ColbyCosh.com

Flat-Top Tony and the Purple Canoes

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 02:18:07 -0700

I was joking yesterday that given the recent history of Edmonton Oiler medical oversight—recent injured-list visits having been occasioned by everything from Jumping Frenchman Syndrome to hookworm to macroscopic devouring pubic lice—Sheldon Souray's "infected hand" means he's probably just a head on a pillow by now.

Alternate Hed: Area Man Overdue For Haircut

Sun, 21 Feb 2010 03:42:28 -0700

From the MacEwan University Journalist: scowling man gives improvised career advice that is probably 180° wrong.

YouTubeology: yikes, this was 7½ years ago?

Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:49:32 -0700

Before there was Elton

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 07:22:45 -0700

I can't believe curling is the big finish.

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 22:40:41 -0700

BBC Winter Olympics animation. Contains more drama than the entire Opening Ceremonies. (þ: MC79.)

Hey! HEY!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:05:11 -0700

Are you keeping up with my Maclean's blog? Because, frankly, I get to see the visitor counts in the server log and I'm not at all convinced that you are! I'm very disappointed. What do you need, an RSS feed? There is one! Do you need a Twitter feed? I have one! Do you need an RSS feed of the Twitter feed? Incredibly, this is feasible! I don't know what else your mother and I can do for you. We've tried so hard.

Your one-man global controversy provider

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 14:37:38 -0700

I make a cameo in the latest edition of Martin Newland's Abu Dhabi newspaper, The National. It's just like Newland, isn't it, to have chosen the right emirate.

Plus, that Professor Claus looks like a nice fella

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 23:51:11 -0700

I'll be honest: I'd pay like $150 for the Nietzsche sweater. Hope everyone is having a good holiday. I felt as though the Spirit of Christmas was a little less oppressive this year, if only because a grim decade is coming to an entropic, slightly miserable conclusion. The way the institutions and media closed up shop had more of a "things just going all to ratshit" feel. As usual I'm hopping the Decapitation Express tomorrow to head back to the farm. Should be back in Edmonton and back at work in earnest on the 26th or 27th. Gonna try to keep things as lively as possible on my Maclean's weblog for the shut-ins and the ships at sea. My Christmas gift to you: a little Britfolk, from the other Britain.

I love you, Mindy Jones

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 22:19:44 -0700

Pretty Good Time Ambulance Driver - Watch more Funny Videos

The new business as usual

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 04:11:43 -0700

OK, three dozen dear friends still watching and besetting this website: my weblog for Maclean's can now be said to exist, and will be the focus of the majority of my attention for the foreseeable future. So please bookmark it if you would, and pass along the news. You could also bookmark the Maclean's Blog Central page and watch for my entries as they pop up there. As a bonus, this strategy would spare you from daily visual confrontations with my enormous planet-like head. I'll be maintaining this site as a place for whatever doesn't fit on the Maclean's site. I can imagine four possible categories of item: 1) the very strictly personal, 2) "meta"-type career updates when appropriate, 3) pure ephemera, 4) any material in which I cannot possibly avoid swearing A LOT. (OH, THOSE FUCKING OILERS. JESUS.) I think the Twitter sidebar is perhaps also useful to those of you who don't want to sign up for everybody's favourite social-media application but who do want to stalk me. Thanks for your continued support and patronage.

Was relieved to find/ Just how kind/ It all was

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 04:54:30 -0700

Finished the update to my CV necessitated by recent events. Let me tell you, thirty years in this business can wear a man down something awful. (Although, really, my first regular gig didn't come along until grade 7.)

Gather round, children

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 10:30:48 -0700

So it turns out the WCB hostage-taker was a really "nice guy", according to the people he lived with, but he had this habit of blaming other people for all his problems. "[I] had to resort to street drugs." Sure you did, buddy: everybody who has a bum knee does that, right? If there is one life lesson I would choose to stress to young acquaintances, it might be this: you will meet many people who fit this description, and none of them are actually "nice guys." Their list of "I had to"s only gets bigger and bigger. My advice: get the had-tas out of your head and your life. The "nice guy" at the centre of this story is, puzzlingly, also described as "Always high-strung and occasionally volatile", which is journalism code for what would otherwise be described as "a complete prick". Why the contradiction? I'm guessing that some of his acquaintances may have made comments along the lines of "Well, he was always real nice to me, but if I had to bet on it I would probably guess he wasn't so nice to his ex-wife or his caseworkers." When somebody's got a case of the had-tas, you stay in their good books until the second you don't, and suddenly you've got a problem. Is sympathy advisable? Mr. Clayton was treated sympathetically by the cops before, when he tied up downtown traffic for much of a day with a suicide threat; he has apparently been handled sympathetically enough by the government to qualify for subsidized housing with assisted-living caregivers. Thank God no innocent people are dead today because the sympathy that the less fortunate I-cans of this world deserve was spent on a had-ta.

Scratchin' my head here

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 09:04:27 -0700

So the Star travel editor wrote a list of "10 Things About Canada I Didn't Know", and the first item is that there was a war on Canadian soil in 1885 which is taught in every school, is recognized as a major turning point in Canadian political history, and is the subject of a large and enormously popular literature? Anybody else think this is sort of weird? Like, maybe we should be asking if there are 10 things about Canada he does know?

Nothing's worse than having the arresting officer critique your weed

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 23:35:02 -0700

This is just somebody's very tightly-edited collection of clips from Cops, but it would also be useful if you needed to communicate exactly what it is like to be physically present in the state of Florida for about four minutes.

Seasonal content

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 15:19:21 -0700

I was out walking late last night and, ever so briefly and gently, got snowed on. It's not especially early in the year for that to happen for the first time in Edmonton. But it's a good time to resurrect my painstakingly-assembled chart, assembled from historical Environment Canada data, depicting the date of the first permanent snowfall in Edmonton—the day on which the snow falls, for real, and stays until spring. Remembrance Day is the break-even point.