I’m not a lady, I’m a guy, and I’m not a climber but I am Scottish and having been raised on a steady diet of porridge, oat cakes and feats of manly derring-do such as tossing the caber (it’s the size of a telephone pole by the way), I was struck by a picture of two early 20th century women climbing a mountain in long skirts and everyday footwear. What? Skirts? Shoes? What the heck is going on?

Ugly ceramics are a thing. They don’t have to hold flowers or serve tea. Ugly ceramics don’t serve a purpose. They just sit there like… well, like blobs of clay. In truth they’re really sculptures and are easy to spot thanks to their volume and asymmetry, a departure from balance and uniformity and what society would call beautiful. Ugly ceramics have been around for decades and have reappeared at recent ceramic fairs in Brussels, Paris, and London.

I love Spain. Barcelona, Madrid, Grenada, the white villages of Andalusia, all well-traveled tourist haunts I admit, but well worth the aggravation. Until, recently, I had never been to northern Spain and in particular, to Basque country. As I soon discovered, Basque country is very different from the rest of Spain. The climate is more temperate, the scenery is greener and hillier and the area is officially bilingual.

The captain cuts the engine and the catamaran drifts closer to shore. I’m aboard a shallow-draft passenger ferry — with an onboard bar, no less — approaching Martillo Island in the Argentine half of the Beagle Channel. It’s home to a colony of Magellanic penguins. Magellanics stand about a metre tall and are distinguished by two black bands of feathers between their head and chest. They are the most common penguin species in this part of Patagonia.

Octoberfest is party time in Berlin and I just couldn’t get into it. I was sharing a long table with the locals in Alexander Platz, a huge outdoor plaza in the middle of the city while nursing a lager, four euros for the drink and another for the glass stein which I get back after returning it to the bar. The Germans are nothing if not practical. The stage band asked the crowd to join them in a raucous, up-tempo singalong. My table mates heartily complied.

Is the zine scene alive and well in the digital age? You bet it is. In fact, it’s enjoying a kind of revival right now thanks, in part, to a traveling art show called Copy Machine Manifestos: Artists Who Make Zines. Created and curated by two art historians from New York’s Brooklyn Museum, it’s been touring across the United States and Canada billed as the first ever exhibition dedicated to the rich history of North American zines.

Art as a form of protest isn’t new. Think of Goya’s sketches of the Peninsular War, Picasso’s mural Guernica and now the works of Pussy Riot, the feminist art collective formed in Moscow in 2011 to challenge misogynism, the orthodoxy of the Church and Putin’s totalitarianism. The collective is the subject of an art show called Velvet Terrorism:Pussy Riot’s Russia now completing a tour of North America.

“What lovely handwriting young man,” my Grade 5 teacher said to me way back in the Paleozoic Era. You know, back then when gasoline was thirty cents a gallon, people had rotary phones, and cursive handwriting was a mandatory part of the curriculum. As a young boomer I put my handwriting skills to good use, signing birthday cards, writing cheques and sending heartfelt letters to my girlfriends because that’s what you did in the pre-Internet days before texting.