I hate to forever be dumping on the good folks at the Capital Commission, but as they have come up with yet another inane idea to pollute my capital city home, I feel compelled to speak out.

If you take a quick drive or walk down Great George Street this festive holiday season, you will see a new collection of 35 lit Christmas trees. In front of each tree is an incredibly ugly large white placard that says something along the lines of “This Tree Sponsored By…” and then the name of a local business.

In today’s Guardian we learn the following from Kim Green of the Capital Commission:

“We have three main goals: to attract off-Island visitation, to keep people shopping downtown and to keep people from going to Moncton and Halifax to shop. We’ve got it all here so let’s stay home and spend the money on P.E.I.”

Can somebody explain to me why intelligent people from away would travel great distances to shop in downtown Charlottetown this season so as to be able to view generic Christmas trees with giant ugly placards in front of them?

Or, indeed, why I, as a downtown resident, would in fact not want to immediately escape to the quite confines of, say, Ellis Brothers Shopping Centre (not downtown) or, say, Summerside, Souris, Montague or North Rustico — or even Moncton! — none of which, as far as I know, have festooned their Christmas Trees with commercial calling cards.

The Guardian article goes on to say:

The freshly-cut eight-foot trees which make up Christmas Tree Lane were purchased by companies, families and service groups as a fund-raiser for the Children’s Wish Foundation. They will act as the focal point of this year’s Christmas light display.

Supporting the Children’s Wish Foundation is, of course, a laudable goal. Whatever happened to the days, however, when local businesses were quietly satisfied to do charitable good without some mandatory uglification project trumpeting their good works? I’ve got nothing against Christmas Trees — it’s the fact that they’ve been turned into billboards that bothers me.

And one more thing: the Guardian story’s lead says that Great George Street has been, by virtue of the prostituted trees, turned into a “winter paradise.” The Guardian here is either guilt of printing Capital Commission propoganda verbatim, or of abusing the language; a paradise is “a place of bliss; a region of supreme felicity or delight.” Christmas trees might be nice, but let’s agree to keep the work paradise for things that are really, really neat, okay?

Read this audit of the Canadian Mission to Zagreb for a concise look at the day to day work of life as a Canadian diplomat.

You gotta hand it to Destina, Air Canada’s new online travel agency, for having the creativity (and the gall) to list the following special offers in this week’s version of their online travel newsletter:

• Charlottetown to Grand Cayman Island
• Saskatoon to Bangkok
• Kamploops to Bali 
• St. John’s, NF to Cancun
• Moncton to Antigua
• Victoria to Singapore
• Regina to St. Lucia

Which also makes me wonder: just how many tickets does Destina expect to sell on the busy Kamloops to Bali route (to say nothing of the Saskatoon to Bangkok)?

Every week Edward Hasbrouck, who runs a website called The Practical Nomad, posts a commentary about that week’s episode of the CBS television programme The Amazing Race.

Hasbrouck works in the travel industry and describes himself as “the world’s best-known authority on around-the-world travel.” His essays use the events of the episode as a jumping off point, and he discusses general and specific travel topics. They’re always interesting, and if you’re a fan of the show, especially so.

In this week’s commentary he writes, in part:

Anywhere listed in a guidebook as “undiscovered” isn’t — the guidebook will have taken care of that. You aren’t likely to get off the beaten path by going anywhere that’s even mentioned, at least not in any detail, in a popular guidebook. (That’s actually an advantage to using a less well-known guidebook: the most popular ones are the victims of their own success.)

My own experience bears this out:

Travelling in South Korea with my younger brother Steve in 1998, we ended up in the small southern port town of Mokpo, described in our Lonely Planet guidebook as being uninteresting. It wasn’t actually all that spectacular a place, and we ended up storm-stayed there briefly, as we were trying to go further south by ferry. But it was our jumping off point for a great adventure to the east of Mokpo looking for an Islander named Annie Shipman that took us to the small community of Haenam, and then later into the hills above Haenam to a wonderful temple.

Later that same year, Catherine and I were travelling in the Czech Republic, and after hitting two tourist highlights — Prague and Cesky Krumlov — we spent our last night in the country in the small border town of Cheb (which is pronounced with the ch as it sounds in the word Loch). After the hussle bussle of the more touristic areas, Cheb was a nice respite, and we enjoyed ourselves in an entirely different way.

This spring in Thailand we repeated this approach, spending 2 days in the mid-country city of Phitsanulok, which is halfway from Chiang Mai to Bangkok. As far as I could tell, we were the only westerners in the city at the time, and, again, we got an entirely different experience of the country.

What Hasbrouck says about guidebooks is true: as soon as something hits a guidebook, especially the Lonely Planet, it goes from being obscure to being in the centre of it all. I’ve heard tales of small towns where the Lonely Planet-recommended guest house is packed, while a perfectly nice guest house in the neighbourhood, unlucky enough not to appear in the guidebook, sits empty.

I know why this is, of course: when you are a stranger in a strange land, don’t speak the language, and are tired, hungry and without your usual reference points, having any information to go on, even if it’s “some travel writer from Australia stayed in this place and lived to tell the tale” can be awfully comforting.

Unfortunately, if you only follow that path, your adventure quotient will almost certainly be much lower. And why do we travel if not for the adventure of it all?

Robertston Davis once said (to paraphrase) that coincidences, which often appear fanastic to us, are actually happening all around us all the time, it’s just that we don’t notice them.

Here’s a weird coincidence that I did notice:

Ten years ago, on November 15, 1992, I submitted an item to comp.dcom.telecom, a Usenet newsgroup, as follows:

I am assisting a novice theatre director in staging a play. We need to make a stand-alone, not-connected-to-phone line phone ring. I assume this involved a battery, switch and some wires. Which ones and what voltage battery?

The comp.dcom.telecom newsgroup was moderated by a wonderful man named Pat Townson, who ensured that the discussion — mostly about telephones and telephone companies — stayed relatively focused and intelligent. Getting an item published by Pat was, for me, tantamount to getting a piece published in the New York Times. Well, maybe not that great. But it was pretty special.

I did receive several replies, though oddly I can’t remember whether or not we every did make the phone ring or not.

The concidence is this: this morning, almost ten years later to the day, a package arrived by FedEx from Digium in Alabama containing a device they call an S100U that I can plug into the USB port on my computer and, you guessed it, make a telephone ring.

Stephen’s since moved to Lubbock, and I want to make the phone ring for an entirely different purpose, but ring it does, and that’s sort of neat.

Charlottetown, being a small place and all, is blessed with several residents named Derek MacEwen.

One of these Derek MacEwens contributed to the discussion about an item I wrote last week about the Town Square project.

There is another Derek MacEwen entirely, not the one who contibuted to that discussion, who is founder of a company called Vision Quest. As far as I know, this Derek MacEwen thinks the Town Square project is the cat’s pyjamas; indeed Vision Quest is, as irony would have it, working on a Town Square-funded project.

Apparently some “biting the hand that feeds you” consternation was directed at this Derek “Vision Quest” MacEwen for the comments which he didn’t write.

Please let this note act as official confirmation that the Derek MacEwen whose name appears here is not the Derek MacEwen whose name appears here. They are different people, with, presumably, different thoughts.

Our apologies to the MacEwen families for any tizzy caused by this confusion; in future it might be a good idea for the two of you to come up with catchy nick names to avoid similar problems; I’ll leave this to you to coordinate.

There is dramatic generational movement in the tea situation. It used to be that the only truly reliable cup of tea to be had in Charlottetown was at Catherine Hennessey’s: her combination of special boilings, cup pre-heating, quality tea and other untold secrets resulted in a cup that rendered most restaurant tea, and any tea I might make myself, seem like thin tasteless swill by compare. And, indeed, Catherine still makes an excellent cup of tea.

But she now has competition: I had the favour of having a cup of tea brewed by Karen Mair last night, and it was the equal of Catherine’s. A rare and special discovery indeed.

I never liked David Morse as an actor; I put him into the same “annoying actor in bad roles” category as Sam Neill. But in the same way that The Dish rescued Neill for me, the new CBS television programme Hack has shown me Morse’s true talents as an actor. It’s a great show, and that’s largely due to Morse and his co-star Andre Braugher.

Braugher, best known for his role in the television version of Homicide: Life of the Street, is a great actor, and he’s at his best when he’s having a conversation. In Homicide his conversation was with Kyle Secor’s Bayliss; in the Bruce Paltrow film Duets it was with Paul Giamatti’s disturbed salesman, and in Hack his partner in conversation is Morse.

The interesting thing about Hack is that it departs from the modern trend for hour-long dramas to be completely self-contained, with no spill-over plot from episode to episode. Think of Law & Order, CSI, NYPD Blue: the idea is that each episode is essentially a world unto itself; presumably the thinking is that if you make it easy for viewers to drop in at any point, they’ll be more likely to watch.

Understanding Hack, however, means following the growth and backsteps of the characters from episode to episode. Morse and Braugher play dirty cops; they dipped into a pool of drug money. Morse is off the force, and disgraced, and Braugher, his former partner, is still working as a cop. They have a complex relationship, and the heart of the show is their conversations at a coffee shop. Each week’s plot revolves around Morse’s life as a cab driver, and the characters he encounters eventually lead him, into conflict with the law.

What’s pleasant is that neither Morse nor Braugher nor the situations they find themselves in are morally clear-cut. The show is not “dirty cop trying to make good,” at least not entirely, and there’s enough moral ambiguity to make the viewer actually think, which is rare.

Hack has been picked up for a full season by CBS; it airs Friday nights, and is broadcast in Canada by Global. Check it out.

Dan asks “Peter, could you list and describe the ‘laudable’ things in the townsquare project? Your sleuthing skills must be more refined than mine.”

The Island Libraries project is laudable: using Z39.50 (an open standard for talking to library catalogues) and open source PHP and Apache tools, this is a common web search interface to the Provincial Library and Holland College Library catalogues. It was funded under the aegis of Town Square, and put together by Donny Moses.

The new online ticket sales application on the Confederation Centre website is very nice and, having purchased tickets for Lennie Gallant mid-summer, I can tesify that it works. It was funded by the Town Square project, and put together by a team that includes Lorrie Jollimore, who used to work for us at Okeedokee.

The City of Charlottetown’s parking ticket payment system is a Good Idea. It appears to be constructed in PHP, and while I’ve not been unlucky enough to have to use it yet, from the look of it, it’s well designed. Same goes for the water bill payment application. Both were funded by Town Square.

The live broadcast of council meetings is a good thing for municipal democracy (although it is slightly disconcerting to hear the Mayor ask the councillors to “please login” at the beginning of the meeting). This is funded by Town Square.

There’s no doubting that the Town Square website itself isn’t a model of good design (to say nothing of the Virtual Charlottetown site, a textbook example of how not to design a website). And there are, as several have pointed out some crazy aspects to the Town Square project. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: there’s some neat stuff happening under the Town Square banner.

Where I come from, the town square is the guy wearing plaid pants, but that’s another story. There are many laudable things about the Town Square project here in Charlottetown, but giving businesses the ability to create ugly dreck like this is not one of them.

The aim of this “microsite” part of the Town Sqaure project is to “assist local business owners in utilizing E-business in their day to day operations.” What they have done, in the case of Sherwood Do-it Centre, is to ensure that nobody with any sense of aesthetics, design or style will patronize the business.

Design is hard. It takes smart people to do well. The more this “empowerment through amateur crap distribution” philosophy takes hold, the further we’re going to be from a day where the web actually is useful.

The irony? Sherwood Do-it Centre already has a website (I guess this would be their “macrosite?”) and while it’s not a paragon of design excellence, it considerably more well put together than its micro cousin.