Friend-of-the-blog Ian Williams wrote a few days ago, of Zap Your PRAM and his reason for attending:

It may not always work, but just dipping your head into the cold, bracing water of other peoples’ obsessions can occasionally give you something you didn’t even know you needed.

If we unpacked our own rationale for organizing Zap, I think we’d come up with something quite similar. The danger of this, of course, is that when you discover things you didn’t even know you needed, these things can be inconvenient: “I need to enter the seminary,” for example, or “everything I’ve been thinking for the last 15 years is bullshit” (examples for demonstration purposes only).

And so burbling through my mind, along with the pride and accomplishment of having helped to create something so awesome, and the thrill of hybridizing so many brilliantisms into my genome, is the terror that comes from a mind opened wider than usual.

The effect has not been unlike a sort of weird fire-grilled acid trip: the colours are brighter, the music sounds like tangerines, it may well take three weeks to recover, and I’ll still be having flashbacks in February.

Time to sleep.

While I loathe board games, casino games and card games (save Canasta), playing road-trip games (“Kansas, Sarasota, Alabama”) and parlour games (charades, etc.) is something I could give up everything for and do professionally.

And so it was my dream, in importing a motley collection of intelligent people to a remote television-less inn, that parlour fun would ensue. Thus charades were formally placed on the agenda.

When Steven made the call for the charadians to assemble, the result was me and Steven, lonely by ourselves, in the corner.

Fortunately the resourceful and imaginative Tessa came to the rescue with a suggestion to play “Celebrity” instead (if you ever need to organize an international peace conference or mission to Mars, I believe Tessa is the person for the job).

A distant cousin of charades (and, indeed, inclusive of charades in one act), Celebrity is a team-based game involving the guessing of commonly-known celebrities (the threshold being “known by at least half of the group”).

The upgrade to Celebrity from Charades was enough to bring in a good dozen Zapians, and two hours of wacky antics ensued.

It will (for perhaps me only) be the highlight of the conference, and I owe a great debt to all those who played along.

I don’t completely know what day it is. Well-trained service staff keep bringing me food. And then dessert. There is good cappuccino. And wine. And interesting people. And you can’t beat the “siege mentality” vibe we’ve set up as an inspiration for unusual interaction. Zap Your PRAM is in full swing. If you missed it this year, we’ll be back in 2013.

There are 12,006 7-Eleven stores in Japan (there are only 7,600 in North America). Exploring the Japanese 7-Eleven website with Google Translate reveals that the stores there are a source for everything from Beaujolais Nouveau to printing from your home PC to home meal delivery. Amazing.

Here’s a sketch I made back in February, based on architect plans for the original proposal for a Fitzroy Street office building:

Here’s a photo of the approved design posted by the developers on the site last week that shows the building even more enormous than I expected:

How anyone can consider this to be a well-designed building that respects the scale of its neighbours I don’t understand. The designers did introduce some architectural flourishes — the set-back of upper floors, for example — but nothing they did serves to reduce the monolithic neighbourhood-destroying effect of the skyscraper.

Some of the people I live with have a queasy feeling about any sort of trespassing, something related to having spent childhood on a farm and thus learning from birth to respect other people’s fence-lines.

I have no such feelings myself, and welcome every chance to trespass that comes up, having a well-practised “oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know I wasn’t allowed in here” defence in my hip pocket.

While I generally defer to the hesitant when in group situations, the presence of the Explorer of the Seas on the wharf in Charlottetown over the weekend was too good a prospect to pass up, and so Olle, Catherine, Oliver and I headed into uncharted waters of the newly-rebranded Historic Charlottetown Seaport to see what we could see.

To my surprise, our access to the Seaport was not restricted at all: we walked right in to the “fenced” area of the wharf, and there were no signs or guards or other restrictions to suggest we weren’t welcome. We walked into the old marine shed and down into the collection of souvenir sellers, tour hawkers and information vendors at the end of the building. It was only here that we were cut off by two private security guards who were checking IDs of passengers and crew before letting them out the back door and onto the ship.

This is all to suggest that if you’re around town on a day when a super-ship is in port and want to grab a closer look, you can walk down to the wharf and get a very close look without fear of arrest or being called out for non-touristic trespass.

I had Nokia’s Location Tagger running while I was in Iceland so my photos got “geo-stamped” with their latitude and longitude. Conveniently, the team at Share on Ovi rolled out an update last week that lets you see these photos on a map of Iceland.

Olle Jonsson and Luisa Carbonelli have been artists in residence here at 84 Fitzroy Street for the past two weeks. Olle and Luisa are not artists. Which is part of the reason why their time here has been so interesting. Tonight, Tuesday, October 14 at 7:00 p.m. they’ll be talking about their visit and their residency at the Confederation Centre of the Arts. Here’s how they describe their “art talk:”

Our residency project is about the curiosity awakened in us as visitors to the Island. We are strangers, and the Island is strange to us. We want to know what shapes daily life here, and what shaped it 150 years ago.

We document this exploration by taking photos and blogging about it on http://hellopei.wordpress.com.

Our talk is more about the process, how we sate our curiosity, and less about what facts we gather. We can not tell the story of the Island, we can only tell our own story.

Back in the spring I bought an issue of Iceland Review magazine on the newsstand in Halifax. At the back of the issue was a rosy advertising supplement about the Icelandic financial industry, including a spread about the health and promise of the country’s banks (click on the image to see exciting notes in Flickr):

The headlines say, in order, “Kaupthing is Solid,” “Landsbanki Sees Opportunities,” and “Glitnir Bank Well Equipped to Increase Efficiency.” What a difference a few months makes.