This was a headline for this story on today’s CBC website. Kind of makes you think of a story written by someone with poor grammar writing about an epic battle of a tree beset by migrating water fowl.

Today is my sister-in-law Jodi’s birthday.

I have an odd day-to-day relationship with Jodi. Every day I’m in touch with her husband (my brother) Jonnny at least two or three times, as Johnny is part of the giant Reinvented data crunching machine.

If my life with Johnny was a movie, Jodi would be that character that is oft referenced, but never actually seen. “Jodi is sick today,” Johnny will say. Or “Jodi has to go to the grocery store.” Or “Jodi just left.”

In a good movie, you might start to wonder whether the “Jodi character” is in fact imaginary, and creation of Johnny’s mind to help him deal with the endless monotony of sitting in front of a screen all day for a living after 15 years of hyper-social management of the emotions of teen hamburger and latte flippers.

I’m happy to report, however, that Jodi is not imaginary. While it’s been slow getting to know her well — she lives, after all, further from us than the Queen of England — I do get to bask in her reflected glow from Johnny every day.

So, Happy Birthday Jodi character; and here’s to a long run.

I have a disability that is very focused: its entire set of symptoms is related to an inability to distinguish between October and August during the month of October. Recently, however, I have begun to see a new symptom, one related to numeracy. I was absolutely certain that I was scheduled to leave Boston for Charlottetown today (Saturday the 26th of October); it was only when I went to the Air Canada website today and found that there is no flight 8860 on Saturdays that the truth was revealed (that I am due to return tomorrow, Sunday the 27th of October).

Fortunately my hotel was able to accommodate me, and I am none the worse for wear.

I spent the bulk of my rainy bonus day in Boston in the Kendall Square Cinemas in Cambridge.

My first show was Bowling for Columbine, Michael Moore’s new film about America, violence and guns. The movie is cast in the well-established Michael Moore mold — a montage of interviews, cartoons, corporate headquarters storming and Moore’s monologues. I can’t say I learned a lot of new information, but there’s no doubting that Moore is an entertaining and razor sharp satirist, and taken simply as a piece of left-leaning political theatre, the movie is an interesting way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Second show was Comedian, the new Jerry Seinfeld movie. It’s a film about Seinfeld’s experiences developing a new comedy act, and consists mostly of a montage of stand-up from he and his peers, along with club chit-chat with people like Colin Quinn, Gary Shandling and Chris Rock. The thesis of the movie is that doing stand-up comedy is Really Hard, and that coming up with a new act is Really Really Hard. Unfortunately that’s about it: the movie is not particularly well put together, Seinfeld is not a particularly sympathetic character, and an attempt to show comedy from the “young guy” point of view fizzles because Orny Adams, the choosen yet-to-break-big comedian, is annoying and in love with himself. Comedian is neither a particularly insightful film, nor will it be satisfying to any but the most devoted fans of Seinfeld’s Seinfeld television show.

For some reason, ISBN 1557045593 is recorded as being “Red Dragon: Book and Toy (not plush)” on the Chapters website and “Red Dragon: The Shooting Script” on the Amazon.com website.

The film Unfaithful is described as being about a couple whose “marriage goes dangerously awry when the wife indulges in an adulterous fling.”

I resisted seeing the movie for a long time because of an unfortunate confusion: I thought that the female lead, played by Diane Lane was actually played by Dianne Wiest. Somehow the idea of Ms. Wiest locked in a torid affair with a swarthy frenchman seemed, well, untenable.

Oops.

On my pay-per-view movie description screen last night in the Sheraton Nashua, I was warned that the movie contained “uninhibited sexuality.”

Now first off, what is the reason for distinguishing between “uninhibited sexuality” and the alternative (presumably “inhibited sexuality”) when posting such warnings? I can understand a warning, or at least a note, about sexual content in a movie, but if you were going to warn me about something, wouldn’t it make sense to warn me about the later, not the former? I mean, isn’t that the unhealthy alternative?

Ironically, the sexuality in Unfaithful is completely inhibited — that is what the movie is about. There is nary a sexual act, nor hint of same, that is not tinged with significant, heavy meaning. There is a thick fog of regret and confusion and guilt and passion and jealousy and anger suffused over the movie.

Having witnessed enough infidelity up close to know the territory, I can say with some authority that the movie is a stunningly accurate portrayal of how it all works: it’s messy and horrible and delightful and hurtful and liberating. And yet at the same time, completely normal and rationale seeming while you’re inside it.

Unfaithful is not a morality tale: it’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong, and least not as far as infidelity is concerned. It is not a classic “affair movie,” both in that the genders are reversed from the tradition, and because there’s no horrible “living a soulless shell of a life and forced into the arms of another” buildup.

The movie quite effectively demonstrates how random chance and momentary crazy mixed up feelings can push people towards doing things that would otherwise seem unreasonable. The Diane Ladd character doesn’t live a horrible existence. She is not unfulfilled, particularly, nor depressed (at least not more than the rest of us). She leans into having an affair rather than bursting into it, and although once she’s on the inside she is overcome by lusty irrationality, even that isn’t something foreign nor difficult to grasp.

The irony is that by bringing a turn of events that is normally couched in all sorts of turmoil and pathos down to earth and portraying it as normal and unfortunate, but with hideous consequences, the movie is probably more effective as a infidelity prophylactic that other, more overwrought movies on this theme.

Unfaithful makes being unfaithful look easy and familiar. That’s enough to put the fear of God into anyone.

This is the thing: the new film Punch Drunk Love, starring Adam Sandler and Emily Watson, is staggeringly, heart-wrenchingly good in ways that I cannot begin to describe. I was on the verge of breaking down (tears, happiness, angst, joy) for most of the film. It hit very close. You will see the film and either feel much like I did or you will feel disappointed because it seems crazy and chaotic in ways that mean nothing to you.

The last time I spoke to a group of librarians, at the APLA conference several years ago in Charlottetown, I spent 45 minutes tearing a strip out of them for creating poorly designed, poorly conceived, poorly connected websites. I fear that what I intended as a rallying cry came off sounding smarmy and more like “you guys are really jerks” and there was a palpable chill in the room when I was done.

Not being able to face the cold wrath of disgruntled librarians again, I opted to end on a cheerier note in my talk to the systems librarians at Access 2002 yesterday:

“You are the caretakers of a set of fragile and brilliant ideas about information and how it should be stored and organized and made accessible to all.

And you live in a world that is increasingly telling you that you are nuts.

Reading between the lines of Access this week, I picked up a subtle chord of exasperation — a sense that constant battling with evil vendors and stupid governments and misguided funding agencies and the power hungry jerks in the computer room is starting to wear you down.

Please don’t let it.

Please know that your work is valued by those on the outside.

Please know that at least some of us are ready to go to the baricades with you on issues of freedom of information, access, and equity.

Please know that in the group that yesterday was dismissed as tatooed, nose-ringed Pringles can collectors are people who share many of your ideals, and if you can find ways of letting them inside the castle, the will glady come, create, spread, innovate, program, and perhaps even entertain.

I will leave you today with some words from the The Committee on Cooperative Principles from 1965:

“Cooperation at its best aims at something beyond promotion of interests of individual members (…) Its object is rather to promote the progress and welfare of the humanity.”

That is your business too. I laud you for it. Keep up the good fight.”

Needless to say, I was somewhat better received.

Preparing a talk is an all-consuming process for me. The carefully crafted “just in time” preparation methods I inherited from my father, while saving me from the travails of advance preparation, do result in a sort of surreal extended low-level panic for the days and hours leading up to the event. It’s somewhat agonizing, but ultimately helpful and probably worth it.

In some state of confusion last month, I arranged to fly from Windsor to Boston at 6:15 a.m. This meant getting up this morning at 4:30 a.m. to catch a cab to the airport.

I read an article recently about hotel air conditioning and heating. Apparently it’s much more expensive to hotels to have quiet, central heating and cooling, which is why most hotel rooms have a combination heater and air conditioner under the window. The quieter units cost a lot more, and so the older and cheaper the hotel, the more likely you are to have a very loud and annoying machine in your room. The Radisson Windsor obviously opted for the very cheapest model, and as a result my sleep for the past three nights has been punctuated every 45 minutes by a loud clunk, followed by some noisy heating, followed by silence.

Which is all to say that as I type this at Gate Two in the Windsor Airport, I am not particularly well rested.

However much unrest I might feel, I will never match the adventures of the cabbie who drove me to the airport this morning. Last week he received word that his cousin, who he hadn’t seen for 26 years, was going to be in Dallas, Texas for several hours. So my cabbie, his wife, children and parents rented a car in Windsor, drove to Dallas (stopping only for 5 hours in a hotel halfway there), spent 3 hours with his cousin, and then drove back.

The closest I’ve ever come to matching this feat was driving from Vancouver to Peterborough, and although I pushed hard, I did stop every night, and did it in four days. At the end of my journey my hands were glued to the steering wheel, and I had nightmares about driving for several weeks thereafter.

My cabbie said that in this fast-paced hectic world, people have to stop and slow down once in a while. That his example of this was driving 2,500 km at 150 km/hour to see his cousin for 3 hours is somewhat odd, but still, somehow, rings true.

I am sitting in a very weird position, here at 7:37 a.m. on a Monday morning.

First, I have been up since 5:30 a.m., which is one of the few times that I’ve been up at 5:30 a.m. in the last decade. Well, actually, ever. I was up that early to get here to the Cleary Centre to set up the wireless Internet for the Access 2002 conference. Unfortunately nobody else was up that early, including the engineering staff who were supposed to be here at 6 a.m. So I wandered around the bowels of the hall looking for a missing cable modem. People started to show up around 6:30 a.m., though, and we’re in action here.

Second, I am sitting at the back of the main hall, and directly ahead of me is the Detroit skyline, which seems close enough to be able to see the workers in the GM Tower at their desks. The sun is just coming up over Detroit, and I’ll soon find out whether it looks better in the day or the night. My taxi driver from the airport claimed I would be let down in the morning when I got to see Detroit in all its gritty glory.

Speaking of which, the taxi ride from the Windsor Airport to downtown Windsor was thrilling. Apparently there was some danger of getting “stuck behind the train,” — something that, from the way the taxi driver said it, seems tantamount to getting stuck forever. His solution to this horrible possibility was to drive as fast as his taxi would go, and to weave in and out of traffic constantly. We didn’t get stuck behind the train, and we made the trip in about 10 minutes. And I lived to tell the tale.

I spent the day travelling across the country from Charlottetown to Windsor, Ontario. Windsor isn’t “across the country” of course, but with the towering buildings of Detroit looming across the river, it’s certainly at one of the edges.

I am here for Access 2002 a conference that one of the organizers characterized as a gathering of “geek librarians” when I pressed him this evening. Access is, in short, a gathering of those secret librarians that the public nevers sees. These aren’t your regular everyday “let me explain the Dewey Decimal System to you” librarians, but rather the ones who work out of sight in the basements, stoking the giant technological coal furnaces that make libraries work.

I have some familiarity with this class of librarian, having been raised by one (and a wicked smart and creative one at that). And so while I have never been formally tutored in the ways of MARC records and the Bath Profile and Z39.50, I can fake my way through enough of it all to not look like a total fool.

Which raises the question: if I am not myself a geek librarian, why am I spending three days in Windsor, Ontario in the midst of one of their big idea orgies?

And that is, indeed, a good question.

I have mostly my friend Barbara Jean to blame. And also a man named Art.

Barbara Jean and I passed like ships in the night in the late 1980s. She left Peterborough as I was arriving. She knew a lot of the same people I eventually came to know and, in fact, we even lived in the same house, a mere two roommate generations apart. Barbara Jean eventually ended up in Newfoundland and, through a complex series of events, we became friends, and remain so to this day.

Back in 1994, Barbara Jean was working at Memorial University in St. John’s, and somehow finagled me an invitation to speak at Access 1994. One of the people in the audience was a man named Art Rhyno. Four years later, Art invited me to speak at Access 1998 in Guelph. And he asked me back this year for Access 2002.

Which doesn’t really answer the question, but at least explains the circumstances that led to the situation where the question could be asked.

If I have a role to play at Access, I think it is akin to the role that I play everyday in my career, and that is to be a mildly informed outsider. With some broad knowledge about systems and people and the Internet, and lots of experience mushing those altogether in my work, I can offer comment on where my world bumps up against the worlds of the systems librarian. And precisely because I’m an outsider — albeit one who can engage in cocktail conversation about Control Field 007 — perhaps I shed a light on things that can’t be seen from the deep recesses of the basement beside the data furnaces.

The real reason I’m here — the reason I accepted their invitation to speak — is that the my fundamental human value of choice is curiousity (this is where the intellectual lives of my parents join as well, no coincidence), and if you’re in the curiousity business, there’s no more interesting place to be than at a conference of people who design the systems that support curiousity satisfaction.

More notes from the conference as things develop. Up at 6:00 a.m. tomorrow morning to install wireless connectivity for the conference, which may, in fact, kill me.