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Category Archives "Links"

From the Parking Lot

September 4, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Links One Comment

A collection of links I found interesting last month. I have been collecting and sharing these on Mastodon, so if you have any interest in seeing these in real time, give me a follow over there. I’ve been using it as a microblogging platform, which is what Twitter used to be. These links cover a wide range of things that caught my eye during the month.

  • This is an example of “exaption” in the human and technological sphere, a key practice in how humans respond to emergence in complex and rapidly changing systems.
  • Educator Sharon Murray shares her principles of teaching, rooted in her love and scholarship of Shakespeare.
  • An important interview with TSN’s Rick Westhead who has done much to uncover scandals, abuse, and governance issues with organizations like Canada Soccer and Hockey Canada.
  • In England, the FA Cup began last month. As one of 440 owners of a Canadian semi-professional football club, I have an active interest in the fates and fortunes of small teams in this competition. The prospect of giant-killings abound and having experienced it once and almost twice with my TSS Rovers FC, I can say there is almost no greater victory for a club of semi-pro punters than taking down a proper professional team.
  • It has become clear to me that during the Olympics nearly everyone with an opinion on sex and gender and what women athletes have to go through. has no idea what they are talking about. You should listen to Tested with Rose Eveleth to better understand the history and complexities of sex testing and athletics.
  • I would love some insight into the psychology of lawmakers who are so frightened and underdeveloped as adults that they ban books by Judy Blume. It’s like we’re being governed by nine-year-old Minecraft mods.
  • A very straightforward tool for moving through complex transitions from Mirjam Hope and Sonja Blignault (@sonjabl).
  • A beautiful tribute from Shireen Ahmed to our Canadian Women’s Soccer Team who had an emotionally wild Olympic tournament as they battled a six point deduction brought on them by their cheating coaching staff and won every game in their group before falling in the quarter-final.
  • An interview with my friend Bob Stilger on his reflections on philanthropy and regenerative systems in the midst of collapse, from a trip he did to Brazil this summer.
  • CBC ran this article about workers dismantling a pro-Palestinian camp at Vancouver Island University and in the caption on this photo failed to mention that one of the workers made friends with a bunny.
  • Facilitated Workshops Create the Problems They Try to Solve. This one hits uncomfortably close to home.
  • I am a Subaru owner. What does it mean?
  • Kanaka Bay on Saysutshun (Newcastle Island) near Nanaimo. The bay is named for a Hawaiian man, Peter Kakua, who is buried there. But his story and the story of those he killed and what it all means is incredible. It took 150 years for someone to give it a proper airing and that someone was Noelani Goodyear-Ka’?pua and you need to read her piece.
  • Vancouver has a new professional women’s soccer team. Welcome Vancouver Rise to the world.
  • This is outstanding, a crowdsourced interview with Laurie Anderson and the last question is delightful. She recently did an episode of The Documentary Podcast for BBC which told a bit more of the story of her new recording.
  • RIP to jazz guitarist Russell Malone. He played with such space and inspired by singers, a singular committment to extracting feel out of every line. Here is an older piece about his lineage.
  • The BC Conservatives want to remove access to harm reduction resources because they feel unsettled about people being able to use them. And the BC NDP is letting them. We are failing folks with addictions. And there is no party willing to govern on the basis of good evidence. Citizens need to be properly educated on addiction and governments shouldn’t let polls dictate health science decisions.

Enjoy these reads and listens and let me know in the comments if you were struck by any of these.

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From the Parking Lot

April 2, 2024 By Chris Corrigan Art of Hosting, Being, Community, Conversation, Culture, Design, Featured, Invitation, Links, Music, Practice 4 Comments

Surfboards inside the museum at Nazaré, Portugal, all of which have ridden the biggest wave in the world.

Things I have found while surfing. Have a look at these, and maybe leave a comment about which link grabbed your attention and what you learned there.

(PS…the headlines are links! Click for more)

John Coltrane’s ideas behind “A Love Supreme.”

I adore this piece of music. I think I first heard it about 20 years after it was recorded, which was nearly 60 years ago now. It is a high form sacred music piece, as important and meaningful as anything that Bach created (it is the season of the Passions, after all) and it so perfectly captures Coltrane’s theology and perhaps every artist’s theology. This article is worth a look for how Coltrane thought about the work and the way he used form as prayer.

Imagining Yourself in Another’s Shoes vs. Extending Your Concern: Empirical and Ethical Differences

An interesting paper about the contrast between The Golden Rule and the idea and practice of what Eric Schweitzgebel calls “extension.” In the paper, Schweitzgebel writes:

“A different approach [to The Golden Rule] treats concern for nearby others as a given and as the seed from which care for more distant others might grow. If you’d care for a nearby child, so also should you care for more distant children. If you’d want something for your sister, so also should you want something similar for other women. This approach to moral expansion differs substantially from others’ shoes / Golden Rule thinking, both in its ethical shape and in its empirical implications.”

This reminds me of the Buddhist practice of Metta, and is food for thought for someone like me who places stock in The Golden Rule.

Every Dr. Johnny Fever DJ break woven into a single show.

If you were a music fan and maybe also if you were involved in radio in the 1970s and 1980s (both of which are true for me), then WKRP in Cincinnati was a must-listen to show. And you had to see the original versions, because the music they played was great but the producers couldn’t afford to syndicate it all, so in re-runs, all the original tracks are just filler tunes and not the originals.

But here is some genius. Someone has taken all of Dr. Johnny Fever’s DJ breaks and announcements and cut them into a three hour show. It contains the live audience laugh track, but it is otherwise a BRILLIANT project and elicits much loving nostalgia for me.

The Implosion of the Retirement Contract

I love a good policy discussion. I admit to being at a loss about how to address inequality and inaccessibility to basics like food, housing and education in a country that thinks of itself as “an advanced economy” and has no political party that is willing or able to make fundamental changes. But policy choices dictate the constraints that create outcomes like unaffordable good food, inaccessible housing and clipping student debt. This paper talks about an interesting underlying assumption that keep property prices high (and therefore also rents).

In nearly all liberal democracies, it is quite normal to treat “property” as “the ideal retirement asset for homeowners, with high house price growth helping downsizers release cash to fund their golden years.”

Cluetrain at 25

The Cluetrain Manifesto was a gamechanger for the early web. Those of us that were blogging back at the beginning of the century all knew about it and if your work extended into the organizational world, reading Cluetrain just laid bare how poorly prepared your company or agency or government was to deal with the oncoming onslaught of conversation, creation and disruption to the ways communications, marketing and organizations worked. Cluetrain is 25 years old now and it’s interesting to think about what is different now. Community is largely gone, for one thing.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Ritual

Ted Gioia should be a must-read on everyone’s list. He writes on music and culture, and everything he says is thoughtful, skillfully economical, and insightful. He points you to pieces of music you would have never found. He provides takes on culture that you aren’t going to get anywhere else. This piece is so insightful about what it takes to live with boundaries that make our lives meaningful in an era where our attention has been nearly completely colonized.

The Origin of Last Summer’s Maui Wildfire

It’s hard to overstate the impact of the fire that destroyed Lahaina on Maui last summer. Having been there in February and witnessed the destruction myself, it is profoundly sad. To make matters worse, the fires ripped open a wound on Maui that private interests have rushed in to heal. The community is now in serious danger of being lost to outside owners and investment companies who have predatory designs on the land and property that was destroyed by the fire. Locals are in danger of forever losing their home places because there is no public support that can compete with what the wealthy interests are offering. It’s a shit show. In this article, Cliff Mass undertakes an analysis of the causes of the wildfire.

Raise energy and reduce ‘meeting fatigue’ by making meetings optional

My mate Mark McKergow has a research-supported idea for lowering cognitive fatigue for online meetings. It’s simple enough, but it requires managers to let go of control and let the work speak for itself. And it requires organizations to loosen up on the samara of accountability culture that is killing many of the workplaces I am working with.

Evaluation vs. Monitoring

Evaluation is one of those things that become a massively problematic constraint on a project if one doesn’t understand it, or worse, fears it. My friend Ciaran Camman is offering his course on Evaluation called “Weaving it In” and you should go to that. To get ready for that though, let this whimsical discussion whet your palate.

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What’s in the the Parking Lot #5

February 15, 2023 By Chris Corrigan Featured, Links

Some links to interesting things that came my way in the last few weeks. Most of these have been already posted on my Mastodon timeline.

  • Cab Calloway singing Jumpin’ Jive and the astonishing, unrehearsed, one-take-dancing duet of the Nicolas Brothers from the 1943 film Stormy Weather. I’ve seen this clip a number of times over the years and it never ceases to put a smile on my face.
  • An index of every In Our Time episode, categorized by their relevant Dewey Decimal System numbers, from the inimitable Matt Webb. In Our Time is a long-running BBC radio show featuring the sometimes cranky Melvyn Bragg as host with three academics who specialize in knowledge of primarily European history, science and philosophy. It’s a wonderful balm for the soul, to hear sophisticated subject matter experts discussing things they are passionate and knowledgeable about.
  • An important interview by journalist Justin Ling about the decriminalization of drugs, harm reduction, advocacy and policy in British Columbia. Ling interviews long-time Vancouver activist Garth Mullins, host of the Crackdown Podcast, and Kennedy Stewart, the former mayor of Vancouver.
  • A beautiful article on the icebergs of the North Atlantic and the people who harvest them.
  • A hopeful article about how Vienna created a sustainable social housing infrastructure. Contains links to further reading if you are so inclined to head down a policy rabbit hole.
  • Continuing the policy dive, here is an analysis of the closure of a major pulp mill in Prince George which has put 300 people out of work, and which has a complex set of causes that might give a thoughtful government pause when thinking about future natural resources policies.
  • On the eve of our Canada’s National Women’s Soccer Team playing a World Cup warm-up tournament match against the USA under protest, here is an article about worker’s compensation for professional athletes. Members of our national team are protesting the fact that they haven’t been paid since 2021 and that the budget, staff size and squad size for their training and preparation for the World Cup has been cut by Canada Soccer. We are the defending Olympic Champions, by the way.
  • And finally, my friend Brad Carter lives in Japan and is an exceptional foodie. He has a blog called 10,000 Words which features pictures and short reflections on food and life in Japan.

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What’s in the Parking Lot #4

December 31, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Being, Democracy, Featured, Football, Links, Music, Uncategorized 2 Comments

As the year comes to a close, I think I have struck a nice balance with Mastodon. It really is a platform much better suited to micro-blogging than twitter ever was. It provides enough characters to properly comment on one link, and invites conversation. And so I THINK I will be mostly posting links from my daily reading there and summing them up here. So enjoy these gems I have found over the past few weeks. You can follow me there at @chriscorrigan@mstdn.ca.

  1. A little summary of some teaching I did earlier this year with Kelly Foxcroft-Poirier
  2. The Yard Sale game and why extreme wealth inequality is inevitable without intervention: Why the Super Rich are Inevitable.
  3. An interesting read about possible futures of Northern Ireland: How realistic is the doomsday scenario?
  4. A deep dive into four seasons of photos of TSS Rovers FC courtesy of our supporters’ group, The Swanguardians.
  5. If you have never discovered The Marginalian (formerly “Brain Pickings”) then you are in for a treat. If you are home with your kids this week, you will need this particular entry: How to Do Nothing with Nobody All Alone by Yourself: A Timely Vintage Field Guide to Self-Reliant Play and Joyful Solitude
  6. Rating the best Colorado beaver dams of 2022: The Best Dam Year End List
  7. The Sky Don’t Have No Roof: The last Ornette Coleman interview
  8. William Shatner on his experience of the overview effect and how it changes you. I can relate, not from travelling to space (I wish!) but from working across many different organizations and sectors. Life lives in relationships.
  9. A reflection on how co-operatives might be the way forward for Medicare, as they were at the outset.
  10. The first Romantics. An engaging long read about the cultural effect of an 18th century German university town and its creation of Romanticism.

That is plenty for now. And so I leave you with this blessing which I wrote and put into a rare Facebook post along with the above photo:

When the mist rises up off the sea
After a day of rain and wind
And you lift your eyes into the falling darkness 
With a sigh on your breath
And weary in your heart 
May your eyes catch the sun 
That finds its way down the valley 
Creeps across the ridges
Filters through the trees 
And lifts the fog from the bottomlands
And fills it with diaphanous tendrils of beauty. 


May the light shine through for you in 2023.

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What’s in the Parking Lot #2

May 27, 2022 By Chris Corrigan Being, Bowen, Collaboration, Community, Complexity, Featured, First Nations, Flow, Learning, Links, Practice One Comment

“Many others have written their books solely from their reading of other books, so that many books exude the stuffy odour of libraries. By what does one judge a book? By its smell (and even more, as we shall see, by its cadence). Its smell: far too many books have the fusty odour of reading rooms or desks. Lightless rooms, poorly ventilated. The air circulates badly between the shelves and becomes saturated with the scent of mildew, the slow decomposition of paper, ink undergoing chemical change. The air is loaded with miasmas there. Other books breathe a livelier air; the bracing air of outdoors, the wind of high mountains, even the icy gust of the high crags buffeting the body; or in the morning, the cool scented air of southern paths through the pines. These books breathe. They are not overloaded, saturated, with dead, vain erudition.”

— from A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros

I love writing born of direct experience, born of the insight of a moment, or generated from the passing inspiration of the glint of sunlight on the sea seen through an open window. I love writing that arises from the quiet encounter with spirit or the contemplation of a mind that finally slows down and stretches out. That is writing of authentic voice or even the super-voice that all writers know, the voice we chase for its clarity and ease. It sometimes takes a long pounding away at the keyboard or days of scribbled lines before that voice arises somewhere below consciousness. In that moment you become merely a vehicle for it, in service to something. Your word choice become less ham-fisted, the cadence of the words more natural, like a jazz musician, you become open, trading fours with the muse, offering a lick of style or form and being rewarded with an image or a connection that you could never see before.

I’m enjoying A Philosophy of Walking. It is a testament to obliquity in the arts and philosophy, about the way a walk frees the mind and opens the heart. Today I’m heading out on y first work trip since February 15 2020 and I’m appreciating the way my thinking slows down even as my body is in the stop and go rhythm of ferry travel. There is spaciousness, time to kill, time to read or write or just peer out at the sea and look for whales or sea lions. Travelling on the coast means moving at the speed of the ferry, and the best way to do that is to travel on foot, at a human pace, free of the frustrations of being confined to a car, presented with options at every turn; a crossword, a book, an album, a blog post, a nap.

Have a read this weekend of some cool things I’ve found on the web. I’ll see what ideas and thoughts bubble up from this little trip to Vancouver Island.

  • The Limitations of “Performance.” With a great quote from Tim Galloway: “When we plant a rose seed in the earth, we notice that it is small, but we do not criticize it as “rootless and stemless.” We treat it as a seed, giving it the water and nourishment required of a seed. When it first shoots up out of the earth, we don’t condemn it as immature and underdeveloped; nor do we criticize the buds for not being open when they appear. We stand in wonder at the process taking place and give the plant the care it needs at each stage of its development. The rose is a rose from the time it is a seed to the time it dies. Within it, at all times, it contains its whole potential. It seems to be constantly in the process of change; yet at each state, at each moment, it is perfectly all right as it is.”
  • Beyond the magic – growing our understanding of societal metamorphosis. An account of a radically open community development approach from Tunisia called Tamkeen. Lots in this piece to think about. Ht: Marcus Jenal, whose newsletter always delivers fantastic stuff.
  • Assumptions about change making.
  • The Northern Ireland Assembly met, this time with simultaneous interpretation of the languages of English, Irish and Ulster Scots. More on these languages and dialects in Ulster on this beautiful video playlist from the Open University
  • The Sultans of String record “The Power of the Land,” a poem by Duke Redbird set to some great music and visuals of some pretty impressive landscapes, including, at 1:36, a view of Nexlelexwem/Bowen Island and the south end of At’lka7tsem/Howe Sound, which I live. 
  • A discussion of Orthodox Christianity and theosis within the natural world, courtesy of Dave Pollard’s monthly link post.
  • A fantastic list of mostly books on encountering silence in the Christian Contemplative tradition from Carl McColman’s blog. 
  • Aja Couchois Duncan and Kad Smith on the history and practice of Loving Accountability

Enjoy your weekend as we move towards midsummer. I heard my first Swainson’s Thrush today, which means the better part of the season has begun.

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