Longtime readers may recall that the company now known as Reinvented Inc. was once known as Digital Island Inc. Back in 1998, at the height of the dotcom insanity, we sold our identity and our domain name to San Francisco-based Digital Island and reinvented ourselves.

It now appears that that Digital Island has bit the dust as well: good old digitalisland.com is now simply an announcement that the company has been subsumed into Exodus.

So, good-bye Digital Island: it was fun while it lasted.

While Brother Mike and I toil away in relative obscurity, Brothers Johnny and Steve are piling on the fame.

Steve is acting as host for CBC Saskatchewan’s after program The Afternoon Edition for the next two weeks. You can listen in live every weekday from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. Saskatchewan Time (which is 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Atlantic Time).

Johnny and his fiancee Jodi are famous for their wedding registry adventures. In last week’s Macleans magazine there was an article about registries in which Johnny was quoted as follows:

Johnny Rukavina and Jodi McLellan, getting married in Parksville, B.C., on Aug. 24, were initially wishy-washy about registering, but then common sense and memories of innumerable picnic baskets they’d bought as wedding gifts won out. “Something from the registry may not really be the special dream gift, but it’s also not a picnic basket,” says Rukavina. After registering at the Bay, the couple posted the following on their wedding Web site: “A disclaimer: we are not greedy materialistic fiends hell-bent on acquiring merchandise. We are not hermits who live in the woods and have eschewed all material possessions either.” In the new world of registering, there is a way around everything.

The epic contest is over, and my loyal readers were only half successful at detective work. I thought it would be so easy! The inestimable Dave Moses guessed right that Correspondent #2 was radio mogul Matt Rainnie. But nobody was successful at Correspondent #1: graphics goddess Kate Westphal. Dave’s hat is on its way west.

On Susan Werner’s album Midwestern Saturday Night the title song starts like this:

Thanks for the concert,
It was quite enlightening,
Although Mahler does tend to
make me want to do myself in.

I wanna knit you wool sweaters
with little deer all over
I wanna feed you from my kitchen
‘til your belt feels too tight
I wanna make love ‘til three
and never judge my performance
On a Midwestern Saturday night.

One of the things I lament about living in PEI is that it’s not on any sort of folk music circuit. Which means that as I sit here in Charlottetown tonight I can probably hop in my car and see all manner of fiddling sensations or celtic balladeers, but I have almost no hope of seeing anyone else from North America playing in the folk or roots genre on a regular basis. Folk music is one type of music that’s almost always better seen live, so that’s too bad.

As an aside, I once was forced to write a song called “Stephen Carter Elliott Hates Folk Music” about my friend Stephen (who had to change his last name to avoid association with the song) who, well, hates folk music. I believe it went something like this:

Stephen Carter Elliott hates folk music,
And he doesn’t really know why.
Stephen Carter Elliott hates folk music,
He says it makes him want to die.

You may recall a commerical for the late etailer eToys which involved an instrumental version of the song Somewhere over the Rainbow and a father and son going to the car wash.

This commecial implanted itself in my mind and as a result I somehow feel that it is my fatherly duty to take not-so-wee Oliver to the car wash on a regular basis. Happily, this desire syncs with my obsessive “you have a new car so must wash it regularly” feeling.

In the world of car washes, there are two camps: touch and touchless (although the ‘touch’ camp probably just thinks of themselves as ‘regular’). At the former your car is beaten and brushed by a variety of spinning, flopping, whirling brushes and at the later you car is simply pummelled with water.

The main selling point of the new-style ‘touchless’ car wash is that, as nothing but water touches you car, you are less likely to suffer damage to antennae, side mirrors and other appendages. The old-style regular carwash people appear to maintain that the spinning and whirling results in a better carwash, despite the possibility of maiming.

Oliver and I usually go to the touchless wash, either in Stratford (good wash; poor vacuums) or West Royalty (good wash; never used the vacuums), but tonight we went to the Iriving on St. Peters Road for a bona fide old-style wash and it felt just like the eToys commercial.

If any of my fellow parents want to experience for yourself, this is a good time to do so, as this Irving has the ‘Super’ wash on sale for the same price as the ‘Deluxe,’ a saving of almost two dollars.

If you live in a place other than Prince Edward Island, try this: walk into the library of the biggest university in your province or state, and tell them that you, a normal everyday civilian otherwise unaffiliated with the university in any way, would like a library card. Dollars to donuts they will either laugh at you, or charge you $150.

Here on Prince Edward Island, at UPEI, they will charge you a one-time $10 fee for a photo ID card, and then give you a library card, for free, that will let you take out books from the Robertson Library.

I obtained such a card about 11 years ago, and I went in to use it for the first time in about 6 years tonight and checked out three books with no problems.

I laud UPEI for its inclusiveness in this regard: sharing your resources with the community at large makes sense, and makes we out here feel more apart of you in there. Thanks.

While we’re talking about acronyms with ‘w’ and ‘e’ in them: I’m not sure how I missed the news that the World Wrestling Federation, formerly known as the WWF, was forced to rename itself the WWE (for World Wrestling Entertainment) by the World Wildlife Fund. Amazing.

When I was a kid, one of my favourite things to do was to listen to AM radio. Very early on I had a Radio Shack crystal radio — a magical device that required no batteries and that pulled in radio signals from all over the place. Later I got a bigger full-blown Radio Shack radio that pulled in the TV audio as well as FM and AM.

My most favourite thing was to lie in bed, after everyone thought I was asleep, with an earphone plugged into the radio. I would scan up and down the AM dial for far-flung stations, usually being able to listen for only 2 or 3 minutes until the cosmos shifted and the signal drifted out of range.

One of my more confusing finds was a radio station that identified itself, at least to my ears, as “threedoobee.” I had to listen for many months until I finally realized that their call letters were WWWE, and that they announced this as “three-w e”. WWWE was out of Cleveland, which was across Lake Erie from where we were, north of Hamilton. The mystery was solved.

Thanks to the insane obsessiveness of the web, you can now hear something like what I heard back then — an announcer for “The Monster on the Lake” doing a station check.

Sadly WWWE is now called a much more generic WTAM, so the pre-teen post-bedtime listeners of today will have no such mysteries to solve.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, then the K/W Call Letters in the United States page might strike your fancy.

The CBC is reporting that Pope John Paul II is advising his followers to “choose Christ, not money and sensual pleasures”. Apparently, says the Pope, Jesus is “…counting on you.

Well that’s all very well and good, and far be it for me to suggest that the Catholic faithful shouldn’t take his advice to heart seriously and with vigor.

I’m in for the “fleeting pleasures of the senses,” though — it sounds too good to pass up. See you in hell.

Robert Paterson has been exploring the possibilites of Radio Userland, especially its ability to aggregate content from other sites. Read Robert’s weblog to see the ongoing results.