Cleaning up and rearranging my shop space today and I came across these two gems: My BBC World Service guide for stringers circa 1996 and my @cfrcradio.bsky.social staff card from 1990 (which would have been my final year there).

If my great grandfather (Eckville’s namesake) was alive today I’m not sure how I’d explain the concept of “Your town is trending on X” to him. Let alone the apparent reason. 🤣

Radio friends, especially those that lived in Ontario in the 80s, I highly recommend the TVO documentary on the life and times of CFNY; Spirit of Radio. A bit melancholy if you miss radio as it was, but a good hour nonetheless tvo.org/video/document…

Official New Year’s Eve photo featuring tree and moon

Today at the airport Teresa got me a coffee featuring a phonetically logical, but uniquely off piste spelling of her name :)

“This is totally the World Juniors” says woman trying to trick her boyfriend into watching Heated Rivalry

Props to Environment Canada for their new colour-coded weather warnings, but my inner 10 year old will never stop laughing about being under a yellow snow warning

Hittin a little too close to home there McSweeney

Now with some festive AI, Charlie Brown

My latest Left Coast Dispatch: Libraries At Their Breaking Point buttondown.com/leftcoastdis... #yyj #bcHist

are we still on about em dashes and ai. imo human writers should just use the em dashes even harder. we should be out here pummeling out those em dashes like we're emily dickinson

*sigh* I’ve always been partial to Times New Roman, but I guess I’ll have to move to another font… maybe Electra which I’ve become fascinated with after reading this note in my copy of a collection of Dashiell Hammett novels :)

Kicking myself for not adding this to my 2025 revenue stream

I can’t look away… also loved this line “In the American imagination, Florida is where you go when you’ve done something wrong. California is where you go when you’ve done something wrong and want to be pretentious about it.”

Our pretend facts are just as good as the real thing. If not better.

Thank god they got that sorted…

When your ambassador is SO deranged that Time Magazine says, "Yeah, that quote sounds real".

They say everybody has that one teacher… I just learned mine, the one who inspired me to study history, has died. Michael Smith also introduced me and many of my classmates to the cinematic classic Zulu (and its admitted flaws as a historical document).

Best read of my morning so far!

Cleo is keen on the fire… she did not love it as a young cat, but like so many of us has grown to enjoy being near heat in her old age!

What an amazing essay from the former chair of Africana Studies at Bowdoin. I'll share a few sections in the reply but seriously, read the whole thing. It's all insightful and beautifully written. lithub.com/maybe-dont-t...

Ian Fleming, though he named his famous character after the author of a birding book, never said if his Jamaica home, Goldeneye, was named for a bird. Bob Marley was a later owner of the property. So I say we unofficially add all that to the lore behind the team’s new name just for fun

I’d love to see the venn diagram of these and things ruined by millennials 🤣

In Mexico, I asked Lewis Hamilton about what pet ownership taught him about himself. A simple question... but one with a LOT of baggage in the #F1 paddock. This is your sign to ask your questions, no matter what others think. open.substack.com/pub/deadlypa...

I still have my special double cassette of Outlandos and Reggatta da Blanc :)

As we brace for a rainfall warning haunted hallowe’en here on the west coast I recommend this series of Wallace the Brave comics by Will Henry that started Monday www.gocomics.com/wallace-the-...

Pumpkin cat is ready for action

Still brilliant

I grew up in one of the whitest bits of Canada and this was always the way with every family I knew…

True, but as a person who had a public facing job I always listed myself with a slightly disguised name… even all those decades ago if the cranks could find you it made your life a bit difficult

And, as I know you’re all keen to know where I was when it happened, I was in this great old school sports bar, The Sports at the Queens Inn in Kingston, ON. Doesn’t look like it’s changed much :)

I’m voting that even when the team gets a name they should stick with this tarp. On a related topic, reclaiming the Vancouver Millionaires name would be fun

I’m not going to cop to a baseball superstition, but here’s a little story; My brother was up for Thanksgiving, brand new Jays cap and all. They lose games 1 & 2. He forgot the cap and left it on a hook at mom’s place. Jays come back to win. The hat will stay where it is.

Environment minister also chimed in, noting that rain must fall to end droughts

There is a trend in some Canadian media of getting all gushy when a major foreign outlet mentions us. In the case of @theonion.com it is actually a big deal 🤣

This sounds brilliant… (I’ll just pause to ask my GP and cardiologist to look away now)… I must try this.

Not expecting to make a career of it, but after living most of my life on the Sunshine Coast and never being in an episode of the Beachcombers or Danger Bay or any of the grazillion Hallmark movies filmed here, tonight I was “guy in Molly’s having a coffee” on an episode of Murder in a Small Town.

On this day in history 35 years ago Teresa and I were married. I checked just this morning and we still are!

Went to a museum and found machines like the one I used to write my first professional news stories on are now old enough to be artifacts

Been watching some old PBS documentaries… highly recommend 2014’s “Dick Cavett’s Watergate” www.imdb.com/title/tt4406...

Wow!

How #CBC's Jazz Show, 'Hot Air,' Quietly Faded Away via @thetyee.ca thetyee.ca/Culture/2025...

Here’s the finished product from what I get up to behind the scenes at the Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts…

I’m enjoying late summer and an extra week or so to get the firewood in

A reporter's personal experiences with the anti-vanlife sentiment in Squamish. www.squamishchief.com/local-news/s...

Just getting into the zone for the 43rd Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts If you’ve never been to our festival before or want to know more about its history check out the two part podcast Sophie Woodrooffe and I made for the festival’s 40th anniversary. writersfestival.ca/2022/40th-an...

I have been thinking about the F1 movie and can’t shake the idea that there was a missed opportunity for a fun B/C plot romance between the ginger race engineer and the slightly clumsy mechanic…

This is some of the best news for independent small market radio in years. Congrats to Ollie and the team at Cabin!

I’d watch the shit out of Hemingway’s Shark Week…