As everyone and their brother is reporting today, Al Gore is not running for President of the United States in 2004.

This brings to mind a recent discovery: I was delighted to find that, now that I am 35 years old, and as I was born in the United States, I am eligible to run for President but Arnold Schwarzenegger, being born in Austria cannot.

Article II, section 1, clause 5 of the United States Constitution says:

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty five years, and been fourteen Years a resident within the United States.

My only problem is this regard is that I am not yet “fourteen Years a resident.” So if I moved to the US today, I couldn’t run for President until the 2016. Gives me plenty of time for preparations, though.

I’ve tried very, very hard to resist commenting again on the garish Christmas lights display which again this holiday season pollutes the streets of my neighbourhood. But I can no longer do so.

I’ve reconciled myself to the notion that the “creating a garish lights display will prevent people from shopping in Moncton” meme cannot be extinguished — it’s simply too powerful, in some crazy viral way that I can’t understand.

What makes me depressed, however, is this: after thousands of years of modern culture, of developments in architecture, design, art, craft, after the Renaissance, the Bauhaus, Impressionism, in a world of Frank Gehry and Jasper Johns and Georgia Okeeffe and the Group of Seven, why is it that the expensive centrepiece of our primary secular and religous holiday consists of a illuminated duck drinking from an illuminated champagne fountain?

Is this the best that we can do? Is this really who we are?

Words to live by from our friends at Disney:

People are not always as nice, cute, or funny as they may sound online.

Were truer words ever spoken?

Every time there’s a crime, accident, or other matter worthy of police attention in Charlottetown, you can expect to see Deputy Chief of Police Richard Collins on Compass telling the police side of the story.

Richard Collins has very obviously not been to media school. He’s prone to sometimes using the wrong word in the right place, and sometimes he laughs at times when he shouldn’t. He tends to be more honest then he probably should, and then sometimes tries to take it back. In short, he’s not a polished media player. And that’s okay by me: Richard Collins appears on television like a regular everyday person who happens to work for the police department. He’s “one of us” and he approaches interviews, within the bounds of his job, just like that.

It can’t be an easy job, and he does it well. Thanks.

Somewhere in the world tonight, a good friend of ours is playing host to a dinner party for a world leader. I’m under strict orders not to reveal places, times or identities. Someday the world will know; tonight, I can only write in these hushes tones.

Before it was taken over by the soccer moms, the “practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” meme had a smaller more elegant life flowing forth from its instigation in the pages of the Whole Earth Review magazine by San Francisco writer Anne Herbert.

One of my favourite things to do, as Sean Connery says in Finding Forrester, is to give an “unexpected gift at an unexpected time.” If I could do this full-time, I would happily take it on.

Sometime reader of this site (and the author of only other site on the Internet to link back to this site from its “blogdex”) Lou Quillo has a nice story that falls under this umbrella.

I think I should move to Palau: first, it’s got a “Compact of Free Association with the United States of America,” so I presume my U.S. citizenship would get me in good there. Secondly, and most important, it seems as though it’s always 87 degrees there.

Palau, the CIA tells us, is “a group of islands in the North Pacific Ocean, southeast of the Philippines… slightly more than 2.5 times the size of Washington, DC.”

Not surprisingly, there are no direct flights from Charlottetown to Palua; you can, however, fly from New York City. Leaving New York on January 1 at 6:00 a.m. would get you into Koror (the capital) at 9:00 p.m. on January 2, local time, for a total flight time of 25 hours. You fly from New York to Houston to Guam to Palau on Continental Airlines. Return fare is $2174US. Not too bad given that you get to be in Palau, in the balmy 87 degree weather, when the journey is over.

It’s 4:53 p.m. on a Wednesday, and I should be hard at work helping my colleagues at YANKEE make their website better.

But I can’t, because Island Tel’s Internet network is cut off from the rest of the world for the second time in as many days.

To their credit, it’s been a long time since there’s been any problems with my Internet service. I would have hoped that they would have been using this happy fallow period to work hard at improving their customer service in the event of an outage like this.

I was wrong.

Here’s how things have progressed over the last 15 minutes:

Upon noticing the problem, I phoned the Island Tel Advanced Solutions Help Desk. The call was answered on the first ring but, alas, I was informed that the number was no longer the number for the Help Desk and given a 1-888 number to call instead.

So I called this new number — 888-796-1825 — and a robot answered the phone and told me to “press 1 for network status.” So I did. And was told that “1 is not a valid option.” I tried again, just to be sure. No luck. So I pressed “3” for technical support and was told that all representatives were busy, but that my call was important to them and I should hold.

I held for a while, but no actual person being in evidence, I hung up and phoned another number — 800-773-2121 — which, oddly enough, appears to lead to a parallel help desk with a completely different set of options (but, alas, no “network status” option).

I selected the option for high-speed technical support, and this is where I’ve been parked for the last 8 minutes, listening to bizarre abbreviated versions of songs by the Nelly Furtado, Jann Arden, Jimmy Rankin, and kd lang. (Really: for some reason the “hold music” consists entirely of 60 second clips of pop music songs — just as things are getting good, they stop one song and cut over to another. Do they think we have short attention span, or is this simply a way of avoiding SOCAN fees?)

Now Lord knows I would never suggest that an ISP like Island Tel would be expected to offer 100% uptime — I probably couldn’t afford their services if they did. The question is not “can you be perfect?” but rather “how do you react when the inevitable problems that will occur, do?”

Wouldn’t it be an excellent business idea to use your own technical support line as a showcase for your telephony prowess rather than offering embarassingly long hold times and 60 second music clips?

I’m into 18 minutes on hold now, and the music’s wrapped around entirely, so I’ve heard the Nelly Furtado wrap around again.

Hey, the network just came back! I can’t stay on hold any longer — too much Jann Arden. I know I’ll never find out the cause of the outage. I’m out 1/2 an hour’s work, and 2 or 3 hours worth of concentration is shot. Sigh.