A Friday morning spent perusing interesting things

This is what our inlet looks like these days. Grey, wet, cold, and lovely.

Fridays are for me. Since I turned 55 a couple of years ago, I’ve set aside Fridays for – whatever. Since my ADHD diagnosis last year, I’ve called Friday my ADHD day where I can just let my mind carry me into an unplanned day. Sometimes that means reading, sometimes it means spending the day outside, doing errands, seeing friends, playing music…lots of options. And it’s important to give myself permission to do whatever and not feel guilty for not being “productive.”

So today, the cloud is starting to build as a 2800km long atmospheric river is set to deliver up to 90 mm of rain over the next 36 hours, then tapering off to a steady 2-4 mm of rain every day for the early part of the week. It is a good day to hang out at home, drink some lovely Guatemalan coffee from Moja and read through some interesting articles from my feed reader. Here’s a bunch of links for you to enjoy:

Last night I spent a couple of hours playing euchre up at the Bowen Island Legion where every Thursday night is games night. Euchre is not typically a BC game, but it’s played extensively in Ontario, Michigan and Alabama. Becasue our local euchre players mostly bring their variations of the rules from other places, we have to agree on the rules before playing. As a folk tradition, the evolution of card games in fascinating, and conversation last night sent me to checking out euchre’s history today on Wikipedia.

There is a cost to a lifetime of coerced performance, whether it is due to insecurity, the need to code switch or deeper concerns for safety and protection. And the good news is as you get older, you really have fewer fucks to give which, to my mind, makes you a more interesting person. Travelling through my mid-fifties, I stand in awe as many my peers find this freedom and just let the venneer slip. They become true, real and authentic. Sometimes that means they take off and find new purposes and friends and people that get them, and sometimes I get to be one of those friends and the more I see of them the more I fall for who they are.

Time for a little magic. I came across Dani DaOrtiz’s craft today for the first time and I’m impressed by how he so thoroughly and delightfully wow’d Penn and Teller. I’m less impressed by how he blew away Donny Osmond, as that seemed to be like hunting fish in a barrel.

My favourite Canadian band, Rheostatics, released a new album today called The Great Lakes Suite. It’s a meandering ode to the Canadian view of the Great Lakes, reminiscent of their album of Music Inspired by the Group of Seven. It’s like a soundtrack for static things. This album includes poetry (Anne Carson, Liz Howard, Chief Stacy Laforme), guest musicians (Tanya Tagaq, Gord Downie, Laurie Anderson) and audio snippets. I can’t help feel that somewhere deep behind this band’s approach to these uniquely Canadian icons was inspired originally by Glen Gould’s experimental sound composition, The Idea of North. Rheos are having an album launch party in Toronto tonight with Alex Lifeson accompanying them.

It’s one thing to look north and another to look west. The CCPA publishes a useful summary of the resource projects that our provincial government is pursuing in their “Look West” strategy. Some of these are potentially catastrophic, including the idea that we can ship oil by tanker across the north coast of BC, or the idea that exporting natural gas is a good thing to do in a world that is dying from fossil fuel consumption. And what about jobs? Marc Less covers that as well, as these kinds of projects tend to hire large numbers of workers from elsewhere to build them and rely on as few as possible to run them. And these companies just aren’t great neighbours, as our local LNG terminal owner is demonstrating against the Town of Squamish.

Resource development in BC has effects on salmon, which is one of our charsmatic fauna in this region. Salmon are very sensitive fish and their story is the story of the attitudes and effects that humans have on our environment, even when we can’t see it. Salmon make things visible to us. Getting a handle on the story of salmon and the story of humans and salmon is important for getting a handle on how we manage to screw things up by segmenting the management of our environment.

Segmenting our approach to things is a things we humans do. And then we develop tools that, in the words of Nicholas Carr, create “dissimilarity cascades.” this is good interview to watch or read.

I think I will go outside today in the rain to see if there are any transient orcas about. A pod was hunting seals off the west side of our island earlier this week. They might still be around. This time of year, going outside means thinking carefully about how you dress, and this podcast episode on cold weather layering is the absolutely best discussion of dressing oneself for the weather that I have ever come across. I’m a bit obsessed about this topic, and it’s both important, and hard, to get it right.

And when I come home? I’ll make myself some dinner and settle down to watch the Vancouver Goldeneyes begin their history as Vancouver’s new Professional Women’s Hockey League team. Led by Canadian hockey legend Sarah Nurse, is it possible that this team will bring another pro women’s sports championship to Vancouver this year? Let’s see!

I publish posts like this a few times a week, but I don’t send them out to my email subscribers. Every few months I send out posts like this to everyone so you can see what else has captured my attention. Every post on my blog always gets cross posted to Bluesky and Mastodon and sometimes LInkedIn, but the best way to get notified is with an RSS reader. With an RSS reader like NetNewsWire, you can subscribe to anyone who publishes an RSS feed through their blog, Substack, Medium, or other publishing platform. Facebook and LinkedIn don’t publish RSS feeds, so if your good writing is happening there, the rest of the world won’t see it and there’s not much point in folks outside those sites sharing. Several times I have seen things go through my LinkedIn feed that looked interesting and then the app refreshes and lost the content. It sucks. Also it’s algorithmically influenced meaning that these sites feed me what they want me to read and not the other way around. Imagine sitting down to read a newspaper and someone puts People Magazine in your hands. If you are writing there, I strongly encourage you to also publish on a blog somewhere. Use a free service like WordPress so that the whole world can read and share what you are offering. And when Meta or LinkedIn finally go dark, you will have a record of your thoughts, contributions and development for all time and we all will have benefitted from them.

Stay dry!