The CBC is reporting that “Aliant expands into central Canada” — a bit of corporate doublespeak that really means that Bell Canada is rearranging its financial deck chairs.

On days like this, it helps to remember that only a few years ago we had a locally-based telephone company that actually marketed itself on its local-ness. Take a look at this old Island Tel commercial to jog your memory.

Four years ago this February, Catherine, Oliver and I went out to dinner in Bangkok with my friend Harold Stephens and his wife Michelle. This morning Harold sent me a photo he took midway through the meal:

Man was it ever hot. And boy was Oliver ever tiny. It was a great meal.

As I was out and about with the car today, I decided to swing by the new “natural foods store” on Burns Ave. in Charlottetown called A Fresh Start. Since the demise of the Uncommon Grocer and the Cool Dog Deli and the “we sell powders and pills to make you healthy” conversion of The Root Cellar, I’m always on the lookout for small independent grocery stores selling healthy food.

Unfortunately, at least from first appearances, A Fresh Start falls firmly into the “powders and pills” category, with pre-packaged “health food” of the sort you would find at Nature’s Harvest filling out the inventory.

It’s sad that the “natural foods” industry has become a sort of parallel “manufactured foods” industry to that offered by the large grocery stores. Sure it’s nice to be able to by crackers made from kamut, but if those crackers are made in California, shipped here by truck, and packaged just like Ritz, is this really a step forward?

The closest you can come to truly natural foods in Charlottetown is the weekly farmer’s market: what could be more natural than real farmers selling things themselves that they grew on their own farms?

Our friends at The Old Farmer’s Almanac have started podcasting their daily radio report.

We received bittersweet news from the Noodle House this weekend: in April owners Tommy and Lina Ko are moving to Toronto. The news is only bittersweet because they’re remaining partners in the business, and they’ll be back every summer.

The new day-to-day partners will be arriving from Toronto in April, and they’ll be a three or four week crossover period while they learn the ropes. Seems as though they might have some exciting new developments planned, including the possibility of dim sum on the weekends.

There’s no doubt that Tommy and Lina deserve a break — they’ve been at the restaurant six days a week since we moved here 13 years ago (to say nothing of the regrettable events of last year) — but we’ll miss them dearly nonethless.

If you’ve grown used to Lina remembering your order by heart, you’ve got another month or so to drop in and say thanks.

Back in the summer of 2003, my friend Oliver Baker made a comment here where he wrote, in part (emphasis mine):

I’d be interested to hear your philosophy of tipping, Peter. Tipping is just paying again for what you already paid for, and letting the corporation snooker you into paying the workers’ salaries, and yet I imagine you are a regular or even generous tipper.

The thing is, until that point I had been an irregular and not particularly generous tipper. That Oliver would imagine I was forced me to immediately change my behaviour, and since that time I’ve probably paid out 50-100% more in restaurant tips.

Earlier in the winter I ran into my friend Ann Thurlow at Timothy’s — it was one of those crazy post-Eurotravel mornings when I was getting up at 7:00 a.m. Ann sat down, we had a pleasant chat, and then when we stood up to leave Ann took her dishes to the back counter rather than leaving them on the table; I asked her why, and she said “oh, I always clean up my dishes at Timothy’s.” So, since that day I have always cleaned up my dishes at Timothy’s too.

On Friday afternoon my friend Cynthia Dunsford and I made a pilgrimage out to the Ellen’s Creek Plaza location of the Formosa Tea House for lunch. On the way out there in Cynthia’s car we had to stop at my house so I could run inside for a second. When I got back to the car I noticed that Cynthia had turned it off; when commented on this, she simply said “I don’t idle.”

So last night, waiting in the driveway to drive our babysitter home, I didn’t idle. It was a little chilly, but I made do.

We think it’s so hard to change the world, but, at least in my case, often a few well-placed words will do.

I’ve spent a very pleasant half hour browsing the rich Cinema Treasures website. They claim listings for over 13,000 theatres around the world. Some of my favourites:

• Capitol Theatre in Port Hope, Ontario. I visited Rod Stewart of Furby House Books in Port Hope in the last 1980s when there was a gleam in his eye about restoring the theatre; the effort has since been taken over by a foundation, and the theatre is in business.
• Clappison Drive-In in Waterdown, Ontario - the drive-in theatre of my youth.
• Highlands Cinemas in Kinmount, Ontario - the most amazing cinema you will ever visit.
• Elgin Theatre in Ottawa, Ontario - I saw War Games there the summer I worked as a summer camp counsellor.

Okay, so I’ve almost found a way of using Internet Explorer 6 for Windows from my Mac. Almost:

I installed WINE on my RedHat Linux box, then installed IEs 4 Linux (following a pointer from Steven — thanks). Then I simply fired up X11 on my iMac, ssh’ed to the Linux box, and typed ie6. What I ended up with is what you see above.

On the plus side, it’s extremely snappy, seems not to crash, and has loaded and rendered every site I’ve tried so far.

On the perplexing side, as you can see above, the fonts are not appearing properly in the browser’s UI (although they don’t appear to be any font-related problems with sites themselves in the browser window).

This problem doesn’t occur if I run ie6 directly from the X console on the Linux box, so I assume that my problem is related to fonts missing on my Mac, or something to do with the mysteries of XFS.

I’d appreciate any pointers or advice.

Discount airline easyJet announced new service from London Luton to Rijeka, Croatia today (thanks to pointer from Online Travel Review). Service starts June 30 and runs four times a week. Where’s Rijeka? Here’s a map of Croatia: