Crossing Jervis Inlet on my way to the Tla’Amin lands.
The weekly summary of notes, links and thoughts that passed through my world.
- August 4, 2025: tests and seasons: things change in the world of sport, planetary science and community.
- August 5, 2025: surviving enshittification: becasue when people are making good things and then wrecking them, we need to know if we can make it through.
- August 6, 2025: magic and the rain returns: internet-famous magicians, and the return of my pluviophilia.
- August 8: you are not as old as you seem to be: age is relative and also it isn’t.
Also I wrote some longer pieces this week including a review of some friends’ play, an invitation to improve your out of office messages, and some thoughts on how building resource megaprojects is not the same thing as strengthening a country and looking after people.
I’ve always thought that my internal age was 23, which puts me younger in my own mind than both of my children are now. Which is a very odd sensation now. At any rate, I haven’t seen such a good set of thoughts on aging as these 27 Notes on Growing Older(er) from Ian Leslie. The sensation of time stopping inside while it continues on elsewhere is almost impossible to capture. Leslie does it.
Lately, becasue I notice these things, I’ve seen different articles about the inner core of the Earth and its interaction with the surface of our planet. This article in Quanta today summarizes the research and the findings from the smart people working on all of this.
Last night we watch Bob Trevino Likes It, a touching film (and a bit of a tear jerker, I’m not afraid to admit) about a woman who is becoming estranged from her father and finds another man with the same name and befriends him. It’s worth watching, and through the film I found myself going down the rabbit hole of facts about co-star John Leguizamo, who I know nothing about. He starred in the 1990s drag film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar where he looked substantial young than 30 or 24 years old. He has a fascinating bio, as an actor, playwright and activist, and to my eye seems to be one of the really good ones in the world.
One advantage to being actually 57 is that I got to see The Shuffle Demons in their heyday in the late 1980s and early 1990s in Toronto. I’m glad to know that there are still folks out there having maximum fun with energetic jazz traditions in an ensemble context. Go into your weekend grooving along with Dirty Catfish Brass Band.
Anyone who knows the Salish Sea in the summertime will recognize this image of still, flat water at slack tide reflecting every imaginable colour at sunset.
This week we were travelling by sailboat through the Hul’q’umi’num speaking territories of the Gulf Islands in the Salish Sea. The posts this week reflect both my usual monkey-mind reading habit and some travel notes from the trip.
- July 27, 2025: systems and cycles: economics and other system
- July 28, 2025: quiet, prayers, and landscapes of war and peace: some theology, a book to read and blessed quiet
- July 29, 2025: place noting and place making: noticing place, making notes and making trade.
- July 30, 2025: connected through tsunamis, contentment, austerity and football: we weather a tsunami advisory, and I think about the good life, suffering and how football advocates.
- July 31,2025: a miscellany of things about time and pay warm water begs us to stay at anchor, and so I read about time and getting paid.
- August 1, 2025: leaving Hul’q’umi’num territories and good questions to ask: a really cute seal to wake up to, humpbacks in the Strait and some questions worth asking.
We’re on the ferry home from Departure Bay to Horseshoe Bay and then from Horseshoe Bay back to our own home island, where a weekend of fun is about to unfold featuring the annual Firefighters’ Dock Dance, and a remounting of the classic Bowen Island play The View, in which every possible island archetype is skewered by the ingenious satire of David Cameron and Jackie Minns. It’s a long weekend in British Columbia and the beginning of Lughnasa, the Celtic season of harvest and generosity.
I hope you enjoy reading these posts.
We stayed another night at Ruxton Island. The day was hot and still and quiet in our little bay. Oystercatchers and heron raised the occasional fuss. A baby crow complained all afternoon and in the water fried egg jellyfish and otters slid by. The sea is warm here – more than 23 degrees and only the slightest breeze riffles the water. We are sleeping and reading and some of us writing a little and that is the story of summer on the coast.
So many links and thoughts today, scoured from a day of mammoth reading yesterday. Thank my ADHD brain for all this fun. I do.
If you thought enshittification was just your favourite apps jumping the shark, then you aren’t seeing what Cory Doctorow is seeing. Here is a grand chronicle of current surveillance and gouging practices used by big retailers to make everyone more poor.
A short story about an uploaded consciousness and its desire to be deleted. Being able to do all the things that can be done seems to be no substitute for being stuck with an unstructured memory. Petition to a Council by Justin Smith-Ruiu
I loved reading collections of letters when I first got into literature. They were right sized chunks of text for my brain, and thoughtful letters penned by authors lie somewhere between poetry, travelogues and aphorism. And I loved reading epistolary novels for the same reason. One of my favourite books of all time, From a Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate by Nathaniel Mackey is a masterful epistolary about jazz, and West African mysticism and friendship and art. The Griffin and Sabine series by Nick Bantock (birthed on Bowen Island, where he lived at the time) is an incredible work of art that has to be held in one’s hands to be fully appreciated. This form, whether actual or fictional is probably why I enjoy blogging so much, especially now that I’m writer here again regularly instead of on social media. I was reminded of all this when I came across this selection of letters from the exiled Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay published in the Paris Review. Letters written in the 1920s to Langston Hughs, Louise Bryant and others written from France and Spain and Morocco.
My friends in Turkey who run the ATÖLYE design studio are doing some really interesting thinking about how to work with AI while still using the inefficient and trust-based mechanisms of community:
“In a world increasingly driven by acceleration, where machine learning predicts behaviors and algorithms shape what we see, hear, and value — communities still resist the fast lane. Why? Because communities, unlike networks or audiences, are not transactional. They are deeply relational, slow-growing organisms — woven together through shared purpose, mutual recognition, and collective, compounding trust.”
I don’t follow the WNBA, but I do have a stake in women’s football in Canada, and this analysis of the current WNBA labour negotiations is an interesting path forward for leagues like the Northern Super League and the Professional Women’s Hockey League. In essence, the strategy focuses on growing the pie rather than reducing the costs, and I would even add, giving players (and supporters too, why not?) direct financial stakes in increasing revenues.
In my area, the saying goes, if you can’t afford to tip your server well, you shouldn’t go out to eat. Tipping culture has been a subject of discussion recently in Canada. In Europe, wages are built into the price of food and tipping is uncommon. There is a move to do this in North America too, but predictably, the restaurant industry isn’t having it. Let’s push for fair wages, and in the meantime, tip your server.
It is said that time slips away here in the languid BC coastal summer, but on parts of our coast, time sometimes speeds up.
If you love David Mitchell (I do) and also struggle with eggs Benedict (I do) then you will appreciate this piece of whimsical Masto-art.
We sometimes call it the “best seat in the house” when we get loaded on the Bowen Island ferry on a forward facing ramp. This is my view this morning as I head into Vancouver to co-lead a workshop with my partner Ciaran Camman. We’re helping a service organization surface context specific strategies practices and principles they use to address crises across their operations.
I love a good football match. I love a semi-final in a major tournament. I do not love when an official gets in the way of a result, but that’s part of the game. Italy and England fought an epic battle yesterday in the women’s European Championship semi-final. Italy took the lead in the first half and England fought back and it looked like the underdogs had won it but the referee added seven minutes of time at at the end, and England used all of it to get the equalizer. Seven minutes. “Twas a bit much, I thought.
Extra time ensued and the Italians fought gamely (no, time wasting is not a “continental” specialty; England did it just fine too…) and late in the second period of extra time – like 119′ late – England were awarded a penally. ‘Twas a weak call, I thought. BUT Italian keeper Laura Giuliani made the save on Chloe Kelly’s penalty, BUT the rebound was poached by Kelly and England won. Cruel sport, this one.
I’m not a fan of the blog posts that begin with “I asked AI to…” but I will point to Tom Atlee’s recent conversation with an AI chatbot where he explored how AI can enable deliberative democracy to move at scale and at speed. I think there are some really thoughtful ideas here not just for governments but also for organizations or networks who are including large numbers of humans in ongoing sensemaking and deliberation. Tom’s grounding in this field and thoughtful questions helped the bot to think through some good ideas.