We were pleasantly surprised to hear the musical stylings of the incomparable Nick Doneff during lunch on the MV Northumberland crossing from Wood Islands to Caribou this morning. He really is a musical treasure.

“It’s times like this that I’m proud to be an Islander,” Lisa said. Agreed.

Writing yesterday about being in Lincoln Centre with Salman Rushdie prompted me to recall the other time, the very same week, we ended up in the same room.

Catherine was 4 months pregnant when, in the spring of 2000, we headed to New York City, along with brothers Mike and Steve, for the very first edition of The New Yorker Festival.

We had tickets to a variety of events, including an architecture bus tour with Paul Goldberger, a reading by Stephen King, and the aforementioned Robin Williams-Lillian Ross event at Lincoln Centre. 

My favourite event, however (and the most “New Yorkery”) was a panel discussion of science writers held at The Princeton Club. I first learned about it when I emailed Malcolm Gladwell to see if he was participating in and (it being 2000, a gentler time), he emailed back:

yes, i think i’m doing a panel discussion with a couple of other science writers on the saturday. but i haven’t seen the final agenda yet either.

The panel included Gladwell, Michael Specter, Jerome Groupman, and Atul Gawande: then and now a cross-section of the smartest science and medicine writers in the US.

When the well-attended panel was over, brother Steve and I, eager to get out the door to the next event on our agenda, ducked out the  back into a service hallway, walked through a maze of corridors, and emerged eventually into another meeting room. Where we encountered Salman Rushdie, just finishing up a panel discussion of his own.

Rushdie had reached a new level of openness by that time, and had moved to New York City that year, so it wasn’t as miraculous to encounter him by chance as it might seem. But, inashmuch as he’d been in hiding for more than a decade, it was still remarkable to just stumble out of a service hallway and come face to face with him.

Lillian Ross, in the introduction to her book Reporting Always, on J.D. Salinger:

He liked what Ralph Waldo Emerson said. He quoted Emerson in a letter to me: “A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” Writers, Salinger said, sometimes had trouble abiding by that, and he referred to Flaubert and Kafka as “two other born non-buyers of carrots and turnips.”

Watching Ross interview Robin Williams at Lincoln Centre, for The New Yorker FestivalYork Times, remains one of the highlights of my life. I just learned that Salman Rushdie was in the audience that afternoon too; he writes:

I once saw Lillian Ross on stage in New York, interviewing Robin Williams. This was not an easy job, because Robin Williams could take an innocent question and run with it for a long time, twisting and turning his answer into various kinds of surreality. (At one point, for example, he became for several minutes a beret-wearing, Gauloise-smoking French parrot.) I remember being impressed by Lillian Ross’s demeanor, her faint smile, her unflappability, her willingness to let Robin fly (who could have stopped him?), but also her determination to get the interview done, and done properly.

I wholly concur. 

Matt Webb mentioned Zork in a recent post:

Back in the day, text adventures were games with a natural language interface.

Zork (1977) was the first well-known one.

This surfaced a long-forgetten memory from when I was a teenager, likely about 17: I had read about Zork, and desperately wanted to try it out on my computer. I bought a copy from a computer shop—it was in Oakville, Ontario, if memory serves—and installed it on my Commodore 64. 

Then I played it for awhile, wasn’t impressed, and packed it up and returned it (for some reason this was allowed).

The memory remains because I remember my father being quite angry at me for doing this: he thought the idea of buying something, using it and then returning it was fundamentally dishonest.

To this day, as Lisa will attest, that’s a deeply-imprinted value of mine, and it’s rare if ever that I’ll return something to a store simply because I didn’t like it.

One of my favourite coffee places in Malmö is Café № 6, on Mäster Henriksgatan. I first visited when I was staying around the corner some years ago, and I like stopping in for a coffee every time I’m in the city.

When we were in Malmö in 2024 we enjoyed coffee in the garden on an April afternoon, a delight for we winter-ravaged Islanders. 

As This Box is for Good was in full voice at the time, when we returned home we sent them a Coffee box, and then promptly forgot that we’d done so.

Last week Olle was there for a coffee, and helpfully sent a proof-of-life for the box:

It makes me so happy to see that: the box phoned home.

From its Recreation Hub at the edge of downtown, the Town of Wolfville, Nova Scotia, lets anyone borrow a bicycle for up to 8 hours for free:

This morning Lisa and I borrowed two Cannondale Cargowagon e-bikes, and rode them 36 km to Kingsport and back, with fish and chips at Tide’s In Canteen mid-way.

The staff person at the Recreation Hub who helped us reported that most of the usage is local: people taking bikes for errands, going out for recreational rides, etc. That said, anyone can borrow a bike (“out-of-towners” need to leave a photocopy of a credit card, and everyone needs to show ID).

It’s such a wonderful idea: shared mobility, right on the rail trail, with a variety of bicycles on offer, including cargo bikes and trikes, e-bikes, and standard bicycles. It stimulates active transportation, lets people try out different types of bicycles in a no-pressure environment, and gives visitors an alternative way to explore the area.

The Cannondale Cargowagons were more bicycle than we actually needed, as we weren’t hauling cargo, but they were the only e-bikes available, and I was eager to see how they handled, what they could carry, etc., in the “could we replace one car with an e-bike” vein. I was able to pair my iPhone with the Bosch control system on the bike, and then use the eBike Flow app to plan a route and have navigation prompts appear on the tiny handlebar display.

The ride from Wolfville to Kingsport started out on the rail trail, then saw us heading north to Port Williams on a somewhat-precarious main road; once we’d crossed over the Cornwallis River, we left the main road and cycled on low-traffic country roads, many of them freshly paved.

The route was 18 km each way, and it took us an hour of cycling out and an hour back, with stops at Country Barn Antiques and Foxhill Cheese en route. It threatened rain almost all day, and while it was never a downpour, we were happy to have our rain gear with us.

This ad, in this month’s Rural Delivery, is perfect: it explains the service, it explains why it’s important.

From Mr. Penumbra is up all night by Robin Sloan:

The digital realm was my springboard, and of course it remains useful; look at us here, meeting on this screen! Although … even email feels threatened these days, doesn’t it? The clear message of the past decade, and the past few years especially, is that we need to regroup in the real world, urgently, before our minds just … float away.

It all started in June. 

We were staying at the central Halifax home of my absent old friends Yvonne and Bob. They’d left the key for us, and we were able to let ourselves in, with a little bit of lock-jiggling. The next morning we headed out into the neighbourhood to find breakfast, and, being extra protective of my friends’ house, I locked not only the deadbolt, but also the doorknob, which had seemed to unlock with the same key.

We enjoyed a tasty French breakfast and walked back to collect our things for our planned day of adventures.

Only to find that…

The key only opened the deadbolt.

Panic.

I texted Bob and Yvonne, three time zones west.

“Oh, we’ve never locked that lock, and we’ve never even had the key for it,” Yvonne messaged back.

While I tried all the other doors, looked to see if any windows were open (no, no), Lisa wandered over to chat to their neighbour, who was painting his front steps.

The neighbour—what are the odds!?—”did some lock picking a while back,” and he was willing to help.

While he went inside to collect his lockpicking tools, I discovered that one of the bedroom windows was unlocked: if I could bust through the screen, I could likely push it up from the outside.

I texted Bob: “Is it okay if I bust through the screen?”

“Of course,” replied Bob (who is nothing if not extremely amiable).

I busted through the screen. 

We were in! I walked around to the front door, unlocked the “we never use this lock and don’t even have a key” lock, and we were sure to never ever lock it again.

The neighbour, sadly, was unable to use his lockpicking skills. 

Bob texted to say that we shouldn’t worry about repairing the screen (yes, he’s that amiable).

A month later. Back to Nova Scotia.

We’re now staying in a home exchange on a peninsula across from Annapolis Royal.

Yesterday we headed over the mountain to the Bay of Fundy side to go for a hike at Delaps Cove Trail. Getting into the car, Lisa made a point of saying aloud “I’m putting the house key here,” pointing to a part of the centre console of the car. 

Duly noted. 

We drove over the mountain to the trailhead. 

We walked.

There was a beautiful waterfall. Lots of interpretive signs. We enjoyed it thoroughly, patting ourselves on the back for being active travellers, at the top of our game.

We headed back over the mountain, stopping at the Crow’s Nest in Parker Cove for a snack of excellent fried clams. It was a perfect day! We made plans to drive home and enjoy a supper of shrimp tacos.

Arriving home, we hopped out of the car, collected our things, grabbed the…

The key?

It wasn’t there.

Are you sure?

Where do you remember it being?

Are you sure?

“Oh my God,” said Lisa, “what if I threw it out when I threw out the ginger chew wrappers after the hike!?”

Back over the mountain. 

Visions of pulling all manner of garbage out of the can, wearing rubber gloves, and then sorting through the muck of unimaginable horrors danced in our heads. What if we need tools? A blow torch? We scoped out houses along the route for possible tool borrowing.

After navigating the twisty road back to the trailhead, we saw the sturdy-looking garbage in the distance. It looked impenetrable? Fortunately it was unlocked, and easy to open up from the back.

We opened it up, and were happy to find that… it was almost empty. There were no horrors to sort through. 

We pulled out the clear plastic bag, sorted through it.

And…

Do lost key stories ever end this well!?

We tucked everything back into place, sped back down the mountain once more, and were enjoying a meal of shrimp tacos an hour later.

While both lockout adventures were frustrating and mildly-panic-inducing, we managed to greet them, at least somewhat, with good humour and cooperation. There were no fuckity-fuck-fucks shared. We didn’t really panic that much. And, as I said to Lisa on the drive back down the mountain, “Does the day end better with this adventure story, or with ‘We hiked, and then went home and had tacos’?”

Love is an adventure. Low-stakes adversity is a kind of adventure playground for relationship dynamics. 

Look at the smile on Lisa’s face, key in hand: what a lovely day!

It’s an awfully long time since Upstreet closed, and stopped making their Libra non-alcoholic beer. I spotted this cache in a cooler in Annapolis Royal today.