The rise of extremist is distressing. Good people, people I know have lost their way, are vacuumed into extremist. Why? It promises a relief valve to the angst of precarity which inflicts the working class and marginalized people in our society. The purity and simplicity of extreme ideologies fulfilling a need for purpose, a need to feel empowered, the need to feel some dignity. Extremist is not providing solutions, and in many cases will worse the very precarity which needs solving. I can only minimally fault the people I know, the people who I've known as good, for turning to extremism. The leaders in our society are failing to address precarity, are failing to address the challenges society is facing,...

I finally did it, I finally had a complete uncontrolled wipe-out on a Sobi Bike. The wipeout was entirely of my own fault and doing. It was a light steady snow today, the kind that makes roads slippery and covered in slush. There's just enough snow on the ground to shovel, and not a flake more. Saturday late morning, I mount the bike and try to enter the roadway accelerating at the same time. I turn the front handle bars, as I would normally do, and the backend came out from underneath me. I'm now sliding along the bike lane. Thankfully, the same slush that cause me to loss control of the bike is cushioning me from the friction of...

How Secret Santa Is Going To Turn Me into Santa....

A good take from Jeff Jarvis on the scandal at one of Germany's flagship The Spiegel following the revelations that the news magazine's top reporter, Claas Relotius, was a serial inventor of stories - a fraud. He was the CNN Journalist of the Year in 2014, "Earlier this month, he won Germany’s Reporterpreis (Reporter of the Year)", and numerous other "prestigious" journalism awards. Needless to say, but worth noting for those who are not journalists, every journalist is award-winning and prestigious these days.  In journalism, the story too often becomes a self-fulfilling creation.  Early in my career at the Chicago Tribune, I watched a managing editor  write a headline — complete with victim and drama — and then direct his  investigative...

It's happening more often, I'm encountering people I went to high school with, but no longer remember. It's been over 15 years, and this should be expected. Nonetheless, each time it happens, I feel guilty about not remembering. We're now at the stage in our lives where a few people who went to high school with us have died. During the Christmas Break, classmates return home, and news is shared.I don't remember the all the names, the people, yet I remain only a degree separated from them. It's fun catching up, sharing different perspectives of the past, and to try remembering that past....

My biography half-jokes that I write in "first person to ensure you can see my bias – I tend to like myself". I wrote that in part to make light of my discomfort with writing about myself. A discomfort that I was reminded of the past few weeks as I've been doing biographies for various speaking engagements in classrooms.This past week I had to do my final edits on a book chapter I've written about my experiences as a Hamiltonian, similar discomfort writing about myself. Thankfully this book allows me to write in first person.I don't know really what you call it, I'll call it irony. It is ironic that I'm very comfortable writing about others but never about...

Update your blog Joey, get back to the passion of blogging Joey! My internal voice tells me this numerous times each week. My poor orphaned blog, which crashed sometime in the past week or maybe month. Maybe if I were updating my blog, as I often say I will, I would've known it crashed. JoeyColeman.ca is back live, after a crash following a Ghost CMS update. Building a new instance of Ghost is now on my Christmas Break to-do list....

During the past few months, I've really enjoyed The Daily Show again. TDS lost me in the transition from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah. Noah seemed (to me at least) too unsure of himself, too guarded in his jokes, the "correspondents" similarly did not appeal to me. Now, Noah has his groove, a clear style, strong media criticism, and the correspondents have their own signature segments and appeal. Of course, it helps there's a US President who provides daily fodder....

I've been thinking a lot about how to create an informed local municipal-focused civic affairs discussion for years; it's one of the primary goals of my journalism. Podcasting provides the opportunity to do so, and Lawrence Lessig conveys many of the ideas I'm considering on his blog:Podcasting will be a critical part of that way out. For the architecture  of the podcast is the precise antidote for the flaws of the present. It  is deep where now is shallow. It is insulated from ads where now is  completely vulnerable. It is a chance for thinking and reflection; it  has an attention span an order of magnitude greater than the Tweet. It  is an opportunity for serious (and playful) engagement....

These words carry greater meaning for me with each passing year; as I watch my friends who served and came back age, yet those who did not return remain frozen in time. I look back on photos of some of those friends who I was fortunate enough to train with in the summer of 2001 prior to the War on Terror, and then I look at them today remembering those who died along side them; I'm struck by the power of the words in Ode of Remembrance. I left the Forces without serving in any notable capacity, I didn't go overseas, I merely observed from afar as those who served went over, I read the names of those who died...