Saturday Sounds - Richard Thompson - Hippies, Thugs and Heroes

Richard Thompson is one of my favourite musicians, so a new album from him is always a cause for celebration. That's especially true when it's an electric band album, as is his new release, Hippies, Thugs and Heroes. 

The album just dropped yesterday, so I haven't had the time to give it the repeated listens it deserves, but on first listen I have to say that I like it. There's nothing here that jumps out like "Cooksferry Queen" or "Beeswing" but nothing that will put you to sleep either. "Sorcerers Apprentice" and "Stringer" are probably the strongest songs and should be stunning live. 

This is the description from the email I got announcing the album and tour. 

A spiritual inquiry disguised as a rock record — a meditation on the towers we build and the ruin that follows when we invest in them too completely. Thompson doesn't fully understand every song here, and that's exactly the point. Hippies, Thugs and Heroes is proof that after sixty years, the joy of not knowing where a song will take you hasn't faded one bit.

Speaking of live, he's just announced a tour and will be coming to Toronto in January, but unfortunately he's playing The Concert Hall, which is a general admission venue,. I might have taken a chance on it in the summer, but heading into Toronto at night by myself in the mid-winter with no guarantee of a decent seat is not happening. 

So here's the album. Play it loud.  

WordCraft: An Open Source Microsoft Word Clone

I posted a while ago about using Google Docs instead of Microsoft Word. At this point in my life, I don't need all of Word's features and Docs serves well for my reduced needs.

But that won't be the case for many others.

WordCraft, by ArtCraft, is an open source clone of Microsoft Word, completely rewritten in Rust. It looks very much like Word and has many (but not all) of Word's features. 

I haven't had time to dive into it so I'm just including a link to this article from XDA that offers a good first look at WordCraft. 

As you may or may not have read, a team of developers led by Brandon Thomas used AI and Rust to reverse-engineer Photoshop into an app called PhotoCraft, and it’s outstanding. However, they didn’t stop at Photoshop; they took their crafty approach to Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom (not Classic), Acrobat, After Effects, and InDesign.

Also, they reverse-engineered Microsoft Word into, you guessed it, WordCraft, and it’s become my new default word processor.

Also: Linus Torvalds is using AI to develop Linux kernel code now

It’s not perfect, but it’s a brilliant start, and it works incredibly well for an alpha release.

My own first impression is that I could use it but that I still don't need it. If I have the time, I'll try to put together a more detailed review in a month or so. 

I've also downloaded their PhotoCraft and LightCraft programs, which are clones of Adobe's Photoshop and Lightroom. These seem somewhat more advanced and polished than WordCraft. Whether I need them is an open question at this point. 

Sometimes You Just have to Pull the Plug

 Sometimes you just have to pull the plug.

Yesterday afternoon I went downstairs to fold laundry, and as I usually do, watch a couple of videos on YouTube. Turned on the TV and receiver and got a "No video signal" screen.

After some fiddling (turn everything off and on, disconnect and reconnect the cable pod), I had the following:

•  Cable TV: audio but no video
•  Blu-ray player: worked with video and full surround sound
•  Chromecast: black screen, no audio
•  LG TV:  home screen worked and apps played with video and surround sound

Nancy checked cables and all appeared to be fine.

So we went nuclear and turned off the power bar, waited a bit, and turned everything back on.

Everything worked as it should. 

I have no idea what caused the problem in the first place. 

We had a similar problem with our new IONIQ 5 and its infotainment screen. Disconnecting it from the battery fixed it, though Nancy lost all her customizations, so hopefully that doesn't happen too often. 

My Windows 11 PC has been admirably stable for the last year or two. Fingers crossed it stays that way. But if it doesn't, I know where the plug is. 

Happy Thanksgiving, Eh!

It's Thanksgiving weekend up here in the Great Yelow and Red North, so I'll be taking the weekend off from blogging (not that I've been here a lot, sorry). It's time to plant the garlic and have a big meal with the family. I'll be back here on Tuesday. 

I think the swans have the right idea.

Swan feeding time

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.