Sound check - Charm the Room - Talk is cheap · Sunday October 18, 2026 by colin newell
In a World of tears, sorrow and pain, we clearly need more music… more art… and more time simply devoted to accomplishing nothing…
So, I have been playing guitar… for like… 50 years… (51 years if I am being more accurate…) and having played on a few projects… produced… directed… rejected… I am always looking for the next score and not afraid to use whatever tools I have at hand…
So – I am working on a 20 year follow up to an album I released…. gasp 20 years ago… Island Standard Time… tossed out into the ether in the Spring of 2008 by troubadour Charlie Burton and yours truly. We were the Two Old Goats. Now my immediate circle is a wealth of talent young and old… and I am conceptualizing a music project of various artists… a cooperative if you would… the idea: Cook up a project of 15 to 20 great songs… no (and I mean NONE) CD’s, cassettes or vinyl… just a digital release – free for the planet to hear. If we get one listen or a thousand listeners, it will make no difference to me…
One of our singer-writers is Colin Murdock – and here is a sketch of what we are working on. The music will (maybe) bridge the ages and genres. Expect pop, rock, rock-a-billy, country and blue grass. Expect to be surprised. To laugh. To cheer. To shed a tear.
Stay tuned!
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Bad site design on the rampage - pinterest why you suck so badly · Wednesday September 30, 2026 by colin newell
I spend a lot of time cooking, baking and prepping food. We all do it. Every day. Without question…
And unless you are preparing the same three-square every single day, you are spending a portion of your research day looking for new ideas for the kitchen.
Which I do. My wife’s preferred method is Pinterest. Which is fine.
Pinterest is, after all, a great location where specific genres of food are aggregated, collated and gathered… So, not a bad thing…
So. OK. In all fairness, Pinterest is not the issue. It is the specific food blogs that choose the sloth lazy path of formatting the recipes and food stories the exact same way… over and over and over and over and flipping over and over…
So. What is it that is bugging me you ask?
It is the endless scrolling through page after page of ads to get to the recipe and even when you do, the page is often scarred with popups that distract from what’s important. Is it too much to ask to get the skinny on anything anymore? On this blog (which has been on the air for 20 years, no less,) has never drooped so low as to subject our readers to this waste of time.
We offer recipes. Simple opening anecdotes or observations and straight to the meat… or tofu… depending on your leaning.
That’s it. No more. No less.
We respect our readers. Big time. Everything on this site (as far as food is concerned) is kitchen tested… over and over.
The average food blogger out there holds their readers in contempt. Not us. We get you. We really do.
Similar rants could be dropped regarding video content creators on the YouTubes… that could encapsulate whatever they are trying to say in less than 15 minutes… but for whatever reason extend the session into a half-hour and beyond… solving most sleep disorders in the process. That is another rant for another day. In the meantime, don’t be a wiener: Get to the point. Deliver the goods and stop wasting my time!
I’d appreciate your comments – leave them in the nifty comment field below. Or you could send me a screed and tell me how much I suck. E-Mail form right over here
Colin Newell is a Victoria B.C. Canada resident who has been creating content for decades. He will never, ever waste your time...
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Victoria P.I. Steele episode #1 · Monday June 1, 2026 by colin newell
It was a regular Friday in the offices of Robert Steele when the phone rang.
I grabbed the handset out of the cradle, like a James Bay seal reaching for a tourist treat at Fishermans wharf..
The name is Robert – I’m a private detective with the firm Steele-Wall down on Fisgard in sunny Victoria.
My long time partner, Jimmy Wall met his fate on Fan Tan Alley one cold December afternoon… as of yet unsolved… and that is a story for another day… I digress…
So his name remains on my office door… as something of a promise of what you will run into… if you ever cross me.
Judging by the voice on the other end of the blower, I knew I had a live wire. She spat her words out like a pro-wrestler on a Saturday afternoon, which was odd. It was Friday. Friday, high noon.
It seems one of her favorite cafe’s had just dumped their quality single origin beans for some johnny-come-lately discount brew and, don’t tell me let me guess, the drinks are the same price.
Yea, this was a clear case of brew and gouge. I hate it when that happens. I hate it when the phone rings and there is an angry client on the other end of the chatterbox. I hate stomach aches and today I was cooking up an Olympic gold medal.
Like a dozen clown detectives packed into a Volkswagen beetle, I managed to squeeze a few words in edgewise..
“So let’s take it from the top shall we?” I coached.
Catrina Bell, or “Cat” as she is known down on Fisgard, works as the executive legal assistant with the Crown attorneys office and Cat’s no slouch. She knows a bad fish when she smells one so she knew who to call.. and looking at at my empty work calendar, I knew my day was looking up.
“Ah, Mister Steele, is this you?”
“Ma’am”, I mumbled between gritted teeth… “It sure is. What seems to be your beef? “
“I was down at the Matrix today, you know the cafe down between Wharf and Sunset?”
“Yes, Ma’am… the one between Jimmy’s Pawn and Leo’s Bar n Grill?”
“Yea, that’s the one… I go there, like, every day without fail and…”
“well, you know how it is. They get you all jazzed up on great coffee, all tasty and perfect, and…”
“Please continue…” I encouraged while peeking at my Hamilton watch.
“Well, I was in for my usual flat white and… well and… well and….”
Just then the scent of spicy ginger beef drifted through my open upstairs office window one measly half block from Don Mee’s and yet it might as well been miles away. I wasn’t going anywhere this afternoon.
By now I was furious (and hungry) as I snubbed out a virtual Marlboro into an imaginary ash-tray next to my Olivetti.
“Here’s the way it is Catrina. There are two kinds of people out there – The good people: that’s you and the men and women in your office – you know and trust.
And then there are the coffee people: the bad people, looking for every opportunity to screw with the general public. That is where I come in.
When my phone rings, it is like the sound of a crying baby. And lately, I have been getting a crib full.”
My job never ends. Coffee cop and private detective. It is a thankless one and the pay is crap. But sometimes on a sunny day, when the wind is blowing in the right direction and things are going my way, I can sit in the corner cafe and everything is okay. The brew is hot like the pavement over Douglas and Yates on an August night…. until the phone rings…
“Mr. Steele, ah… Mr. Steele….Hello? Are you still there?”
I snapped out of my narcissistic reverie long enough to realize that I was still on the phone…
“Their americanos were just so perfect.. crema like butterscotch churned by angels.. and now… and now it’s…
“Go on, Miss C.. and don’t let me interrupt…”
“The coffee is like a double-double Tim Horton’s that has been forgotten in the back-seat of a Pontiac Acadian, left overnight in the strip mall and allowed to bake in the heat of the day…”
“Cat, I get your vibe, and it pains me to know that every day in this sleepy little town, there is one more coffee crime going down…Now you relax and let Mr. Steele take it from here.”
As she hung up the phone and I tapped another pretend Marlboro out of my near-empty deck of phantom smokes, I realized one thing …Damn, I need a coffee!
Detective Robert Steele is the sole proprietor of Steele-Wall a private investigation firm keeping a handle on caffeinated crimes and general mischief in the sleepy little town of Victoria.
Colin Newell, author of the coffeecrew blog once helped write an episode of C.S.I. Las Vegas (Season 3 – Episode Last Laugh) – since then, pretty much everything has gone to his head.
The Fermi Paradox - a casual look at why we are alone · Sunday March 15, 2026 by colin newell
The Fermi Paradox – I’ve have never written about it. Maybe the time has come. See what I did there?
The Fermi Paradox: sometimes pitched as “where are they?” – It is a question about the apparent lack of intelligent detected alien life in the universe.
The universe is very old relative to the speed of light so Light has been able to traverse our galaxy a thousand times since the ancient reptiles died out, and since radio waves travel at the speed of light (give or take…) too – why haven’t we heard anything?
I have some ideas on the subject…
We’re not looking very carefully.
We are a speck surrounded by the vast reaches of space – which stretches out almost infinitely in every direction – not quite “infinite” (as a subscriber of the big pa-boom theory…) we can only focus our attention on very minute segments of “the big out there…”
And living in the era of Tik-tok and the one minute Chinese internet drama, it is entirely unlikely that we have the staying power to find anything — that attention span issue is a subject for another day… Oh, look! A squirrel…
Suffice to say, all the stuff around us is huge, exponentially huge and with all that’s available to look at, it would be much like having a Mount Everest bin of popcorn dumped on us and trying to focus on one kernel.
So, with our astronomers wearing the equivalent of dental hygienist 7x googles, we’re not going to discover intelligent life unless it’s very close by… like a handful of light years away… with ET sending big radio signals formatted for talk radio, news and weather together or the Alpha Centauri equivalent of Fox News… modulated in a way that would make sense to us… you know… AM, FM, Morse code… and the like.
Interstellar travel might be impossible
Our galaxy, The Milky Way is huge… 100,000 light years wide. And currently, you and I walk around 1 meter per second. We can drive safely at 100 meters per second… and fly at 300 to 500 meters per second… and ride with Mister Bezos for 9 minutes in space at around Mach 3 (2300 mph…) – that, by the way, takes us 65 miles into the space… the distance you might drive for your fav ice cream cone on Earth. In short: You ain’t gone nowhere yet. The closest star is 4 light years away… 25 trillion miles… so you had better pack lunch.
The great equalizer.
One of the main foundations of the Fermi Paradox is the “reality” that civilizations will exhaust their resources or self destruct before they achieve the ability to get very far beyond their own planetary borough. Currently Planet Earth is a very good example of this. Wars, more wars and more rumors of wars, skirmishes, neglect of our environment and the fragility of our ecosystem are among some of the factors inhibiting our ability to evolve. Let’s face it, we can’t have nice things.
The peril of observational conclusions
Consider the Fermi Paradox perspective from Robin Hansen’s work on Grabby Aliens – the universe appears to be empty and that cultural selection on expansionist aliens would lead to their rapid spread if they did occur to conclude that intelligent life must actually be very rare or that evolution must be very slow. Or, in other words, we are not that much more evolved than primates… and we’ve discovered that raccoons like solving puzzles without the expectation of reward.
My Universal three states of being(s)
a.) We observe no aliens. Good luck with that. I got suspicious when that Irish family moved in next door. My point: In a perfect World we would not see colour, cultural differentiation or class distinction. This is not that perfect World. In our current World, space aliens would move freely among us.
b.) We are so busy expressing our own version of apartheid on the peoples around us that we wouldn’t detect anything truly out of the ordinary… although a flaming plasma head-dress might be a give away.
c.) We are alone. As outlined in my thoughts above, below and as of yet unexpressed.
All these factors are potentially under-estimated when discussing the Fermi Paradox.
- If most of the planets in the universe are too far away for us to see alien life, then if we see it at all we’ll be seeing their space ships as they come to us… less warning than an Amazon Prime delivery on a Saturday.
- We won’t even see them launch to us, even with perfect telescopes staring out into the galaxy, until they’re almost here.
- In practice this means that, in the grand scheme of human history, the phase between becoming aware of aliens and meeting them is vanishingly short.
Example - Expanding alien life capable of sub-light travel will arrive minutes or hours after reaching the outer orbits of our solar system. This periodic table only has the element of surprise!
Conclusion… in part…
Modern culture has been peppered with references to alien arrival in media and film. Truth be told, if our brightest minds are to be considered… is that first contact is arguably tens of thousands or millions of years away… if at all.Are we alone in the Universe? Depending on your statistical model, no… we are very much not alone. That said, there is an overwhelming unlikelihood of someone tapping on our planetary door looking for a cup of sugar any time soon. Leave your comments below.
Colin Newell is a resident of Earth, a popular coffee drinker and talker on subjects far and wide… his brain blips have occupied this blog since the Year 2005!
Logic and reason requires critical thinking skills. · Saturday September 4, 2021 by colin newell
In a time rife with disasters, simmering regional conflicts, global warming, and out of control fires, when more people than ever can find an audience online, conspiracy theories seem to be growing more silly by the day.
We’re also more prone to believing such things under heightened stress, and there is no shortage of troubling issues confronting us, whether locally or globally.
Some conspiracy theorists pride themselves on being “critical freethinkers,” but a new study showing a trend between lower critical thinking skills and increased conspiracy theory belief suggests this may not be the case.
“Conspiracy theories refer to attempts to explain the ultimate cause of an important event (social, political, climatic, etc.), by accusing a hidden coalition of perceived malicious and powerful people or organizations of having secretly planned and implemented these events,” explain Paris Nanterre University psychologist Anthony Lantian and team in their paper.
Across two studies, the researchers assessed the critical thinking skills of 338 undergraduate students using a French version of the Ennis-Weir Critical Thinking Essay Test. They then scored the students’ tendencies towards conspiracy beliefs and their personal assessment of their own critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking – the objective analysis and evaluation of a situation – requires a collection of cognitive skills. These include the ability to discern relevant versus irrelevant information, think systematically, seeing other perspectives, recognizing and avoiding logical fallacies, look beyond the obvious, be aware of and avoid biases and changing your mind in light of new evidence.
“The more people believe in conspiracy theories, the worse they perform on a critical thinking ability test,” Lantian told Eric Dolan from PsyPost. “This test is characterized by an open-ended format highlighting several areas of critical thinking ability in the context of argumentation.”
Before anyone gets all superior and self righteous around this, we must keep in mind that some people may not have had opportunities to obtain or develop these skills. This doesn’t mean they’re any less intelligent, just that their lives have not as yet taken them on the critical thinking skill acquiring path. But it’s never too late to learn. Good thing!
The researchers didn’t find any evidence for a higher (or lower) subjective critical thinking ability (as opposed to that evaluated more objectively by the test) among those who subscribe more to conspiracy theories.
“This is not in line with the cliché of the conspiracy theorists who see themselves as critical thinkers,” Lantian said.
All this is not to say those with high critical thinking skills can’t also be sucked into believing things that may not necessarily align with reality. The way our thinking is wired as an obligatorily social species makes us very vulnerable to believing those we identify with as part of our own cultural group – no matter how much education we have had that boosts science literacy.
Trust plays a massive role in who we believe; we also have a tendency to believe each of us is above average at detecting misinformation. And that is a clear case of self deception if there ever was one!
Researchers have also linked this need to feel special to greater belief in conspiracies. This is the classic, “I know something that you don’t!” Or, “There is this guy that has a YouTube channel that knows stuff that no one else knows!”
Lantian and team point out that while their study suggests critical thinking lowers people’s chances of believing in unfounded conspiracy theories, the findings don’t determine if these skills can help people detect true conspiracies.
Photo above: Our COVID-19 journey has been rife with speculation and a lively source for “conspiracy theorization”, in part, because of the elements of calamity, the “perceived” volumes of unanswered questions, the complexity of the varied impacts on society and so on.
Furthermore, the uniformity of their sample population (all French-speaking undergraduates) means these findings may not necessarily be an accurate reflection across wider society, nor have the researchers demonstrated a causal relationship.
However, previous research has also suggested more highly educated people are less prone to conspiracy beliefs. Another study, specifically designed by Yale University psychologist Dan Kahan and team to untangle within-group bias from levels of understanding, found similar results: Participants who scored highest in science comprehension – which requires critical thinking skills – displayed higher scores in independent thinking.
Kahan and colleagues have also found that curiosity can play an incredibly powerful role in counteracting within-group biases by leading people to consume “a richer diet of information”.
Lantian and team conclude in their paper that “critical thinking ability could help individuals to seek contradictory evidence rather than blindly trusting a conspiracy theory as long as it challenges an established version.”
They hope that this and further research on the topic will help develop better ways to teach more people these vital skills. Critical thinking, along with fostering curiosity and a sense of belonging and community to counteract the forces of cultural biases, may help us nudge each other back towards a smarter and wiser reality.
Elements of this research was published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.
Your web writer, Colin Newell, has lived on the radical Wet Coast of North America and has been writing stuff, totally believable stuff, since 1996!
