If you are not a regular viewer of Eastlink Television (aka “Cable 10” in Charlottetown), you may have missed the fact that Kevin O’Brien has taken over from Elmer Williams as host of the Tuesday evening call-in programme Point of View.

I liked Elmer as host: he wasn’t pretentious, he ran the show well, and he was good at engaging his guests. Kevin’s equally up to the task, though, and this is especially impressive as, to the best of my knowledge, the sum total of his television experience before he assumed the host’s chair was, well, nothing. Of course he did play the lead in Brigadoon (or was it South Pacific?), and that must count for something ;-).

Be sure to tune in next Tuesday night if you’re around a cable outlet.

Kurt Andersen’s new public radio programme Studio 360 is an interesting listen every week. I’ve been a subscriber to the show, through Audible.com, for the past month.

Each show circumnavigates a theme — “War,” or “Robots,” for example — and includes a guest host with some connection to the material, and a series of interviews, pieces on tape by contributors, and music woven together very effectively.

I just finished listening to an episode about improvisation with Alan Arkin as the guest, and covering material from jazz to standup comedy.

Archived audio is availble for real time listening at the show’s website (which is very well put together) and is also available, for subscription purchase, from Audible.com (which means you can dump it into your iPod and listen to it in the car.

Ann’s comment about the RCAF fitness plan got me thinking about 5BX plan. I know that I bumped up against this plan — which is “the RCAF plan” for fitness — sometime in my life. I think my mother may have had the 5BX pamphlet at one point?

Here’s what the Chief of the Defense Staff said in his introduction to the plan:

It is your duty and responsibility as a member of the RCAF to maintain a high level of physical fitness and be ready for any emergency which may require the extended use of your physical resources. Positive physical well-being is also closely allied with mental and emotional fitness, all of which are essential in the discharge of normal daily tasks.

Presumably, in the eyes of public school educators in the American north-east, the same thing applied to their students? The entire 5BX plan is online, courtesy of Abraham Provost in Green Bay, WI.

That Green Bay is only 130 miles (say, a 12 hour run?) from Madison, WI, where Ann’s brother calls home, is a coincidence I will opt not to explore the ramifications of.

Kudos to Charlottetown City Councillor Philip Brown for calling on his colleagues to enact a ban on cosmetic pesticides within the city limits.

Civic “beauty” at the expense of our collective health is absurd. Council should show leadership on this issue and move immediately.

Show your support to Councillor Brown by sending him an email.

While you’re at it, you might thank him for being the only member of council to publish his email address.

I just got home from taping a piece for the CBC Prince Edward Island MainStreet programme’s My Music segment on Curtis Driedger. It should air this afternoon.

The first time I read a book about a trip around the world — Who Needs a Road? — I ended up making contact with the author, Harold Stephens, became friends at a distance, and visited him and his family in Bangkok.

I am, what you might call, an involved reader of around the world odysseys.

My most recent around the world read is The Seven Year Hitch: A Family Odyssey.

While Harold did his trip in a Toyota Land Cruiser, the Grant family made theirs in a horse-drawn caravan. And they made their voyage about 30 years later.

While perhaps a more daunting challenge in many ways — keeping a horse alive and healthy, along with engaging the lives of three kids and a wife (who doesn’t really want to be on the trip, it quickly develops) appears somewhat more difficult than keeping a Land Cruiser on the road — Harold’s tale is the more interesting of the two: he got into more scrapes, had more adventures, and is a more interesting writer.

The Hitch book really fades out in the home stretch — the journey from California to Halifax, and across the ocean home to Scotland is covered in very brief form, especially compared to sections like “our time in Slovenia,” which go on at great length about the minutae of everyday life. Perhaps the author was in a hurry? Or maybe North America isn’t all that interesting.

Although I’m not prompted to hitch up the wagon, I am interested in finding more contemorary “travel around the world books.” An Amazon.ca search turns up a couple of interesting looking books (along with lots of less useful ones like Do’s and Taboos Around the World for Women in Business).

If you know of others, please drop me a line.

I went looking for information about the Canada Fitness program today, and I couldn’t find anything. Perhaps it’s dead?

During my elementary school years, each spring we were forced to engage in a set of fitness tests — chin-ups and running figured prominently — and based on our individual results, we were awarded either a bronze, silver, gold or the “Award of Excellence.” Or, if you were like me, you received none of the above and instead were “awarded” a small plastic “participation pin.”

Although it’s hard not to laud any program that endeavoured to make us all more fit, I can’t think of any one effort in my time inside the walls of formal education that did more to turn me off physical activity.

Presumably the theory went that we down in the dregs of the participation pin ghetto were supposed to strive to better ourselves, with hopes that one day we could become bronze, silver, gold, or “excellent.”

In practice, we all thought the program silly and perhaps mean-spirited, for it seemed to rate natural abilities more than anything else. And, heck, we couldn’t do anything about that. Not quite eugenics. But not as far off as I’d like, either.

I’ve written in this space before about the Formosa Tea House (2001, 2002).

And now they’ve gotten bigger.

Fueled by space abandoned by The Reading Well after its flight east to Water Street, the Formosa Tea House on University Avenue has busted through the back wall and opened up a very nice, bright space with five additional tables.

I’m constantly amazed by the blind spot my contemporaries have for that stretch of University Avenue between Kent and FItzroy that the Formosa Tea House calls home. It is, admitedly, not the prettiest part of our city. But in the decade we’ve been here it has gotten much better. Somehow decades of neglect means that many Islanders appear to simply look straight ahead when driving up University, and so when I try to describe to them where the Tea House is, they get a deep and profound blank look on their faces.

So here is a detailed set of directions: go to the corner of Kent and University (translation to diehard Islanders: “go to the corner of Kent and Great George”). Stand in front of where Sam the Record Man and CFCY used to be. Walk out University towards the outskirts of town. You will pass Comic Hunter, an antique shop, Fergie’s Barbershop, the Taj Mahal restaurant and the space formerly occupied by The Reading Well. Stop. You are now at the entrance to the Formosa Tea House. There is a small porch with pine trim and astroturf carpeting at the entrance.

The hours of operation are 11:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. Monday through Saturday. Go earlier in the day rather than later, as they are a small operation, and tend to run out of many things after two or three in the afternoon. You do not need a lot of money (I rarely spend more than four dollars for a tea and snacks). You do not need to know anything about tea. There is no chanting (unless you want to chant). You can even order a cup of coffee or a hot chocolate.

My personal favourites are Lemon Iced Tea, the spicy stuffed buns, and the bamboo rice. They have good fresh-squeezed orange juice. And, of course, tea.

The owners are very nice. You can bring children. If you go alone, they have a nice selection of books, newspapers and magazines to read, located right beside the front door. You will never feel pressured to leave.

I await reports from the tea-virgin readership.