Kudos to Charlottetown City Councillor Clifford Lee for standing up for his constituents against the tourism behemoth. In today’s Guardian, Lee calls into question the additional impositions on downtown residents, to be caused by the CBC national broadcast of the Dominion Day festivities, that weren’t disclosed to Council until recently.

I didn’t know that Mary Frann had died. She played Bob Newhart’s wife on Newhart.

It’s hard to believe that in recent memory CBC Television was broadcasting American programs like Newhart, Kate and Allie and All My Children. I even remember going to CBC season preview events and hearing how they were going to excise non-Canadian programming from the schedule and thinking there was no way they could ever do it.

But they have. Or at least almost. As near as I can tell, the remaining U.S. programs on the schedule are The Simpsons broadcast weekdays at 5:00 p.m. and Wonderful World of Disney broadcast Sundays at 6:00 p.m..

And of course there’s Mr. Bean, which is neither Canadian, nor funny but which, for some reason, is now an animated series. Why, why, why?

In any case, it’s an impressive feat for the CBC to have pulled off and the powers that be should be lauded.

The final victory of our new demographically programmed Dominion Day celebrations can now be proclaimed by the tourismocrats: fireworks in Charlottetown will go off at 11:00 p.m. this July 1 to accommodate the needs of a national television broadcast.

In other words the national audience will be treated to a television show from the birthplace of Confederation that, in the end, has more to do with glitz and pomp and the pretend PEI than the lives of actual everyday Islanders, many of whom will be asleep at home.

I imagine the next step will be to move the holiday festivities to another date: probably be more convenient for the RV crowd or something.

tur·o·phile : A lover of cheese. [Greek tūros, cheese + –PHILE.]

There is a song on a They Might Be Giants album called Istanbul (Not Constantinople), part of the lyrics of which are:

Every gal in Constantinople
Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople
So if you’ve a date in Constantinople
She’ll be waiting in Istanbul

The invoice came as something of a surprise given that I have never shipped anything from Greensboro, NC to Istanbul, nor indeed to anywhere in Turkey.

I phoned FedEx this morning and relayed this to their “correction on invoice” department. Their response, oddly enough, was “yes.” I found this response rather unhelpful.

I pressed my case further, and they agreed to reverse the “Third Party Billing.” Presumably this means I won’t have to pay the invoice.

I am very curious, however, to know what one would pay $1,042.26 to air ship from North Carolina to Istanbul. Stay tuned for more information as I’m on the case.

Does anyone have a recollection of Pink Floyd playing Ivor Wynn Stadium in Hamilton, Ontario in the mid-1970s in a concert that effectively ended the stadium’s career as a hosting place for rock concerts given then melee that ensued?

Just to prove that I’m equally willing to argue (and sincerely believe in) both sides of an issue, let us consider the other side of the Tim Banks Big Sign issue.

During my time in Peterborough, Ontario, one of my close friends was Simon Shields. When I first met Simon — he was a fellow boarder in a house full of various itinerants — he was working in a group home, and had a broad interest in social justice, especially where it concerned the intersection of day to day legal matters like landlord tenant law and welfare and people without the wherewithal to represent themselves in such matters.

Simon’s front for these interests was a storefront paralegal clinic called the Community Information Agency (or CIA) and through the CIA he offered no- or low-cost legal assistance to all and sundry.

One of Simon’s clients was a local musician and gadabout named Ken Ramsden who, among other things, fronted a band called Reverend Ken and the Lost Followers. Ken’s practice was to staple posters for his upcoming shows to the various utility polls of Peterborough, and it was this behaviour that ran him afoul of the law.

Ken was charged under a City of Peterborough bylaw that prohibited postering of this sort. Before a Justice of the Peace, Simon, presenting the case on Ken’s behalf, admitted Ken’s actions, but held that the bylaw itself was in violiation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and its guarantee of freedom of expression.

The Justice of the Peace found this not to be the case, and Ken was convicted. On appeal to the Provincial Court (where Simon’s reprsentation gave way to lawyers more skilled in such matters), Ken’s conviction was overturned, and this was upheld on further appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada in Ramsden v. Peterborough (City) [1993] 2 S.C.R. 1084.

I lauded Ken’s victory at the time, and continue to think he was right to pursue the issue.

This is, of course, in stark contrast to the opinions I presented earlier regarding the Tim Banks Big Sign.

One of the cases considered in v. Ramsden was Irwin Toy Ltd. v. Quebec (Attorney General), [1989] 1 S.C.R. 927. The Court in that case gave some substance to the notion of freedom of expression:

(1) seeking and attaining the truth is an inherently good activity; (2) participation in social and political decision making is to be fostered and encouraged; and (3) the diversity in forms of individual self-fulfillment and human flourishing ought to be cultivated in an essentially tolerant, indeed welcoming, environment not only for the sake of those who convey a meaning, but also for the sake of those to whom it is conveyed.

And in this same spirit, I would argue that it is unreasonable for the City of Charlottetown to seek to regulate the sort of expression that has spilled out of Tim Banks with his Big Sign.

The problem with regulation like this, wherein a public body, through a select committee of well-intentioned aestheticians, attempts to place boundaries on expression (whether through regulation of paint colour, house cladding or signage) the result is a weird mausoleum-like homogeneity to the regulated area.

We preserve the stately homes with their historically-correct clapboard and pre-screened milk paint colour schemes and we attempt (but somehow fail) to cut down on the gaudy fast food neon, but in doing so we also excise creativity and the general “freedom of expression quotient” in the community goes down.

Here’s an example from far away. Pictured below is a snapshot of the Khao San Road in Bangkok, arguably among the least aesthetically regulated places in the world:

While I’m not sure I’d want to have downtown Charlottetown’s Queen Street look exactly like this, at the same time there is a sense of vitality, creativity and life to this street that is almost entirely missing from Charlottetown. What’s more, this same “anything goes” approach to design and signage results in things like this:

A diamond in the rough, as it were, and something not too far in spirit from the Tim Banks Big Sign.

Now I won’t go as far as actually suggesting that Tim Banks is a cultural revolutionary (despite what I suggested in the title of this note), but in light of all this, I do have cause to reconsider the hertiage and signage policies that he rails against in a new, more Draconian light. And to think that perhaps if Tim Banks has the freedom to put up a big painting to help him sell sweaters, then maybe I too have the freedom to do things I never considered.

Just a thought.

My brother and co-worker Johnny lives in Vancouver and has a phone in the 778 area code. About 50% of the time when I try and dial his number, I get a message on the line saying “We’re sorry, but you must dial 1 or 0…”. Presumably this is because the 778 area code isn’t programmed into some switch or another as a valid area code.

Last month I emailed Island Tel about this and they instructed me to phone repair as soon as I noticed the problem again.

I just tried to call Johnny, and so I went to Island Tel’s website to find the number for repair. On this page it lists the repair number as 1-800-565-1570. When I dial this number, I get a recording telling me the number is out of service. This is not a Good Sign.

So I call the main inquiries number, 1-800-565-4737, and select the option to be connected to repair. I waited on hold on this line for 8 minutes and 39 seconds (thus making it difficult to follow the instructions here to “call us promptly”). The friendly person who eventually answered the call told me that she’d put in a repair call on the issue, and that I’d hear from one of the “testers.” Stay tuned.

Jakob Erbar isn’t exactly a household name, even in typography circles. But he designed what I think is the great underappreciated font of the 20th century, Erbar: