I’ve never been to the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart. Mount Stewart is one of those funny villages that seems like it’s hours and hours away from Charlottetown. But when you actually get in your car and drive there, it turns out to be very close. As such, every time I think of going out to an event at the Trailside, I mistakenly think “oh, that would be like driving to North Bay,” and opt not.

That I have never been to the Trailside would tend disqualify me from recommending it to others. However the infectious enthusiasm for the place demonstrated by proprietors Doug and Barb Deacon towards the place, combined with what I’ve heard from others, suggests it’s a place worthy of mention.

All the more so for the following notice that came over the wire from Doug this weekend:

Katherine Wheatley—Live at the Trailside Café!

Spring has brought Katherine Wheatley back to the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart for two special performances on April 27! A well-known singer/songwriter from Ontario, Katherine has developed a strong following after a number of successful Atlantic tours. Her most recent CD “Habits and Heroes” was highly acclaimed by audiences across Canada. Her beautiful voice, melodic piano styles and well-crafted song structures are very pleasing to the ear. She is returning to the Maritimes this spring along with Wendell Ferguson, six time winner of the Canadian Country Music Awards guitar player of the year. Wendell has performed with many well-known musicians including the Dixie Chicks, Gordon Lightfoot, James Keelaghan, Jane Siberry, and Sylvia Tyson. They will perform at the Trailside Café from 2-4 and again from 7-9 on Sunday, April 27. For tickets and for more information call 676-3130.

Everything I’ve ever heard come out of Katherine Wheatley has been great, so I think the event is one worth attending. Past experience of others suggests getting tickets early, as they’re sure to sell out.

Dan James commented recently about the practice of spending so-called “old year money” during the run-up to the end of the government fiscal year (which is March 31 for both the federal and provincial governments).

Dan’s comments are pretty standard Reform Partyesque griping about “government waste:”

I have come to understand that Christmas comes twice a year in Canada (December 25 & March 31). What once was urban legend to me has been confirmed as cold hard truth. The government does in fact waste money on unnecessary things bought in a spending spree at the end of March… The system forces reasonable people to perpetually waste our money.

I’m certainly not going to argue that old-year money spending doesn’t happen. I just tried to order a desk chair, and was told by my dealer that it would take an extra week or two because of the flood of office furniture orders from government.

But I think there are four solid arguments why Dan’s got it wrong about what this means, and what the “solution” should be:

First, having worked closely with the provincial government for the past 8 years, I can tell you, first-hand, that there’s not a lot of excess fat in the system. Budgets are tight. Tighter than they’ve ever been. The sterotype of the public service swimming in money just isn’t true. As a result, decision makers have to watch money more carefully than ever, and spend on essentials before anything else. That means that they don’t go out and buy computers and desk chairs at the beginning of the year, because they might need to buy gauze pads or soil test supplies or road signs before the year is out. If they’ve managed wisely, and, more importantly, if no unforseen events come up over the year, they might be able to replace old equipment, office furniture and other “frills” at the end of the year. That’s a more responsible approach to spending, I think.

Second, there are three levels of oversight in place to ensure that spending is not irresponsible: the internal “chain of command,” the Office of the Auditor General, and the annual review of revenue and expenditures [815KB PDF] in the Legislative Assembly. For many years there was $400 set aside in the budget of the Department of Economic Development to cover travel expenses associated with our contract with the province; each year in the Legislative Assembly this line item would be raised by the opposition and explained by the Minister. These checks and balances help keep people honest.

Third, public servants, as a rule, are people of great integrity. This is not universally true, of course. But I can honestly say that there’s much more awareness inside the public service that it’s the public tax dollars that are being spent than the public realizes.

And finally, a notion best illustrated by this quote from last week’s The New Yorker magazine:

The military is not like a corporation that can be streamlined. It is the most inefficient machine known to man. It’s the redundancy that saves lives.

The speaker is a “former [Air Force] planner” speaking to Seymour Hersh about the tensions between Donald Rumsfeld and the military over the “efficiency” of the war in Iraq.

While I don’t suggest that direct parallels be drawn between the military and the public service, the larger message of this statement is that sometimes looking only at what’s most efficient, or quickest, or cheapest, isn’t the best way to run a system.

In other words, it’s easy for Dan to sit outside government and spot what he sees as egregious waste, and to suggest that the system needs to be changed so that it “rewards diligent managers for carefully managing our money.” But to look at old-year money in isolation rather than as part of a system that, by and large, works very well as a way to run a little society like ours, is to ignore the richness and complexity in the system.

You have probably seen the previews for the new movie It Runs in the Family.

The publicity highlights the movie’s two stars, son and father Michael and Kirk Douglas:

What is left unmentioned is that there are actually four members of the Douglas family the film: the other two are Michael’s son Cameron and Michael’s mother (and Kirk’s ex-wife) Diana (highlights are mine):

I assume that some sort of complicated Hollywood rules prevent the mention of these other Douglas family members without mentioning the other non-Douglas cast. But I gotta say, the promotion would be far more effective if it highlighted this “art imitating life” aspect of the picture.

Québec votes tomorrow; brother Steve has been hard at work for CBC Montreal preparing a series called Election Fun Facts.

Here’s Ian Williams on hybrid cars. Brilliant.

There have been some positive developments this season on CBC Radio’s morning schedule.

The Current is an excellent current affairs show, and Anna Maria Tremonti and Jim Brown are excellent hosts.

Even Sounds Like Canada, which is otherwise chaotic and unfocused, has its good points, not the least of which is permanent guest host Bernard St-Laurent, who has managed, inside his tenuous shell of a job, to tilt the show a little to the positive.

That all said, there’s a substantial problem with the morning schedule, and that’s simply that the schedule itself is far, far too confusing.

Here’s the progression as I hear it. Island Morning, the local morning show, now ends at 8:30 a.m., and is followed immediately by about 15 minutes of news and sports. Then comes The Current, which breaks for news almost immediately at 9:00 a.m. There’s another newscast at 9:30 a.m., and then, before 10:00 a.m. comes the “mid-morning break” from Halifax, which huddles around the top of the hour and is a sort of garage sale for otherwise unused bits of vaguely local information. Sometime after 10:00 a.m. Sounds Like Canada starts up, and then there’s more news at 10:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. Somewhere before Noon, Out Front may or may not cause Sounds Lilke Canada to end early. Then there’s more news at Noon.

That’s six newscasts alone between 8:30 and Noon. Some of them from Toronto, some from Charlottetown, some from Halifax. Some are local, some are regional, some are “national and international.”

While much of the individual programming has its good points, it’s scattered over such a confusing schedule that a listener tuning in for Island Morning and listening through to Maritime Noon — as I’ve done every morning for the past week — can emerge feeling mentally pommeled.

The roots of this can be traced back to the introduction of the bottom of the clock “update” newscast into the former 9:00 a.m. to Noon show This Morning. Apparently the Big Bosses felt that we listeners needed more local updating in the vast Sargasso Sea of contemplative current affairs. While this may have made sense in places like Toronto, where perhaps the Don Valley Parkway is backed up and drivers need alerting, here in The Regions, I’m sure most of us can hold our breath and wait to be updated at Noon.

The ultimate demonstration of the insanity of this idea came several years ago during a This Morning interview with former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna: the interview was just developing a nice head of steam when the host had to break for a “local update” and we got to hear Aubrey Bell rhyme off a couple of headlines, and then update us on the IODE meeting scheduled and the status of various lost cats.

I don’t think the CBC has to keep the Peter Gzowski-era format forever, and I’m not opposed to progress. But the chaotic panorama that is the morning schedule needs renovation and simplification.

Being that the gallbladder is spurred into action to produce bile to aid in the “digestion and absorption of fats and fat-soluble vitamins in the small intestine,” I was advised, during my time with a bum gallbladder, to avoid foods containing fat.

As you might imagine, this meant that I became much more aware of what fat is, and what foods it’s found in, and in what quantities.

The first problem a newfound fat-watcher must face is the distinction between “fat” the food ingredient, “fat” the body part and “fat” the adjective.

Let’s go through these one by one:

Fat the food ingredient, or “dietary fat,” the NIH tells us, is “one of the three nutrients (along with protein and carbohydrates) that supply calories to the body.” Fats “are organic compounds that are made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen; they are the most concentrated source of energy in foods.”

Fat the body part is actually called “body fat” or, more technically, “adipose tissue.” Body fat is “a form of body tissue composed of cells which primarily store lipids.” Apparently, “just like saving money for a rainy day, our body stores excess calories as fat.” These excess calories can come from dietary fat. Or not.

Fat the adjective — “I feel fat,” “I’ve been getting really fat lately,” and so on — usually is taken to mean a combination of “I have more body fat than I would like” and “I weigh more than I would like.” Confusingly, losing body fat does not necessarily equate to losing weight. Nor does losing weight equate to losing body fat.

This whole situation is almost as confusing as having a two year old son who says “poo” to describe both a Disney character and feces.

The short version of the story is: foods with more dietary fat generally contain more calories because every gram of fat provides 9 calories, which is more than double the gram to calories ratio of protein or carbohydrates. So if you eat more foods with more dietary fat, you will consume more calories which may, in the end, get stored as body fat. Making you “fat,” so to speak.

But you can also eat protein or carbohydrates, which also contribute calories, which might also end up stored in body fat.

In other words, you can eat fat and get fat. You can also eat fat and not get fat. And you can also not eat fat and get fat.

To confuse the issue further, there are several types of fat, some of which are “good” and some of which are “bad.” The “bad” type of fat is saturated fat. Saturated fat is “bad” because, says the NIH:

Eating too much saturated fat is one of the major risk factors for heart disease. A diet high in saturated fat causes a soft, waxy substance called cholesterol to build up in the arteries.

This cholesterol-build up evil of fat is in addition to the “high calorie containing leading to excess body fat leading to obesity” potential evil of fats in general.

The Dietitians of Canada say the following about the amount of dietary fat in our diet:

Contrary to popular belief, fat is important for good health. However, most of us eat more fat than we need. Aim for less than 30% of total calories from fat. This amount is 60 grams of fat for the average woman (based on 55 kg/120 lbs) and 90 grams (based on 75 kg/165 lbs) for the average man.

This appears simple, but once the numbers start rumbling around in your head, it can get confusing, especially because there’s a 30, a 60 and a 90 in there.

The easiest approach, I think, is to simply fill out the Dietitians of CanadaNutrition Profile and find your Recommended Daily Intake of calories (mine is 2,700). Then divide this figure by 30. For me, the result, as above, is 90 grams of dietary fat per day.

Perhaps the best fat-related thing to come from my gallbladder journey is that I’ve managed to develop a taste for foods without fat. Or rather I don’t depend on fats in foods to define their taste.

I’m still confused, but I’m getting better.

I have been watching a lot of television this week while I wait for the gashes in my belly to heal sufficiently to allow me to resume a normal life. One of the programmes I watched was on Bravo and was a low-budget interview show hosted by Canadian Keith Morrison called The Actors.

Morrison, who used to come off as a sort of lightweight John Tesh, has matured into a creditable interviewer. His guest this week was Peter Coyote.

Coyote has appeared in the Whole Earth orbit several times, and this is how I first came to know of him. You’ve undoubtedly heard his voice, as he is a leading voiceover artist for commercials (and he narrated the Oscars in 2000). And of course he’s an accomplished actor. He is a fascinating man, a true polymath. And perhaps more than anyone I’ve ever heard interviewed, is skilled a being equally brutally honest and self-confident without appearing at all arrogant.

If you have an opportunity to see him interviewed, you will not be disappointed.