From Palvelukeskus Helsinki:

Helsinki offers a free-of-charge hot lunch for children under the age of 16 at its playgrounds, which are open during the school summer holidays.

Here on PEI we have the Children’s Summer Food Program, which serves a similar role, the key distinction being that in Helsinki “all you will need to bring is a plate, a spoon and a mug for yourself,” whereas here on PEI you need to demonstrate financial need, and apply, including provincial health number and household income.

One is “let’s everyone eat together in community, while ensuring everyone gets fed,” the other is “let’s ensure everyone gets fed, but with a fence around it to ensure it’s only people who need it.”

I prefer the former.

(via Linda Liukas)

May I never be accused of wringing every last drop out of my tympan.

Two notable things happened this weekend:

1. I received beautiful an email from a reader of the blog telling me that they’d spent a week reading through the archives here, and providing a lovely summary of my zeitgest. It warmed my heart. Some basic research revealed that the email came from an AI bot.
2. Lisa noticed a photo with one of her prints in the background appearing in a promotion on Facebook. Zooming into the photo revealed that it was AI-generated where both the credit on the piece where hallucinated, and and Lisa’s art piece itself altered.

Together these seem worth making note of as the first significant examples of AI intruding into our life in a malicious way.

Today was the last day for the Oh Hey coffee spot at Founders Hall, so I stopped down to have my friend Lori Joy make me a flat white. It was very good.

Oh Hey’s coffee will be missed downtown; you can still grab a coffee at their Brackley Beach location. And the Founders Hall retail location remains; there’s lots of Lori Joy’s art at both locations.

From Comparative Literature As Core Need In Desk Research and AI As Tool by Ton Zijlstra:

Put together it spells to me that when I am doing some deskresearch shining a better light on literary ‘dark matter’ becomes much more important. Are there any francophone resources, Nordic authors, Eastern European authors, hispanic movements around an issue I am exploring? Yes, the scientific world largely uses English as lingua franca, but language areas also have their own spheres outside of it.

Last night I volunteered at the ticket desk at City Cinema for a sold-out screening of the Malayalam-language Bethlehem Kudumba Unit.

Seventy people gathered a few blocks from my house to watch a film I’d never heard of, in a language I’d never heard of.

I’m left feeling insufficiently curious about my neighbours and their cultural universe. And I’m reminded that my mind spends most of its time wandering only in the English-language landscape. To my detriment.

Postscript: according to Statistics Canada, in 2021 Malayalam was the fourth most common “non-official language spoken in the home” of immigrants to Charlottetown, after Mandarin, Arabic, and Vietnamese. 

The Confederation Centre of the Arts is nearing the end of a dramatic renovation. As a neighbour, watching the Centre extend itself out and up over the last two years has been fascinating, and I’ve been endlessly curious about what the new parts will feel like.

Having a couple of curious friends in town for the month—one a retired architect, the other a former Charlottetown Festival milliner—seemed like sufficient conceit to ask for a tour of the renovations, and Steve Bellamy graciously agreed to provide one when I did so.

And so we gathered, Lisa, L., friends and I, on Friday afternoon for a deep dive into the belly of the out-and-up.

It’s an impressive expansion. Parts of it are breathtaking.

The use of mass timber throughout is a stark (and welcome) contrast to the sandstone of the original building: it’s simply beautiful, especially as exposed inside the new rehearsal hall that extends out from the old public library pavillion.

As a neighbour, the reorientation of the Centre, after more than 50 years, to finally have a proper “front door” (onto Victoria Row) will change the nature of the neighbourhood for the better. Here’s an architectural rendering of what it will look like (source):

Here are some photos I took during our tour; none really do justice to the scale of the new spaces, which need to be experienced first-hand to truly be appreciated.

For the curious, here’s the Centre’s page detailing the renovations, and here’s the project blog. For the deeply curious, here is the almost-500-page plan for the renovations.

John Flood gifted me a case of 14 pt. Weiss Italic last week, type he’d originally been given by Thaddeus Holownia.

It’s a typeface unlike any other I own: precious, delicate, with a need to be very frugal with inking to avoid plugging up the loops in letters like e and g.

Once I figured that out, I was very pleased with what resulted.

Aided by a grant from the City of Charlottetown Heritage Incentive Program, we’re on a multi-year program of replacing the windows here at 100 Prince Street. Two years ago it was the bottom four facing the street; this week it was the top five. Here’s the finished job:

The windows are Marvin Elevate ones, and they were installed by Ultimate Windows (excellent service all-round).

Beyond any benefit to the streetscape, and sound and heat insulation, and being able to see outside clearly in the winter, having windows that can open and close is such a wonderful novelty.

For comparison, here’s the house after the bottom windows were replaced, but before the replacement of the top ones.

Here’s a photo of the house before any windows were replaced:

And, finally, here’s a photo of the house as we purchased it in 2000, before painting and new windows:

Reflecting Light from KINLEY—our neighbour here in the C1A 4R4 for a time—was released today:

Reflecting Light is a five-song release built on strong pop instincts, lyrics that turn small moments into whole stories, and production that moves easily between dreamy, synth-bright and infectious.

Across the record, KINLEY writes in scenes. A relationship can feel like a natural disaster or a happily ever after. A stranger can become a love interest and a big break before the conversation is even over. Certainty can turn into doubt and back again. The songs live in those in-between moments where attraction, intuition, history and possibility all collide.

At its heart, Reflecting Light is about love, instinct, contradiction and finding your footing, but never in a way that feels too polished or precious.

I’ve had it on repeat today. I love it.

From The Jump? by Rob Paterson:

In the summer of 1993, I was on track to end up at the top of the Canadian banking system. This had been my dream since I left school. But instead of being happy, I was utterly depressed. Something was wrong and I did not know what it was. I felt like a donkey on a treadmill going around in circles. Ultimately I realized that I was a prisoner. I was trapped by my income and my debt. For a year, I was just miserable. For how could I have ever escape this trap? Then one summer day, I woke up and realized that I could escape. All I had to do was to walk away from this life. 

This was my jump. The moment when I knew for certain that I had to leave the traditional work life forever.

On the one-year anniversary of the death of my friend Rob comes an unexpected gift: an entire website that Rob created, which I’ve never seen, where he dives deep into the dramatic transformation he took his life through.

Thanks to his daughter Hope for passing this along today.