I was impressed by this excellent example of Google AdSense targeting for this page about my attempted girlish umbrella purchase in Croatia:

Just in case you were concerned, General Motors reassures you that:

The OnStar system does not allow monitoring of vehicle occupant conversations without notice to the occupants. When OnStar establishes a voice connection, subscribers will see the green OnStar status light flash, their audio system will mute (if it’s on), and they will hear the phone ring as they are greeted by the OnStar advisor.

A comment by host Mark Peacock in episode #71 of the Travel Commons podcast about seeing “Don’t Pick up Hitchhikers” signs along a stretch of I-94 near a prison brought back memories of a road trip from Texas to Ontario I took in 1990.

I was returning home to Canada in my Toyota Tercel after a 3 month stint in El Paso. I had next to no money, and so I was travelling fast and low to the ground.

After spending my first night in Amarillo, I headed east on the I-40 toward Bartlesville, Oklahoma where I planned to meet up with my friend Bill who was rehearsing there. As I neared the Oklahoma border around noon I decided to pull off the highway for one last meal in Texas. Which is how I found myself in Shamrock, Texas looking for a parking space on the main street. I found one, locked up the car, and headed off to find some lunch.

And as I walked away from the car and felt to make sure I had my car keys I immediately realized that I’d made a big mistake: I’d locked the keys in the car.

As a stood there staring a the car wondering what I was going to do, I noticed that the rear “pop-out” window on the Tercel was partially “popped-out” and I figured that if I could get it open all the way I’d have a few inches of space to stick a coat hanger in and grab the keys.

That was the theory, anyway.

Unfortunately I didn’t realize that auto glass, when placed under stress, is designed to shatter into a million pieces. Which is what the read driver’s side window of my Toyota Tercel did as soon as I tried to pop it open.

With glass now all over Main Street I ran into the shoe store I was parked in, woke up the owner who was sleeping in the back, and borrowed a broom and dustpan to clean up the mess.

Then I decided that fate was trying to speak to me, that I was meant to get out of Texas right away, and I headed back to the highway.

As I pulled back on to the I-40 I saw a hitchhiker with his thumb out heading my way. As I’d thumbed around a lot in my early 20s — and because I was in need of some positive karma — I pulled over and picked him up.

He turned out to be an interesting guy, in the habit of moving back and forth across the country staying in shelters, picking up work when he could, and generally living the life of a vagabond. I told him my window story and we shared a good laugh and I told him that I could take him as far as Oklahoma City.

After about 20 minutes we started to pass the same sort of “Don’t Pick up Hitchhikers” signs that Mark saw in Michigan. While I can’t say that I didn’t feel a tinge of nervousness, by this time I figured I had enough rapport with my hitchhiker that he probably wouldn’t murder me, so we forged on.

I dropped him off at the western side of Oklahoma City in the middle of the afternoon, without incident, and then found a truck stop pay phone and started calling around to the auto salvage yards of the area to track down a replacement window. After a few hours of calls, and a few dead-end trips, I finally found a perfect match, for $25, at a wrecker that only dealt with Japanese cars. Fortunately it was a simple job to screw the window into place, and I was back on my way before sunset.

As I reached the turn-off for I-44 toward Tulsa, on the north-eastern side of the city, who should I spot at the side of the road, miles away from where I’d dropped him off hours before, but my vagabond friend. As things were going my way since I’d picked him up originally, I pulled over once again and we shared another good laugh about the unlikely coincidence of a second ride

I dropped him off at the Salvation Army shelter in Tulsa and continued on to Bartlesville. The rest of the trip was uneventful.

Photo of road sign by Joe Schwartz.

The [relatively] new Empire Theatres website is running Drupal.

Here’s a recipe I adapted from one presented by Jamie Oliver. The ingredients:

• Olive oil.
• A handful of olives, green or black, pitted.
• A couple of tablespoons of capers.
• Some red, green and/or yellow peppers.
• A can of tomatoes, whole or chopped.
• A splash of hot sauce.
• Pasta — spaghetti, linguine, or other.

Splash some olive oil into a frying pan and bring it up to medium heat. Chop the olives and peppers and add to the frying pan along with the capers. Cook for a while. Add a splash of hot sauce, to your taste. After a while add the tomatoes — if you use whole tomatoes chop them up with a knife while still in the can. Add whatever spices you have handy — oregano, basil, etc. to taste. Cook for 15 to 20 minutes, allowing the sauce to reduce.

Boil salted water, add pasta, cook per instructions on the package. When the pasta is done to your taste, drain most of the water, but not all of it (this is key) from the pot, leaving the pasta in the pot. Then add the olive-tomato mix from the frying pan and mix well.

Serve into large bowls. If you run some how water (and then remove) into the bowls before you add the pasta they’ll be nice and hot and won’t cool off the pasta. Sprinkle salt and ground pepper to taste.

The result is quite unlike standard pasta with sauce, and has a nice bite to it. It’s a flexible enough recipe that you can substitute for whatever ingredients you happen to have on hand, although the olives and the capers are central.

Nigel Armstrong at The Guardian is doing great work with things like his maps of Charlottetown City Council meeting decisions. This is what newspapers need to do to remain relevant.

Mitch and Kerry have tested you. And you have failed.

All season long CBC Radio One’s morning show here on Prince Edward Island has been outsourcing their music programming to their listeners in a jiggle they call “All Request Winter.”

Setting aside the obvious abrogation of editorial responsibility this involves, it was possible to imagine that the wisdom of the Island Morning crowd would take us in unanticipated musical directions. So I was willing to temporarily suspend my curmudgeonliness.

And then yesterday at 8 minutes to 7 o’clock the clock radio alarm went off and I found myself waking up to a Captain & Tennille song.

Perhaps, I thought, a rare misstep.

And then while making coffee they played Could I Have This Dance by Anne Murray. And I realized things were going down hill.

But they lost me entirely this morning with Lady In Red: as I made my way to have a shower I found myself literally wanting to gnaw my own ears off.

So here’s the thing, Island Morning listeners: I know that you and Donalda-Jean Gallant stared into each others eyes at the Colonel Gray Valentines Dance in 1986 while Chris De Burgh crooned and the disco ball splashed waves of light that made the gym seem like a Las Vegas showroom.

But I don’t care.

And even if I did care, it’s absolutely no justification for inflicting your musical memories on contemporary Islanders.

Nowhere in the CBC Mission Statement does it say anything about playing dreadful nostalgic music, and I think it’s hard to squeeze morning after morning of Anne Murray and the Captain & Tennille and the like out of “distinctive programming of the highest quality.”

Even if you set taste aside, surely the job of stoking the musical nostalgia fires falls to private radio: the role of the CBC, musically speaking, should be to take us all in unexpected directions.

That doesn’t mean we need to wake up to acid punk. Well, at least not exclusively.

But it does mean that maybe music programming is best left the experts, that DJing should be recognized as a professional skill, and that turning morning radio into some sort of dreadful collectively-programming iPod was a hideous unfortunate mistake.

(Oh, and as long as you’re asking, I’d like to hear For Wanda by the Thee Silver Mt. Zion Memorial Orchestra & Tra-La-La Band).

Did you know that when advertisements on television say “pet stains” they actually mean “the stains from where your pets peed on the carpet”? I didn’t. I think I have a genetic mutation that makes me incapable of grasping common euphemisms. I thought “pet stains” were like when your dog knocks over a bottle of red wine or your cat tracks mud in from the garden.