People say BlueSky is an echo chamber but we have road cyclists, gravel cyclists, mountain bikers, single speeders, fixie riders, cargo bike riders, e-bike riders, hybrid riders, recumbent riders, bikepackers, randonneurs, and I'm sure we even have a few unicyclists among us
I wonder if this is becoming students' perception? They do poor work and get a poor grade and blame it on *not* using AI? In my experience, profs are actually strongly against their students using AI for any kind of writing work.
I love the time change. Best days of the year.
Ignoring the news (I wish) and making my kids listen to Joanna Newsom as they play until they learn to appreciate good music
Forward.
I remember Priscila Uppal talking in class about the suburbs as the great Canadian tragedy that hasn't been mined enough by literature. Of course there are books about the suburbs, but you should do it. (She was talking about fiction, maybe poetry, which I don't think you are.)
Remember when people used to earnestly use terms like high-brow and low-brow. I don't think anyone has really figured out a new way to talk about aesthetic value and taste, and there remains a lot of anxiety about it.
New from me: The Colorado River is drying up & the Western US' water crisis is fueling bitter disputes among the states that share it. Yet the obvious solution to the crisis (raising fewer cows in the desert) gets almost no air time. A glaring case of agricultural exceptionalism.
Haha fair enough! My post was sarcastic and in support of talking you down because that sounds terrible to me.
It's so fun to fill shelves with these big records so that instead of just hitting play on your phone with access to all the world's music and playlists you get to take that big piece of plastic from its cardboard and try to find that one track—ah!— and then the peace of doing it again
The bike lanes haven’t been cleared anywhere anyway. I can get to Claxton to Heath to Yonge, no bike lanes.
bsky.app/profile/matt...
This neighbourhood has almost no bike lanes. Nice to see the one bike lane get cleared…
Yonge bike lane on south east side at St Clair totally full of snow. Cyclist approaches in car lane.
Yonge bike lane on north east side at St Clair totally full of snow.
Cyclist waits in bike lanes on west side at St Clair and Yonge. West bike lanes seem clear.
Yonge bike lanes on east side at St Clair totally blocked. For some reason, west side is clear. Saw two cyclists as I walked past mid-morning.
Ill be clear about why I am so angry and critical about it: Im seeing a good portion of my students who have imbibed the notion that they dont have to read, think or write for themselves because ChatGPT/CoPilot will do their thinking for them, and its terrifying. It should scare all of us.
Well, there are two other border crossings in Windsor, a bridge and a tunnel.
Looking for the best new writing in Canada? We now have 70 literary magazines listed in the LMCC directory!
litmags.ca/directory/
They put all the snow in the bike lanes. Seems that was the plan.
My commute to work is mostly on back roads with no bike lanes. I can’t believe how bad the major roads are for cycling right now. @cycletoronto.bsky.social @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social
I can’t believe how terrible the bike lanes are. Davenport and Christie bike lanes are just full of snow. Bayview trail largely impassable. Rosedale Valley Road somewhat bikeable with studded tires.
Maybe I’ll find out today. 🤞
Does anyone know the conditions of the Rosedale Valley Road and Bayview multiuse trail? I need to bike to the Brickworks tomorrow. @thebikinglawyer.bsky.social @cycletoronto.bsky.social
unfriendly, positively agitated reminder
But it’s of course both, even as the abstract states: “Behaviour change can contribute to system change through actions in the public sphere, including influence and citizenship.” Much easier to regulate when there’s evidence of political will, which comes from individual behaviour change.
Ontario Science Centre. Still doing just fine, undefeated by the weather. If it can outlast the corrupt Ford government, it can reopen.
I'm fully confident literary magazines will survive the AI apocalypse. There is no better time to become a creative writer. You already have an inside track because most people have never even heard of these things that can never die. We will be here with the cockroaches and Taco Bell
My government spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make my life and my kids’ life worse and more dangerous. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
After a Few Beers, My Uncle Asks Me How for Uncle Tommy do you write a poem? It's like laying bricks, I say. You put down one word, then another, and after a while you've made this path. Bullshit, my uncle says. Tell me the truth. The trick, I say, is the bricks can be anything. A window, the moon, even snow. Snow, my uncle says. I remember when I was stationed in Germany in the 80’s. There was this huge field outside the base. It was the kind of cold that yanks your balls up into your stomach, so much snow you'd smoke a little hash and forget the planet you were on was earth. I was on guard duty. Some civilian on a snowmobile raced out of the woods and rocketed across the field, waves of powder foaming up around him. I remember I shouted: Hey Man! Hey man you're trespassing! But he didn't hear. I didn't hear the gun fire, but when he fell off I knew why. And the snowmobile growling like some animal. I ask my uncle, If you could catch the bullet, if you could turn the bullet into anything else, what would you pick? My uncle takes a long drink. Shit man, he says. Maybe a bird? And it appears: a little white bird in his hands, its wingtips freckled with red. What do you feed the bird? I ask, and, like a piece of bread, my uncle tears a corner off the field. The bird pecks it from his palms. How did we get here? my uncle asks, but there's so much snow, we can’t see the path. Before us, a dark wood. You hear that? my uncle asks. And I do. Something's in there. Something ancient, growling.
Second page of the poem in the journal; the entire poem is in the previous image and here: After a Few Beers, My Uncle Asks Me How for Uncle Tommy do you write a poem? It's like laying bricks, I say. You put down one word, then another, and after a while you've made this path. Bullshit, my uncle says. Tell me the truth. The trick, I say, is the bricks can be anything. A window, the moon, even snow. Snow, my uncle says. I remember when I was stationed in Germany in the 80’s. There was this huge field outside the base. It was the kind of cold that yanks your balls up into your stomach, so much snow you'd smoke a little hash and forget the planet you were on was earth. I was on guard duty. Some civilian on a snowmobile raced out of the woods and rocketed across the field, waves of powder foaming up around him. I remember I shouted: Hey Man! Hey man you're trespassing! But he didn't hear. I didn't hear the gun fire, but when he fell off I knew why. And the snowmobile growling like some animal. I ask my uncle, If you could catch the bullet, if you could turn the bullet into anything else, what would you pick? My uncle takes a long drink. Shit man, he says. Maybe a bird? And it appears: a little white bird in his hands, its wingtips freckled with red. What do you feed the bird? I ask, and, like a piece of bread, my uncle tears a corner off the field. The bird pecks it from his palms. How did we get here? my uncle asks, but there's so much snow, we can’t see the path. Before us, a dark wood. You hear that? my uncle asks. And I do. Something's in there. Something ancient, growling.
Cover of the 2026 Winter Edition of The Southern Review featuring a blue-black background with a woman’s long white hair
Really, really happy to have a new poem in one of the first literary journals I ever read as a teen trying to find poems in the world. Here’s “After A Few Beers, My Uncle Asks Me How” in The Southern Review.
Elsa Lam continues to prove & document how corrupt & full of lies the Doug Ford closure of the science centre was & is. Read & share widely - not that it matters in Ontario, a province that seems ok w a high level of this.
www.canadianarchitect.com/draft-engine...
oh my god. More details are surfacing about the catastrophic incompetence that led to the dietary guidelines' inaccurate claims about a litany of nutrient gaps in plant-based diets
