It seems clear that the de facto leader of the western world is now New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Throughout the horrors of the past two weeks he has consistently been the only leader, in the U.S. or Canada, to have practically, responsibly, efficiently and with good humour stood before us to report on the aftermaths of September 11.

He comes off as so much better a human being than any other western leader that the rest of them look like dolts by comparison.

Giuliani, of course, has the benefit of being a municipal leader and thus being directly responsible for actual stuff. He doesn’t need to talk about “smokin’ them out of their caves” because he’s too busy calmly talking about death certificates and parking meters and whether the subways are running are not.

But he is at his most eloquent when talking about the psychological realities of the situation.

At his news conference this morning, for example, he talked about how important it is that children aren’t afraid. To quote from the New York Times:

Children should not be afraid, he said. “They should go out and enjoy themselves and play and play ball and study and do the things they normally do. And adults can help children to not be afraid by not being afraid themselves, “The best way of to get your children to stop being afraid is to stop being afraid yourself.”

Giuliani, who is being rallied to seek a third term as Mayor, understands that part of recovery is the restoration of confidence, and that the restoration of confidence requires, in part, strong leadership. While we in Canada may have effective managers and defenders of our sovereignty, we are sorely lacking strong leaders, people who can inspire us to greatness, calm us in times of hardship and generally, well, lead.

If Rudolph Giuliani wants to run for Canadian Prime Minister I’m ready to work on the campaign.

I received a reply from Angus Orford at Maritime Electric this morning with regards to their Wind Power Program. He says it will be six weeks before the details of the program are released. You can indicate that you’re an “interested customer” by contacting Angus at 629-3628 or email Orford@MaritimeElectric.com.

An interesting special on ABC this evening: a session in an elementary classroom with kids talking about the events of September 11, terrorism, etc.

The kids were all very wise and compasionate and sensible. Far more wise and compasionate than their elders. And, almost to a head, they didn’t think we should go to war against, well, whoever.

I’m ashamed to live in a country, a world, where after thousands of years of “civilization” our gut recourse — and indeed our recourse after some time to think — is still to go and blow our aggressors off the face of the earth.

It might actually work, this “infinite justice” — although it could as easily fail, or drag on for years — but once all is said and done and thousands of “ours” and “theirs” are dead or maimed, what is better about the world?

It’s fine to grieve and get angry and fly the flag and sing the rah-rah songs and give money to a telethon — we all need things to distract us from the horrors of last week.

But if we give in to our base instincts, respond to evil with greater evil, then we are stupid, senseless people, guided by stupid, senseless leaders.

If you have any domain names registered with Network Solutions, and you’re based here in Canada, no doubt you’re very familiar with almost daily calls from the folks at the perversely named Courtesy Support Team, an “affiliate business partner of Network Solutions” (as they are always fond of sticking in two or three times in each spam call).

Each time they call, I simply say “never call here again.” And then, the next day, the calls start again.

Thanks to Mark Jeftovic, who had his people do some research, I’m happy to provide the following contact information for this evil bunch:

Courtesy Support Team
2300 Young St. Suite 2103
P.O. Box 2313
Toronto, ON M4P 1E4

Toll free 1.866.448.5598
Fax 1.888.898.2766

The word on the street is that Maritime Electric (warning: toxic splash page) is now signing people up for their “pay a premium and get power generated from the wind” program.

I’ll be signing up first thing Wednesday morning, and I encourage all Islanders to do so. This is one of those Truly Great Ideas that crys out for broad public support.

With apologies to the potato industry here on Prince Edward Island, I’m happy to announce that, for some delightful reason, Sobey’s grocery store (at least in West Royalty) has a new section in their deli area devoted entirely to sushi.

They not only have prepared sushi of various types, but also wasabi, soy sauce, miso soup, and seaweed sheets. They even have disposable chopsticks.

So tonight, at that time when I would normally reach for the unhealthy potato chips or their fatty snackfood brethren, I was able to have a tasty and healthful sushi snack — sticky rice wrapped around shrimp and vegetables.

I’m hopeful that Sobey’s has what it takes to stick with this new idea (new, of course, only in the Sobey’s and Prince Edward Island sense). I have a gut feeling, however, that this might be one of those times like when Empire Theatres would mistakenly book some fantastic Italian film for a week, and then quickly whisk it off to the film vortex as soon as they realized the folly of their ways.

So if you’re driving by Sobey’s, please help support the cause and pop in and pick up and pack o’ sushi.

In the spring of 1985, 16 years ago, I was fresh out of high school and looking for something to fill my time with until starting at university in the fall. One night just after Christmas, Heather, a friend of my mother’s from her own university days, from whom I’d been renting a room in Toronto during high school, went to an event at Victoria College. Over the course of the evening, she met the College Provost, who described to her a project run out of the College called Athenians that was looking for eager young volunteers. The next morning Heather described the project to me. And for some reason I pursued the idea and became a volunteer.

Athenians is, in essence, an after-the-fact census of ancient Athens, Greece. Technically the project is “A Prosopography of Ancient Athens.” That is to say “A study, often using statistics, that identifies and draws relationships between various characters or people within a specific historical, social, or literary context” (from American Heritage® Dictionary).

Most importantly for me, the project was built around a database called Empress that ran on a UNIX-based computer. And so, in amongst my data entry of the details of the ancients, I got an opportunity to take UNIX out for a ride, and was thus able to learn all about the world of email and newsgroups.

I also managed to piss some people off: more than once I managed to ask one too many questions of the kindly sys admins who managed the U of T computer centre. They appeared ready to tolerate my presence on their system as long as I didn’t raise too much of a fuss. Or maybe they just didn’t know I was there. Remember, this was back in the days of a kinder, gentler network.

This was also back in the days where Internet (not that it was called that yet) email worked by store-and-forward. I would send an email to someone in California and it would travel, by hop, skip and jump, from Toronto to Waterloo to Columbia to Ohio and so on, usually travelling one or two hops a night, so that email across the country and back might stretch out over two weeks.

Athenians, both in print and online is still going strong, and John Traill and Philippa Matheson, who were my introducers to the online world, are still its sheppherds.

I owe them a great debt of gratitude, and they can take some pride in knowing that the online work I’ve done since is in the image of those early experiences.

It’s being reported that CanWest is ceasing publication of Saturday Night magazine. I’ve been a reader, off and on, for 25 years, through many owners, editors, formats and approaches. The most recent National Post-insert incarnation had its problems, but on balance it was an interesting read from week to week, and certainly a reason to pick up the paper on Saturday.

According to Masthead magazine, Saturday Night ranked 27th in the country on the the list of magazines by revenue.

Sad to see it go.

Fountain Pen Hospital, where I bought my Waterman fountain pen last year, is closed this week. It’s inside the Secured Access area about 3 blocks from the World Trade Centre site, just about where the C in City Hall is on this map.

Their website says their facilities are unaffected, but that they’ll be closed for a few days.

One of my favourite bookstores in the world is the Indigo in Burlington, Ontario. One of my least favourite bookstores in the world is the new Indigo in Charlottetown.

I’ve been to the new Charlottetown store twice now — it opened last week with much fanfare. It is disappointing. Here’s how, in no particular order:

1. The automatic wheelchair accessible doors don’t work. Or rather the first set of doors works, and the second set of doors doesn’t. In my mind, this isn’t a “fix it Monday” kind of thing because it excludes large numbers of customers from an easy means of ingress.
2. The marquee says Books, Music, Café. As far as I could tell, the Music part of this consists entirely of two meagre racks of CD’s near the front of the store. There is nothing special about these, and there’s no method for listening to them. In other words, the Music part is a lie for all practical purposes.
3. The Café part is a lie too. My brother Johnny says the best sandwich he’s ever had came from the Indigo in Vancouver. I’ll never know, for the Indigo in Charlottetown doesn’t serve sandwiches. It serves banana bread and cinnamon rolls and coffee. If you go in expecting Upper Canadian delights never seen before on PEI, you will emerge diappointed. In other worlds it’s a feeble imitation of a café, and pales when compared to any other café in Charlottetown.
4. Which is to say nothing of the fact that the café is crammed over into the corner with the magazine rack and contains two or three dinky tables and a couple of seats at the bar. You can’t eat or drink (such as it is) in the café without having magazine browsers in your face. And you can’t browse magazines without feeling as though your stepping into the middle of someone’s conversation.
5. The central payment mechanism for the for-pay Internet terminals is broken, rendering all four unusable other than to browser the Indigo website. They are a week old. This doesn’t bode well for the future.
6. The staff are inept. I went in on Thursday looking for a copy of a book I’d heard a discussion about on CBC Radio. All that I knew about it was that it contained an essay by Peter Gzowski and was about addiction. The clerk took this information and searched for keyword addiction on her terminal and gave me information about an obviously clinical book called Addiction which was nothing like I’d described. I asked her to be more creative in her search, but she just gave up. I went over to the otherwise-broken public Internet terminal myself and found the book, called Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast in 3 minutes. When I came back to the desk with this information in hand, they looked it up in their system and told me they didn’t have it in stock. But, they happily said, they could order it on the Internet for me. Huh? Yesterday I made the same inquiry at The Bookmark, our smallish downtown Charlottetown bookstore and the clerk immediately led me to the location of the book on their shelves (they had about 5 copies). It was exactly the same price as on the Indigo website, and I didn’t have to pay shipping.
7. The store is physically cramped, and so feels less like an endless wonderland of books than an over-crowded grocery store. I found this not only this morning when I tried to wheel wee Oliver around the store in a stroller on a busy Saturday morning, but also on Thursday night when I showed up close to closing time and there was almost nobody around at all. To make matters worse there’s no special area for their public events — readings, signings, etc. — so they just set up the chairs in amongst the stacks and aisles. This all wouldn’t be so bad if they actually appeared to have a wonderful selection of books unavailable elsewhere, but my experience was that The Bookmark — of which I’ve never been a great fan — has an equal or better selection in 1/32 the space.

I actually like big-box bookstores, and I’ve never decried them, in a You’ve Got Mail-like way, as being evil just because they’re all big and corporate. I can happily spend 3 or 4 hours in the Borders in Bangor or the Barnes & Noble in Manchester. Or even at the aforementioned Indigo in Burlington, which is open and airy, has a well-stocked cafe, and excellent magazine section and attentive staff.

But, somehow, we have ended up with the worst situation of all here in Charlottetown: a big-box bookstore that’s just big and alluring enough to drive any remaining independent bookstores out of business but which, in the end, is a mediocre runt of the big-box litter itself. In 6 months to a year we’ll be left with our mediocre, cramped, sandwich-less Indigo as the only place to buy books on PEI.

There is, of course, a simple solution to this problem: buy your books and magazines at The Reading Well or The Bookmark in Charlottetown. These are small and imperfect stores, I grant, but at least they are run by our friends and neighbours and — who would have ever thought! — it looks like they might actually be better bookstores that their new big-box cousin. Don’t like their service? Have a long-term grudge against them for their old “we can order that, but it will take 6 weeks” attitudes? Take the owner aside on your next visit, and tell them they you’ll promise to abandon Indigo in their favour if they get better at what they’re doing. And make sure you tell them what that means.

In the end, we get the mercantile world we deserve.