last half century will be familiar with most of the objects cited in the article. (It's an Apple News+ link and I can't find a more open link to it, sorry).
Finally, here's a column from Dean Blundell, who expresses his love for Canada much better than I can.
Thank you for being the country that runs toward the ambulance instead of billing it. Thank you for a Charter that treats my humanity as a starting assumption instead of a negotiation. Thank you for leaders who, whatever their flaws, at least know the job is about us and not about them. Thank you for two official languages, for a hundred unofficial ones, for a mosaic that never asked anyone to melt away who they are.
Thank you for being close to perfect in a world that’s forgotten what perfect was even supposed to look like.
I’ve never been more aware of what democracy actually costs, or how fast it can be stolen by a man who mistakes a nation for a mirror. And I’ve never been more grateful that I get to raise my glass tonight in a country that still knows the difference.
You’re 159 today, Canada. You don’t look a day over indispensable.
Happy birthday. I stand on guard for thee. I always will.
The False Flower in the Underground Republic. A dispatch from the garden bed, on what bindweed can teach us about Trumpism, entanglement, and the danger of mistaking strangulation for strength,
From the second column:
A living system is not healthy because nothing grows wildly, it’s healthy because the wildness doesn’t all belong to one thing, and a democracy is not healthy because nobody fights, it’s healthy because no one hungry vine is allowed to wrap itself around every structure and call the suffocation unity.
So yes, the false flower is pretty, yes, it’s persistent, yes, it will be back tomorrow. But so will we.
Today's photo is of a rose in our front yard. When we bought the house, there was a rose bush full of gorgeous pink/orange roses. A severe winter about 10 years ago killed the bush, but to our surprise and pleasure, it started coming back a couple of years ago. Taken with my Pixel 8 Pro.
Neil Young surprised fans this week with the release of Corduroy Plants, a free one-hour concert film documenting his 2025 tour with The Chrome Hearts. The film follows last month’s release of As Time Explodes, a live album culled from the same tour and featuring all the same songs except for “After the Gold Rush” and “Looking Forward.”
If you like Neil's electric playing, you're going to love "Cortez the Killer" and "Like a Hurricane".
Nancy and I headed into a very lively Toronto last night to see the Philip Glass Ensemble at Koerner Hall. I've been a fan of Glass's music since I first heard it in the late 1970s and I've seen him and/or the Ensemble at least nine times.
The concert highlighted Glass's works from the late 1970s and early 1980s. The first set was the entire Glassworks album and was, for me, the highlight of the evening. I much prefer the Ensemble's arrangements to the more orchestral recording. The second set was music from Satyagraha, Koyaanisqatsi, Einstein on the Beach, and Akhnaten.
I enjoyed it much more than Nancy, who is not a fan of Glass's music. That being said, "Dance 1" from Einstein on the Beach wasn't the best choice to highlight music from that opera; I told Nancy it should have been titled "Enough Already". They did do "Spaceship" as an encore which is somewhat more succinct. .
I'm glad I had a chance to see the Ensemble again. Now if only the COC would perform Satyagraha or Akhnaten.
Setlist:
Glassworks (1981
1. Opening
2. Floe
3. Islands
4. Rubric
5. Facades
6. Closing
Rescue from Satyagraha (1979)
Grid from Koyaanisqatsi (1982)
Dance 1 from Einstein on the Beach (1976)
Funeral from Akhnaten (1983)
Spaceship (Encore) from Einstein on the Beach (19776)
