Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage. I’m almost at the halfway point of editing 35 short videos from the 2025 York Plays, presented in Toronto by a troupe of hundreds of performers in June. The event was a textually faithful but theatrically creative staging of some 50 plays that were performed as…
Tickets for To Battle: A Fight Play Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)“If music be the food of love, play on!” I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who d…Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up…
Business / Cyberculture / Design / Technology / UsabilityCoders who used AI self-reported that they worked 20% faster, but an objective study found AI actually made coders 19% slower. This study confirms that while AI can help for general low-level tasks, humans with deep knowledge of the specific project could spend far more time working on higher-level tasks, rather than hunting for errors…
Culture / Ethics / Journalism / SciFi / SpeechI had a great time narrating and coming up with the character voices for this short story. Look for elements of the classic crime story, with a plot that just touches on social commentary, showing tension between a reporter and his politically ambitious boss, and tension between the reporter and his wife. The narrator lives…
Current_Events / Empathy / Ethics / Fact Check / Psychology / Rhetoric / Social_SoftwareFrom an article in the Houston Chronicle: It’s still unclear who started a widely shared rumor over the weekend that raised false hopes of desperate parents that two girls had been found alive clinging to a tree around Comfort or Center Point. I first saw the rumor spread on Facebook where a user mentioned it…
Rewatching ST:DS9 Playing tongo at the bar, Dax is annoyed that Quark is distracted by bad financial news. He’s put the bar up as collateral to three different debtors and he’s wiped out. At this very moment, because the opening credits are gonna roll soon, Quark’s cousin Gaila the weapons dealer shows up with a…
Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)Touch Me Now: York Plays 2025Pesky journalists, always showing up to document atrocities.How to be a…
A cast of hundreds participated in a public medieval re-enactment dramatizing the Christian story from Creation through Final Judgement at the University of Toronto a few weeks ago. I attended as the event videographer. I had at least three cameras running at all times — sometimes five — while a roving camera also caught the…
No Democratic president should send in troops trained for lethal combat into a pro-life rally, a worship service, a gun show, or any other peaceful gathering expressing solidarity on an an issue that rubs Democrats the wrong way, at least not in a land where people have first amendment freedoms (no establishment or prohibition of…
I’m getting ready to record about 18hrs footage from four different cameras, and I noticed my new 4K webcam was heating up pretty fast. I’m settled in a dorm room at the University of Toronto, far from the junk drawers and tool boxes that would have aluminum foil and copper wire. I suppose I could…
This is what I’m in Toronto to observe. Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…The Scapegoat by Richard Maples (1957 Sci-Fi Short Story)“If music be the food of love, play on!” I…
Nature is amazing. Dr John Martin, a senior ecologist at Ecosure and co-author of the study, said they stumbled on the complex behaviour at a twist-handle-operated bubbler located in a western Sydney sports field while surveying cockatoo foraging habits…. Presumably the birds first learned what to do by watching people, Martin said. “Eventually one of…
The market is rough for college grads, and especially rough for computer-related majors that the STEM-first mindset pushed as a guaranteed safe career track. According to a recent report, employment for journalism majors is not only better than CS and computer engineering, but also a notch or two better than the average employment rate for…
I’ll be in Toronto next week to observe and document a full production of the York Corpus Christi Cycle. The event, which took place annually for hundreds of years in the streets of the medieval city of York, dramatizes the Christian salvation story from the creation of the universe to the final judgement. The plays,…
So much to see at the Heinz History Center but I absolutely had to check in with Nellie Bly. As a child I was fascinated by a drawing of a firefighter’s pole ladder in a book by Richard Scary. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a real one before but I instantly recognized it. Similar:York…
When I was working in radio news in the late 1980s, I took a lunch break at a nearby cafe that happened to be tuned to our station. “You have a voice like a radio announcer,” said the cashier, obviously not aware that he had been listening to my hourly news bulletins all morning. Gayanne…
We’re drawn to activities that invite us to grow, by trying and trying again, because we want to evolve as people. Life is mostly repetitive—wake, eat, work, sleep, repeat—and each day can feel like an unsatisfying circle. But repetition with variation broadens us. It makes our circular days into spiralling journeys. “The spiral is a…
Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.I may have mentioned that I have a daughter who does things. Her next is "To Battle: A Fig…Did you like or share that social media post about two Camp Mystic girls found in a tree?“If music be the food of love, play on!”…
I had a great time playing Hastings in this audio adaptation of a classic Agatha Christie classic. A smart, young woman must “prove her wits” in order to find her uncle’s will and receive her inheritance. Does it count if she hires the world-renowned detective, Hercule Poirot? Find out when you listen to “The Missing…
On the White House website, there is no official record of about 80% of President Trump’s public statements. The self-proclaimed “most transparent” White House in history, as it turns out, has little interest in making the vast majority of Trump’s speeches and interactions with journalists readily accessible to the public whose taxes pay for their…
This is what we have to look forward to, as a torrent of AI-generated slop that’s good enough for the CEOs to monetize squeezes out the human-generated content that actually matters. Former NBA player Brandon Hunter passed away unexpectedly at the young age of 42 this week, a tragedy that rattled fans of his 2000s…
On road trips in my youth, watching the Bob’s Big Boy signs transition to Shoney’s Big Boy was often part of the adventure. As the franchises close, the cheerful burger-wielding statues have been rounded up and corralled, presumably for their own safety. Source: The Big Boy Graveyard Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to…
Pope Leo XIV, in his first address to journalists at the Vatican, called for the release of imprisoned journalists, championed the free press, and urged caution about AI. My social media feed is full of memes that purport to represent the words of Leo XIV. Legitimate news sources have already published stories about Pope Leo…
Rewatching ST:DS9 A duo of knobby-faced macguffin-hunters, bantering like the crooks from Home Alone, rough up a bumpy-foreheaded alien, then vaporize him. In Quark’s, Bashir is happily casting his friends Dax and O’Brien in his next unnamed-for-copyright-reasons British superspy holodeck adventure, Operation Nudge-Wink. Odo declines, looking uncomfortable. I had never seen this episode before. What…
…I chose to take the name Leo XIV. There are different reasons for this, but mainly because Pope Leo XIII in his historic Encyclical Rerum Novarum addressed the social question in the context of the first great industrial revolution. In our own day, the Church offers to everyone the treasury of her social teaching in response…
