Queen's Gambit – Filmed in Hamilton and Berlin
During my visit to Berlin Germany in December 2019, I enjoyed a brief tour of the Old City Hall. (Cause, if you are me, an Old City Hall is what you go to see). During the tour, we entered Bear Hall which was set up for filming of…
A Collection of Thoughts, Because This is My Blog
It’s the evening of Halloween 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. This means I’m doing the same thing I do nearly every other night of this damn pandemic – sitting at my computer (actually standing, I have one of those desks now). I spend much of my…
NYT Piece on Small Theatres
The revival of small, often one screen, theatres in the past few years has been something to celebrate in communities across English North America. Hamilton has seen the revival of the Westdale and the Playhouse. (Sadly, the Zoetic did not survive 2019 – it was ahead of its…
Open Courts and Living Rooms Visible Due to Video Conferencing
Video hearings is how the courts and adjudicative bodies (and municipal councils etc) function now to the pandemic. There are many access and privacy issues with this. Adjudicator Ian Mackenzie provides a good summary of this in a piece published on Slaw this morning. Of note, for me…
Stardust Trailer – Scenes filmed in Hamilton
A friend sent me a link for the trailer of a new David Bowie biographical film titled “Stardust”, asking where some of the scenes were shot in Hamilton. [Wikipedia article on the film] The film is scheduled for release on November 25. Here’s what I picked out (and…
Unpublishing – some thoughts
“We may need a better term for what we currently refer to as unpublishing”, writes Ph.D candidate and Reynolds Journalism Institute Fellow Deborah Dwyer. Dwyer explains the term, coined in the early 2000s when newspapers were beginning to receive requests for stories to be removed from their websites,…
Documentary "Newstown" Explores the Closure of Youngstown Ohio's newspaper The Vindicator
A few months ago, the Canadian documentary After Fact premiered online. I’m one of four journalists featured in After Fact. The documentary team followed me during three years, 2017 to 2019, ending shortly before I won my journalism fellowship (I think that would’ve been a fun ending). It…
The COVID long-haul: 2021 Cancellations Begin. Time to Cancel my March Birthday Party?
It’s odd to think that exactly six months ago I had an email conversation to reschedule cancelled March/April meetings into September. It was a Tuesday, St. Patrick’s Day in fact, and I was consumed with responding to the COVID crisis as a UofT Fellow-at-Large. The Provincial State of…
Interesting Listen: Boston NPR station interview on preparation for COVID vaccine distribution
Our public health leaders are preparing us for the long-term reality of living during a pandemic, with discussions of lengthy time periods for the development of an effective vaccine, the production of these vaccine, and the distribution of the vaccine. There may not be enough COVID vaccine for…
Fighting Adjectival Bloat
John McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun writes on how journalists use language. Primarily, he focuses upon grammar and style. As one of those journalists whose grammar is ruinous, I read McIntyre’s writing wondering what it be like to work in journalism thirty years ago when there were copy…