I mean

someone got his summer haircut yesterday

Now this, my friends, is an a finding aid that makes you want to see what the hell is in that box.

Lazy Sunday mornings with Slugger: a story in three acts

Here are the two most Ottawa Experiences I’ve had in the one (1) week I’ve been home: 1. Sitting next to some Liberal party staffers at a coffee shop and overhearing their discussion about the differences between “Justin” and “Mark” 2. Running into two people I know on the bus. I love this city.

I’m at the archives this week filling in some gaps in my book ms and you should see this ad showing all the kinds of asbestos they used in building the Dorval airport (Montreal Star, 11/26/1960)

The Kranzberg Papacy

I still have my Canadian Press Style Guide and my copy of Mary Vipond’s “The Mass Media in Canada,” which I’m pretty sure was our required first-year textbook. I was a journalism major but I was never really a working journalist, so idk if that counts.

S09E02 The new ADA (Angie Harmon) uses an n-word while quoting a racist cop who kills a Black guy. (This isn’t a slur-spotting watch-along but noting when they appear will help us figure out when they stop!) The season premiere was a Russian baby-broker adoption cover-up scandal situation.

Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Time flies! Season FOUR (omg) of the podcast my history of technology students record went live this morning. I shared details in the linked thread, and you can listen on Spotify link here. An update thread:

Time flies! Season FOUR (omg) of the podcast my history of technology students record went live this morning. I shared details in the linked thread, and you can listen on Spotify link here. An update thread:

oh good my Air Canada book gets to have an epilogue

Over the second half of S08, Van Buren sues the NYPD for promoting a junior white woman over her. The lawsuit is ultimately dismissed. In the season finale, she finally lets it rip on the top brass because they refuse to give her backup to help investigate the assault of a little Black girl.

I have restarted this crochet project three times in the past week. …do you think it’s the first week of May and so I’ve lost the ability to read instructions, process them, and then actualize them? We’ll never know.

The woman who plays Stabler’s wife on SVU is in S08E21 as the titular “Bad Girl”—a drugged-out, barbed-wire-tattoo-having, multiple-boyfriending, killer of a police officer who McCoy gets to confess on the stand and is then sentenced to death. She finds Jesus in prison or something.

I didn’t pick the course name, and the SOR suggests it’s supposed to be an “Industrial Revolution”-type class. Required time period is 1700s-2000s, lower-level gen-ed. I try to come up with other “revolutions” we can learn about instead! Mostly thematic, but arranged approximately chronologically🧵

Damn, that line-up is STACKED with brilliant friends: @danielmacfarlane.bsky.social @ramya.bsky.social @clairecampbell.bsky.social @maryeb.bsky.social a veritable who’s who of Canada-US-border #envhist

I teach a class called “The Technological Revolution.” I split the course into different themed “revolutions,” and on the last day I ask the students what I’d call our current “revolution” if I were teaching this class in 150 years. This time they came up with “The Gratification Revolution.”

I was JUST talking with my history of technology students the other day about how Alexa and Siri are ladies but Claude and Grok are dudes and what that might tell us about our relationship with the technological worlds around us

YouTube categorizes my “official” pick as a children’s song so it’s not on our playlist. But my alternative is this, my favorite song (for grown-ups, I guess) about what we discard in our urban environments. youtu.be/2hXxz5YQSCA?...

I tell this one often, but: To graduate high school in Ontario you needed 40 hours of volunteering. I dropped off applications to everywhere I could ride my bike to. The first response I got was from Kim, the volunteer coordinator at the Canada Aviation and Space Museum. Thanks, Kim!

update: i didn’t go yesterday (got drive-thru instead, sue me) but im going now! I’m gonna eat a VEGETABLE tonight !!

Hey so are you looking for some Earth Day music that maybe *doesn’t* just say that everything is awful? We @nichecanada.bsky.social editors shared our faves here: niche-canada.org/2026/04/22/w...

My undergrad was a professional degree (journalism) so depending on how you define “senior thesis” it was either 1. A no-narration radio documentary about a local indie movie theater’s monthly screenings of The Room 2. A magazine feature about artist-run galleries (guess which one was more fun)

hey guys 8pm on a Wednesday when you haven’t had lunch yet is exactly the right time to go grocery shopping, right?

I’m only the humble co-Editor in Chief at @nichecanada.bsky.social , but consider us “unofficial” signatories of this letter too. niche-canada.org/2026/03/10/c...

CHA president Colin Coates and IHAF president Thomas Wien have sent a letter to Minister Julie Dabrusin, with Richard Dennis (Chief Librarian, Parks Canada) and Media Relations in CC. #cdnhist #parkscanada

@disabilitystor1.bsky.social oh goody this one is gendered female and named after the history of science’s Patron Saint of Having Your Work Ripped Off and Unrecognized By Dudes

S08E18, a minor plot point hinges on someone installing an EIGHT GIGABYTE hard drive on a computer. I continue to be charmed by the Law & Order cops trying to deal with computers. (I had most of S08 running ambiently during spring cleaning this weekend, so I might have missed something fun.)

“RFK Jr. [past tense verb] the [body part] off a dead [animal]” truly any combination of verbs and nouns sounds plausible

To the person whose car I see in the faculty parking lot outside the building that houses history, statistics, computing, and modern languages with the vanity license plate “SOLV4X” I see you, you are loved, I appreciate the commitment to the theme

Not what this is actually about, but in the 19th and early 20th c. settler Canadians tried equally to mythologize their harsh winters **and** downplay their severity to attract (Anglo) tourists and settlers. That paradox is still alive and well I see.

Sort of related: I’ve started listening to an audiobook narrated by Carolyn McCormick (the actor who plays Dr Olivet in the first half-dozen seasons or so) and she’s great.

from a thread about Greenland but also evergreen

I think I’m going to subtitle my flight history course that I’m teaching for the first time in 2 years “From Air to Artemis” (it typically starts with the “invention of air” in the 18th century and ends with the ISS)

S08E06 is another two-parter and another crossover with Homicide: Life on the Street. They rectify their previous mistake by putting Munch and Briscoe in scenes together. Also, there’s LORE: Briscoe slept with one of Munch’s ex-wives??!? (Maybe this is a Homicide deep cut I was not aware of.)

S08E05 is the first time I noticed The Internet mobilized as a main player. Briscoe and Curtis infiltrate a “leaderless resistance” sovereign citizen online group (including one of my favorite guest stars Denis O’Hare, who we’ve seen once before). Briscoe literally says “Let’s surf the web!”

Slugger found the afikomen this year, apparently

i don’t swear much on main but jesus FUCKING christ there are honest-to-goodness photographs of this event (and even if there weren’t, jesus FUCKING christ) i literally just put some of them in a slideshow for my history of technology class

S08E02 has a famous woman naval pilot named Blair, so obviously I have no idea what else is going on in this episode.

The “Victorian Chatbot” came across my feed and I have two responses. 1. I’m not an expert on that particular period or place, but from what I understand the most interesting bits about the Victorians is what they *didn’t write down and publish.* 2. Quick! Ask it about disabled people!

S08E01, a guy uses “Shylock” to refer to exactly what you think he’s referring to. Compared to the n-words and f-words from the first few seasons it’s practically woke. Also, this ep features an extremely baby-faced and unconvincing (sorry!) Rob McElhenney as a teen who kills for the thrill of it.

This is neither here nor there, but I lost my previous academic job in 2024 as a result of one such “reimagining.” The initiative was literally called “Reimagining [College].” When I had my exit interview, the HR person said: “We don’t have it in our files. Did you resign or were you Reimagined?”

This morning’s Bluesky discourse brought to you by the fact that history of science, STS, and the medical humanities are still not integrated in a meaningful way in science training and medical education, and it shows

Of the many jerk-off motions and exaggerated eye-rolls I have to the response (not to the original letter!) one of the jerk-offiest and eye-rolliest is that it’s addressed to *MR.* Coates. Absolutely not! Get out of here with that!

I mean, I grew up in Ottawa, so we did field trips to like the Supreme Court. In first grade someone’s dad worked for the PMO, so we got to meet Prime Minister Jean Chrétien. It was a French immersion class so we practiced asking him questions in French. We *also* did winter survival.

god forbid a gal have a little fun writing about early 20th century Canadian winter culture