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.

Eight years after their scheduled showing (which was cancelled due to concerns over their provenance), the Vancouver Art Gallery has finally released ten controversial oil sketches attributed to the Group of Seven’s J.E.H. MacDonald. It's controversial because while Toronto collectors Ephry and Melvin Merkur gifted the sketches to the gallery in 2015, and while the gallery’s senior curator authenticated them at the time, others doubted their authenticity.

The smoke is clearing as 18-year-old Ben Shugar emerges from the live fire training facility on Pender Island. He’s tired but energized. “Live fire, yeah, I’m really into it,” he says. “I love the feeling. There’s so much adrenalin but you also have to take deep breaths and calm your mind so you can think clearly.” Ben and his buddies have just tackled a simulated house fire, coming to grips with heat, smoke and working in a confined space.

It was simple curiosity that drew me into the unassuming farmhouse and driveway just off Slea Head Drive on Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula. The sign said Beehive Huts Fahan Group. Beehive huts? What are beehive huts? And then I saw them, a group of stone huts in the shape of beehives in the middle of a rocky sheep enclosure.

June 12, 1942. Russian pilot Nadezhda Popova and her navigator Sofia Vodyanik climb into their twin-cockpit Polikarpov Po-2 biplane fueled, armed, and waiting for them at their base in eastern Russia. As members of the recently-formed, all-female 588th Night Bomber Regiment, their mission is to harass German units crossing the Muis and Donets Rivers in southern Ukraine.

The mid-1960s were heady times in rock and roll, attracting a pantheon of photographers who sometimes became as noteworthy as the talent they were following. One of the first was English photographer Barrie Wentzell. “We were out there discovering bands,” he says of the days when he worked as chief photographer for Melody Maker, an influential British music magazine that predated Rolling Stone. “Nobody was really famous, apart from the Beatles, and even they were very sweet.”