Not There Yet-logo

Not There Yet

Arts & Culture Podcasts

The Not There Yet podcast is a ongoing series of short essays covering a wide range of subjects from the perspective of the third decade of the 21st century. They are intended to be thought provoking, challenging, skeptical and hopefully funny once in a while. They are sometimes conventional in nature and others are a little more experimental. They cover science, history, sports, technology, philosophy or just about whatever subject comes to mind. Sometimes they look forward, other times they look back. They will not, however, take up a lot of your time and will be told in an interesting and accessible way.

Play Button

Location:

Canada

Description:

The Not There Yet podcast is a ongoing series of short essays covering a wide range of subjects from the perspective of the third decade of the 21st century. They are intended to be thought provoking, challenging, skeptical and hopefully funny once in a while. They are sometimes conventional in nature and others are a little more experimental. They cover science, history, sports, technology, philosophy or just about whatever subject comes to mind. Sometimes they look forward, other times they look back. They will not, however, take up a lot of your time and will be told in an interesting and accessible way.

Twitter:

@NTYessays

Language:

English

Contact:

4038189287

Episodes

The Return of the Golden Age of Air Travel

10/25/2020
Getting back on a plane may look more like the past than the future. I originally wrote The Return of the Golden Age of Air Travel in April of this year and published it on May 1st. It was a visceral response to the early days of COVID-19. As the summer wore on, I felt that maybe the piece was a reflection of a relatively short period which was, for the most part, behind us. Sadly, that's turned out not to be the case. Things might already be worse than they have ever been. So I dusted off...

Duration:00:32:40

Shooting Craps with the Grandkids’ Cash

8/21/2019
Some thoughts on a failed Olympic bid and what it tells us about the shocking randomness of how we build our cities. Although it has been many years since I last wrote computer code ‘to save my life’ I still vividly remember the five basic phases of the Cost of Change Curve associated with software development projects. While the fine details are now dim and distant the basic idea is this: the cost of making a given change rises exponentially as we work our way from the first phase,...

Duration:00:20:01

Amy Johnson

8/8/2019
A remarkable life and the enduring mystery of her tragic death. The late arrival of the inbound flight she had piloted from Hatfield, in Hertfordshire, prevented Amy Johnson from departing Prestwick, Scotland any earlier than 4.00 pm on that afternoon in early January of 1941. Darkness was already beginning to fall. The most direct route from Prestwick to her eventual destination of Royal Air Force base Kidlington, near Oxford, took Amy Johnson right over Blackpool where Amy’s sister Molly...

Duration:00:29:43

Champion of Something

7/24/2019
Dad did his fair share of dreaming big. Particularly when it came to his kids. On a whim in the summer of 1976—no doubt in part because he wanted to drive his shiny silver Alfa Romeo on the twisty and dangerous road through the mountains—my father suggested I have a stab at the Model Aeronautics Association of Canada National Championships held that year in Calgary, Alberta. This was on the strength of some spotty success at similar local model airplane competitions. Dad did his fair share...

Duration:00:17:25

Alas, Kawhi, We Hardly Knew Ye

7/10/2019
The blessing and the curse of capturing lightning in a bottle. The news landed with an apocalyptic shudder on an otherwise beautiful Saturday morning. Just 23 days after the Raptors handily dispatched the Golden State Warriors in six games, the enigmatic Kawhi Leonard announced he had signed a four year, $142 million deal with the Los Angeles Clippers. Predictably, the interstitial period became #KawhiWatch for fans of NBA basketball around the world. Nowhere more so than in Canada. Over...

Duration:00:18:08

Twitter+

6/26/2019
Some unsolicited—and probably unwelcome—advice on where Twitter should go from here. “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.” Mark Twain’s life did not overlap Twitter’s by nearly a century, but he still managed to provide the single best commentary of what Twitter is, and should continue to be. Brevity is Twitter’s essence and that should never change. Any idea which takes more than 280 characters clearly needs more work, a modern day Twain might have...

Duration:00:18:40

Framing John DeLorean

6/12/2019
It’s a three-fer: biopic drama, documentary and the-making-of all rolled into one. Three cars were most likely to adorn an adolescent boy’s room in the early 1980s. The first was the brutish Porsche Turbo Carrera with its outlandish fender flairs and whale tail. The second was the Lamborghini Countach which, in its original and purest form, was a single, hard-chined arc from nose to tail. The third was the DeLorean. It might have had a model name but nobody knew what it was. With its unique...

Duration:00:23:31

The Tao of Kawhi Leonard

5/29/2019
His approach to the game is an example we need in these troubled times. I was furious. Not only had Masai Ujiri fired Coach of the Year Dwane Casey in May, now he had traded away DeMar DeRozan for some guy from the San Antonio Spurs whose name I didn’t even recognize. Along with some other guy whose name I didn’t recognize either. My fury was based, in part, on a very weird, very Canadian reason. DeRozan actually liked playing in Toronto and we liked him back for almost that reason alone....

Duration:00:28:09

Jack Northrop's Flying Wings

5/16/2019
An old idea for which the best years may still lay ahead. Jack Northrop dreamt of aircraft where everything not absolutely essential for flight was eliminated. Leonardo da Vinci’s theoretical flying machines from the 15th century, Sir George Cayley’s Governable Parachute of 1852, the Wright Brothers’ Flyer of 1903 and virtually ever other flying machine all have one thing in common: they all have tails of one sort of another which are used to stabilize and control their flight. Northrop,...

Duration:00:30:31

RV-6

5/1/2019
A labour of love — and hate — 23 years in the making. “The baby is on the roof with an umbrella and he looks like he is about to jump.” My mother tells this story — undoubtedly embellished over the years — about a chillingly calm call she took from a neighbour to warn of the seemingly imminent, tragic death of her younger son. I don’t remember the event myself but if it worked for Mary Poppins, I must have reasoned, surely it would work for me. Besides, I had a backup plan: my satin-edged...

Duration:00:28:55

The Return of Tiger Woods

4/17/2019
Thankfully, things didn’t turn out the way many expected. What caught my attention, and that of a few others, was a small article about an amateur golf phenom out of Cypress, California with the improbable name of Tiger Woods. He had just quit the economics program at Stanford University and was turning pro at just 20 years of age. I think I recall somebody saying “he’s going to regret quitting Stanford!” Now I think about it, that could easily have been me. At that time, however, Stanford...

Duration:00:21:38

The Last, Best Reason for Newspapers

4/3/2019
The future of newspapers may lie in their past. I have not bought a hometown newspaper for a decade. I haven’t read a whole one in years. I do occasionally read the article which just happens to be facing up on The Globe and Mail abandoned at Starbucks while I’m waiting for my four shot American Misto. I rarely touch the paper itself. That’s not because I’m a germaphobe — although I do have tendencies in that regard — it’s a subconscious holdover from the days when the ink used to come off...

Duration:00:18:20

The Comet

3/20/2019
The MacRobertson Air Race of 1934 marked the beginning of modern air travel and the beginning of the end of the Golden Age of Aviation. It was a time when daring—or simply dangerous—aviation events were concocted for the slightest of excuses. In the case of the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race it was nominally to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the city of Melbourne, Australia. The sponsor for whom the race was named was provided this honour simply by putting up the £15,000 in prize money. Sir...

Duration:00:20:20

'F' for Freddie

3/7/2019
It wasn't supposed to end this way. "Eye-witnesses to the crash told how F-for-Freddie's rubber dinghy dropped out, inflated automatically and landed, as neatly and naturally as though something had gone wrong over the North Sea" so the local newspapers reported. Except it wasn't over the North Sea. It was in the middle of a cattle pasture and not far from a poultry farm on the prairie near Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It was certainly nowhere near anywhere a rubber dinghy would have been of...

Duration:00:24:01

How Himalaya Should Spend the $100 Million

2/20/2019
They didn't ask me but here's what I think anyway. I had to reread the headline at least a couple of times: Podcast Platform Himalaya Raises $100 Million, Launches Apps With Tipping Function $100 million? What on earth is Himalaya going to do with all that money? Besides, of course, the oddly headline-worthy 'tipping function'? Then it occurred to me: The Oprah and LeBron Show. The two stars would richly deserve that money just so long as their deal includes three important words: Only on...

Duration:00:18:57

Story First, Everything Else Last

2/6/2019
We need the willing suspension of disbelief to sell shoes? "How is corporate storytelling different from other kinds of storytelling?" I was stumped by the question. I have to thank the interviewer who found the bullet point in my LinkedIn profile and called me out on it. I hope his audio editor eventually eliminates 90% of the pause that followed so I sound a whole lot sharper than I guess I must be. I eventually replied with the only thing which came into my head at the time: "It isn't,"...

Duration:00:20:47

The Arrow

1/23/2019
The path not taken 60 years ago has a nation still wondering what might have been. On February 19th, 1959 Wladyslaw "Spud" Potocki was test flying the sparkling white Avro Arrow RL-201 in the fair but chilly skies near Malton, Ontario. On that particular flight the World War II veteran fighter pilot was testing the Arrow's roll rates at Mach 1.7. While fast, it was still well below the nearly twice the speed-of-sound the sharp, delta-wing aircraft had already achieved on previous test...

Duration:00:24:20

Fat Kid with a Cello

1/9/2019
Why you should probably make your child play a musical instrument. The autobiography you won't read is the one I won't write because nothing short of Mitty-esque imaginings could make it interesting. I am vain enough, however, to know what the title of that pathetically thin volume would be: Fat Kid with a Cello. In the fall of 1966, when I was just five years old, my parents enrolled me in what I just recently learned was an experiment in teaching five year olds how to play the violin....

Duration:00:16:22

Legalization

12/17/2018
I really hope this isn’t the one thing for which Canada is known. When travelling, and the answer "Calgary" to the question "so where do you call home?" draws the fairly common blank stare, there are two things which can usually be relied upon to locate my home town on Planet Earth. My first recourse is usually "ever heard of the Calgary Stampede?" If that doesn't work, which it usually does, then the next thing to try is "remember the 1988 Winter Olympics?" Still nothing? "From Montana,...

Duration:00:16:56

X-15

11/21/2018
Inspired by its feature role in First Man, a closer look at the first aircraft to fly into space. In the annotated screenplay for First Man, author Josh Singer was asked “why start with the X-15?” for the gripping opening scene in the movie. His answer was simple: “we fell in love with the aircraft. The fastest and highest flying…ever built…[it] flew well over Mach 6 (4,520 miles per hour) and more than 50 miles high, well outside the sensible atmosphere.” Singer’s collaborator and Neil...

Duration:00:22:43

See More