I’m on hold to Motorola Canada with a question about one of their cell phones. Apparently, says the voice robot, my call may be recorded “for quality and coaching purposes.”

Does this mean that I might make some sort of highlight (or blooper) reel? Will a group of apprentice call centre staff gather together in a room, listen to my call with a coach dressed in shorts and rugby shirt at the head of the class, and then do a post-call evaluation. “See where Bobby says ‘Could I have your name?’ there? He should really say ‘Might I have your name?”.

Obviously I am from the old “if you can make conversation and have some smarts, you’ll do okay” school of call centre management.

Postscript: Motorola guy answered the phone and, believe it or not, he could make conversation and did have some smarts. I was looking for information on using iSync with the Motorola V60ci that Island Tel Mobility offers; he hadn’t heard about this iSync support yet, so I gave him the URL at Apple, and we browsed their website together. Nice to encounter a company where information is allowed to flow both ways. Just FYI, he told me that the V60i (that Apple says they support) and Island Tel’s V60ci are functionally equivalent — the ‘c’ just means “customer can install coloured covers on the phone.”

News.com reports that Palm will acquire Handspring. If you’ve read Piloting Palm, the book that’s “The Inside Story of Palm, Handspring, and the Birth of the Billion-Dollar Handheld Industry,” this is a fascinating, though not unexpected development.

If you are near your radio on Wednesday morning, you can tune into Island Morning on CBC Radio One where Hon. Marion Reid and I will be joining Karen Mair on the road live from Park Corner to talk about the work of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust.

Although I’m not sure what time our conversations will go to air, I do know that this operation requires getting up at 4:00 a.m., which is closer to my normal bedtime than my normal rising time.

This afternoon taped interviews with John Jeffery for a piece that should air soon on Compass.

This is all partly by way of publicizing our recent sucesses preserving land at Cousins Shore, and partly by way of trying to communicate our mission to preserve more land between Cavendish and Sea View in agricultural hands.

My parents are visiting us this week. As they are both music fans with broad tastes, we bought tickets for the Fred Eaglesmith concert tonight at Myron’s, dialed up the wonder-babysitter, and prepared to be entertained.

I was somehow operating under some sort of delusion that a group as talented and “alternative” as Fred’s would attract a crowd of angry, determined and vibrant youth. Or at least a crowd of moribund, melancholy and artistic youth. Of course I was operating in a musical fanspace that had its parameters put in place in and around 1985. To me that seems like “the week before last.” To the rest of the world it’s “almost 20 years ago.”

Long story short, the Fred Eaglesmith demographic consists of the following cluster groups:

• Nattily dressed Assistant Deputy Minister-looking types in button-down shirts and comfortable shoes.
• People from Breadalbane, North Granville and environs.
• Leo Cheverie and Devotees
• Ritchie Simpson and Devotees

In other words, for most of the night I was the youngest person in the crowd. Which, somehow, made me feel very old.

I need the young urban hipsters in the readership to explain to me why a Fred Eaglesmith concert isn’t young, urban nor apparently hip any more.

PS: The concert was excellent, and enjoyed by my mother, my father, Catherine and I, all for different but complementary reasons. The highlight for me was when Catherine found Fred after the concert and reminded him that she used to date his best friend from grade school, and that they’d seen each other again 10 or 15 years ago in Peterborough. Fred’s response was “oh yah, that was back in the day…” Which means that I’m dating a gal who knew Fred Eaglesmith “back in the day.” Surely this must mean that I’m just a little hip, doesn’t it? Or if not hip, well, whatever it is that the natty dressers and Leo Cheverie add up to these days.

Catherine and I both voted for Jonathan Ive for Designer of the Year at the Design Museum in London a couple of weeks ago. And today it was announced that he won. Congratulations.

While I’m recalling musical memories, here are two more.

First, I remember being in Newport News, VA with my family sometime in the 1970s on our way to or from a late-winter trip to North Carolina. We were driving, I think, the 1969 green Plymouth Satellite. Gas cost 50 cents a gallon (I remember the signs). The song Afternoon Delight by the Starland Vocal Band came on the AM radio. I remember asking my parents what “afternoon delight” was. I remember that they didn’t give me a straight answer.

Next, I remember being at Camp Kitchikewana in Georgian Bay. Would have been the mid-1970s, as I was 8 or 9. Our camp councillor, Dave Hamilton, was a great guy, full of life and humour. He used to make us play musical trivia for extra desserts (the answer to one of the questions was Jethro Tull, the question involving the Beverly Hillbillies. The only strong AM station on the dial was 680 CFTR (before it became the all-news 680news). The song of the summer was Summer in the City by the Lovin Spoonful. What a great song.

My next strong musical memory is from the mid-1980s. I was living at 107 Hazlitt Street in Peterborough with my friend Stephen. We had a record player, and two records: a Meho Puzic 45rpm and an album by Sade (the one with Smooth Operator). You could stack records on our player, and have them player one after another. So we stacked up Meho and Sade, and listened to them over and over and over. We ate lots of chick pea curry that summer.

When I was in high school, Mr. Brescasin, our Phys Ed teacher, used to call me “Ruk.” And so for the two years I took Phys Ed, I had a catchy nickname, at least out on the football field. It was a small oasis of pure glory in a lifetime of “woa! how do you spell that” and “that’s not an Island name, is it?” I think at least some of my brothers benefitted from the same nickname as they moved up through the years and followed me to high school.

I have always had a facsination with people who have the audacity to take their nickname — or, even more brazen, a name of their own creation — and use it as their public handle.

Prince, Madonna, Cher, and Sting are perhaps the most famous examples of this behaviour. One has to wonder how exactly they get away with it. I can imagine the reaction from friends and family if I woke up Wednesday morning and announced that heretofore I am to be referred to as “Tarmac” or “Wheely.”

Our most famous Canadian “known only by nickname” celebrity is Roy Forbes, aka Bim. According to Roy’s website:

For the longest time Roy was called Bim, a childhood nickname that became a password for extraordinary songs, at a time when some amazing songwriters were at the top of their game. This, coupled with his unique and intense guitar playing and a high and soulful voice - part Roy Orbison, part Billie Holiday and all heart, made for a winning combination.

For a time in the mid-1980s I was a big “Roy Forbes aka Bim” (this was how he was known during “the transition away from Bim” phase) fan. I saw him play with Connie Kaldor at the Bathurst Street Theatre in Toronto one night and they blew the roof off the place.

Roy is still around and playing. To get a taste, visit his website and click on the link to Old Man Worry right on the front page.

This is tarmac, signing out.

Disclaimer: for a time, when my brother Steve was in university, I took to assigning his roommates arbitrary nicknames, the most famous of which were Morty and Hooper. Unfortunately, I could never keep track of who was Morty and who was Hooper, something that plagues me to this day, as Steve insists on using their nicknames when talking to me. So I am, in a way, Part of The Problem.

Perhaps (should you live here in eastern Canada) you have seen the Atlantic Lotteries television commercials advertising the “649 Atlantic” draws? The ads use the fact that $1,000,000 buys a lot more in Atlantic Canada than it does elsewhere in Canada. They’re pretty well done (here’s one you can watch online — it’s a 416KB Windows Media Player format file; there’s an associated print campaign too).

The truth of these ads wasn’t completely born out for me until brother Johnny sent me this MLS listing from Vancouver.

My favourite part is “Access to the property has not been given.” Followed closely by “Needs work.”

Several years ago I was working for The Anne of Green Gables Store here in Charlottetown doing product development. One of the products we wanted to develop was the driftwood folk art of former Premier Alex Campbell. So I was dispatched to his summer home in Stanley Bridge to see what I could see. I spent a very pleasant afternoon with Alex and his wife, drinking lemonade, talking about driftwood, and touring his workshop.

Meanwhile, across the Island, my consort Catherine was becoming ever more deeply involved in the Island spinning and weaving scene. One of the women she met through this work was Harriet Meacher. Catherine mentioned that Harriet and her husband Michael had a summer house in Stanley Bridge.

It was only several years later that, no doubt with the assistance of “connector node” Catherine Hennessey, I came to learn that Harriet is Alex’s sister.

Small world, take one.

Fast forward to this Saturday: we were having some people over to the house to look at our slides of Spain. Catherine invited Harriet, and she planned to drop by, but something came up and she couldn’t. One of the people who did come was Roy Johnstone. Roy got talking to my father, and learned that the Queens County Fiddlers were having a concert Saturday night at the Carrefour. So while I cleaned up the dishes and looked after Oliver, Mom and Dad and Catherine went to the concert. Who should they meet there, but the selfsame Harriet.

Small world, take two.

On Sunday, Harriet, suffering from gallbladder problems goes to the Internet to look for more information on her condition. Where does her searching the vastness of the web land her? Right here.

Small world, take three.