Charlottetown lawyer turned web chaperon Alan McLeod writes:

Subject: Sarah Harmer

Saw the show as did at least Anne Thurlow. She is going to be huge. I am poking you with a digital stick to start a thread on her show.

I will insert one corrective point: Thurlow, A is Ann without an E.

Since the notice went out about the Community Radio Meeting (see below) last night, along with some email to people I thought might be interested, I’ve received nothing but positive responses: it appears as though there are 4 or 5 groups of Islanders who have been batting this idea around for a while, and the meeting will be a good chance to get everyone around the same table.

One small point of clarification: the meeting’s being held in the CBC Board Room due to the kindness of Craig Mackie, CBC Radio Program Manager for PEI, but isn’t a meeting about the CBC, or about community radio on the CBC, nor is the meeting in any way officially connected with the CBC.

Earlier in the year there was some discussion in this space about community radio on Prince Edward Island. Some people went off and discussed the idea further in a Yahoo! discussion group. My sense from all of this is that there might be enough community energy and community skills to create some sort of community radio enterprise here on the Island.

To this end, a small group of us have decided to jump in and plan a meeting of interested people. Scheduled for Tuesday, October 29 at 7:30 p.m., the meeting will take place in the Board Room at CBC Prince Edward Island.

We intend the meeting to be an exploratory session — a way to gauge just what interests and skills and passions could be assembled, and into what. Watch this space for more details; in the meantime, please spread the word that anyone, young or old, experienced in radio or not, is welcome to attend and contribute to the meeting.

All through high school my little brothers had to endure the question “so, you’re Peter’s brother.” Not that I was acclaimed — I simply had the virtue of coming first.

Brother Steve is exacting his revenge these days, though: a spate of national stories on CBC Radio (for whom he’s a news report in Saskatoon) have people asking me “so, you any relation to that Steve Rukavina?”.

Although Steve’s website has been dark of late, leaving the reading public without the insightful “behind the scenes of a young journo” pieces that were so interesting, we in the family do get to hear news from the horse’s mouth now and again, and one of the stories Steve related recently was of a sort of broadcaster boot camp held by the CBC in Winnipeg. Part of what went on there was a series of role plays, where the participants would read news stories and then be critiqued on them, and Steve says he got a lot out of this.

And I have to agree: if you listen to this recent piece, you’ll hear a much more affable, relaxed Journalist Steve.

It’s a wonderful experience to be able to watch one of your kid brothers mature into his career from afar; if Steve was a construction worker or a shop clerk we wouldn’t have this opportunity, but as he’s choosen the public airwaves as his medium, we’re lucky enough to be able to tune in.

After the launch of the new YankeeMagazine.com website in June, our time working with our colleagues on the web team at Yankee Publishing in New Hampshire has been consumed with a gradual redesign of Almanac.com, the website of The Old Farmer’s Almanac.

You can see the beginnings of the fruits of this work on the front page of Almanac.com this week. The new design on that page coincides with the release of the 2003 edition of the The Old Farmer’s Almanac (order yours today online or find copies at a bookstore or newsstand near you).

The new design is the work of the masterful Steve Muskie. Steve took the best parts of the old design and created a new presentation that has more content presented more clearly. Our contribution to the effort was the engines that drive the personalization features on the front page — weather, tides, sunrise and so on — and the databases behind them.

There’s lots more in store in the days and weeks to come. Stay tuned.

By the way, the sun is going to rise at 7:04 a.m. tomorrow morning.

Last night’s Big Premiere was The West Wing.

I originally sought solace in the arms of The West Wing after the cancellation of Sports Night: they share Aaron Sorkin as creator and writer and share Sorkin’s Mametesque “faster and more thrilling than life” approach to dialog. After watching Sports Night and early episodes of The West Wing I was left with an odd, pleasant after taste: I wanted my life to be that breezy.

Alas, if Wednesday’s premiere is any guide, the writing on The West Wing has gone from compelling and breezy to confusing and muddled. There were entire sequences in the two-hour opener that simply passed me by.

Perhaps I’m simply too stupid, or not in tune enough with the US politcal situation, but chunks of plot like “Toby and Josh get lost in America,” while perhaps interesting in some abstract metaphorical way, were unintelligible and tired.

Combine this nonesense with the whole “how many times can there be some horrible crisis in some country with a made-up name that causes everyone to get stressed out” and I worry for the health of the show.

The final blow may be the departure of Rob Lowe from the series. He’s obviously already in the process of being ushered out, as his role in last night’s episode was minor and of no consequence. I always thought that The West Wing was about Rob Lowe’s character Sam Seaborn, in the same way the WKRP was about Andy and M*A*S*H was about Hawkeye Pierce. While I wouldn’t go as far as saying he’s as much of a linchpin as either of those characters, he was the archtypical snappy talker, and every other characters bravado seemed descended from his.

That all said, there are some reasons for hope: Dule Hill as the President’s assistant Charlie is taking on a larger role in the show, and I really enjoyed his performance last night. Lily Tomlin (bias: I am a big Lily Tomlin fan) is going to do wonderful things too, I think. And Allison Janney really, really deserved the Emmy she received last week: she’s a great actor.

I’ll keep watching, but some of the magic is gone.

On Tuesday was the return of NYPD Blue to the fall season, after airing in the winter and spring for the past two years.

The season opener was preceded by a special, inexplicably hosted by Joe Mantegna, that took us “inside the world of NYPD Blue.” While there were several interesting parts to this preview, it was mostly gloss and fluff and left me wishing it was produced by more interesting people and was three times as long.

Whereas in shows like Law & Order and CSI it is the plot that drives the show, and shows like ER are more character driven (and I use that term loosely with ER), I realized on Tuesday that NYPD Blue is neither: it’s simply a compelling, well-punctuated visual ballet. The show has neither strong plots nor particularly strong actors (although Dennis Franz does have his charms, I admit): it’s something you have to eat as a whole, and be broadly brushed by. And I have a hunch that you either like that or you don’t, but I’d be hard pressed to suggest how you tell the difference. In a sense this makes the show perfect for the modern television viewer: you can go to the bathroom in the middle of the show and not really miss anything. You can even miss entire episodes or entire seasons, and not feel as though you’re being left behind.

In the corner of my mind I knew that local coffee baron and multimedia magnate Campbell Webster was involved with the production of a television program called My Messy Bedroom.

I assumed, given the prevalance of Island-produced childrens’ television (viz. shows about mathematics and mice), that with a title like that, this was some sort of Degrassi High-like show about a quirky family with kids who couldn’t keep their rooms clean.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I happened upon the show by accident on cable one night and found that the plot revolved around not wacky kids and their neatness problems, nor even multiplication or the adventures of a gang of mice, but rather sex, chocolate, vaginas, and other such wonderfulia.

I have since come to learn that the series is the television version of a syndicated newspaper column which, given the general aversion to open discussion of concupiscent pursuits on the Island, is not syndicated here.

Or perhaps the names of our newspapers are too long. The MMB website lists the publications the column is carried in as all having only one-word titles: Hour, Here, View, Echo, Pulse, Snap, Uptown, See, Monday and Current. Okay, so there’s Free Spirit in New York. But that’s American, so it doesn’t count. Maybe if we shortened the name of the local papers here to the much hipper-sounding Buzz or Guardian — “Hi, I’m a reporter at Guardian” sounds very cool — we would be released to participate full-on in the sexual revolution.

That all said, my real reason for writing about My Messy Bedroom is to congratulate Campbell and company on being nominated for a Gemini Award. Bravo.

You wouldn’t believe how truly difficult it is to get any work done when there are workers using jackhammers to destroy pavement and sidewalks across the street from you.

The irony is that Catherine and I used to cross the street when going up town because of the nice, modern, smooth sidewalk on the other side of the street. For some reason the City Fathers decided that it would be a good idea to show up at the crack of dawn yesterday and completely remove this sidewalk with a front-end loader, and they are spending today doing collateral destruction using the aforementioned jack hammer.

Now if this destruction was in the service of Good rather than in the service of mindless “the schedule says we have to destroy this sidewalk even if it is in good shape” Evil, this wouldn’t be so bad. But it’s bureaucratic jack hammering that’s drilling through my mind, and there’s no more annoying a type.

Those of you without television, or without an addiction to it, won’t know that it’s TV premiere week. For the rest of is it’s time to clear out the evening appointment book, stock up on Kit Kats and Feeling drinks, and assume the position on the couch.

Monday night is traditionally not a barn-burner of a TV night for me. I was never an Ally McBeal fan (well, there were the Robert Downey Junior years, but that was an exception), I don’t watch football, and I’ve never found anything else compelling to watch on Monday nights. So I wasn’t as glued to the TV last night as I will be tonight.

That said, the new CSI: Miami was very good, and I’ll certainly tune in again. The program is a spin-off, or perhaps better a spin-over from the mothership CSI program that debuted last year on Thursday nights and took the TV world by unexpected storm.

While not quite as entirely plot-driven as the Law & Order collection, the CSI’s are certainly on that side of the fence: we don’t go home at night with the characters, and although they have the usual sort of weaknesses (dead husband, work friction, fear of alligators, etc.) these are more spice than substance. The true star of the CSI’s is the case, and the science surrounding its investigation.

While I’m not enough of a scientist to be able to say how realistic the CSI forensic science actually is, I’m willing to hazard a guess that it’s at least mostly so, and I can say without hesitation that there is more scientific equipment on display in these series, and more exploration of applied scientific concepts, than any dramatic show on television. That such a show is popular seems to have amazed some critics — I take it simply as proof that there is more popular interest in science than conventional wisdom would suggest.

Although the characters are secondary to the plot in CSI: Miami, there are some good actors on display. I’ve always liked <a href=”http://us.imdb.com/Name?Caruso,%20David”“>David Caruso, even if he did leave NYPD in a huff looking to start a movie career that never happened: he’s the Big Boss on the show, and he plays it well; better, I think, than his equivalent on the mother show, William Petersen.

Kim Delaney is second in command, and is playing to type: she’s the better detective with a distraught personal life (in this case her husband has died, cause unknown so far; in Philly, her now-cancelled series from last year, she was divorced from her successful husband, and we all know what happened in NYPD Blue). My jury is out on whether she’ll be good for this role.

Emily Procter is the only other name actor in the series, and this is the only weak point. I thought she was fantastic in her role on The West Wing, although she didn’t appear consistently enough on that series to make her a regular part of the show, and this is apparently why she left. While The West Wing role made the best use of her considerable talents, on CSI: Miami, at least from the debut episode, she is playing a generic role with nothing to distinguish it. This may change as the series matures. Let’s hope so.

Tonight’s schedule: the Inside NYPD Blue special at 10 on ABC, followed by the season premiere of that show. There’s also Presidio Med on CBS, but that will have to fall to commercial click-over status given my fondness for the Blue. Man your clickers.