There was a promo in regular rotation on CTV many years ago for the morning show Canada AM that featured Ed Robertson from Barenaked Ladies responding to a question about whether the band regretted its name. His reply was along the lines of “if you’d called your show ‘Wake up Jerks!’ you’d probably regret it.”

In a similar vein, my work once saw me spending time with the parent of one of the members of the band Holy Fuck. Despite, or perhaps because, his job was one requiring an uncommon amount of propriety, I always got the sense that he took a devilish pride in the name his son’s band.

It’s hard not to think of these bands when I think of The Man The Myth The Meatslab, the musical sobriquet of Jamie Clarke. It’s a memorable name, no doubt, but it quite doesn’t roll off the tongue. I wonder if he regrets it.

Regardless, TMTMTM released Until The Comet Came this week, and, unwieldy name or no, it’s a tiny perfect 16 minutes of rollicking songs that I dare you to emerge from a listen to unhappy. 

I can’t exactly tell you why I love it so, but I do.

Lisa writes about Leona’s Fox, the varied edition of reduction prints she’s been working on this month and finished up yesterday:

For the past few weeks I have been picking away (well, carving away) a linoleum block to help a red fox emerge from it. And emerge he has, in a varied edition of ten prints.  He’s unmistakably a fox, and I am proud I saw this experiment through until the end.

I watched this print come together, watched as Lisa lost control of it, walked through the valley of unease, and brought it back. It’s a lovely print (for sale in our shop).

The East Pointers released Schoonertown last week, and it’s been on regular rotation here since.

Most of the tracks are familiar, having been titrated out to us to enjoy individually over the last year. There are some new ones, though, and Sea Spirit is by far and away my favourite.

It is by no means a classic East Pointers song; indeed, it stands quite apart from the rollicking good times of the rest of the album. 

More than anything, it evokes the music of The Gloaming (the Irish-American supergroup), music I first encountered in this brilliant piece of television a decade ago, music that seems both fresh and new and like it’s always existed, music that, in the right frame of mind, can induce tears.

Not surprising given the track’s provenance, as the band described to Spill:

The East Pointers managed to pay tribute to Koady with a song that he actually wrote. The song, “Sea Spirit” is a beautiful instrumental and it anchors the album, both in tone and location.

“We finished off the album with that,” said Chaisson. “It is actually an instrumental track that Koady wrote. He wrote that and we always had in our pocket as a band and not knowing what to do with it. I remember Koady writing it and we were going to write lyrics to it, and we never had a proper recording of Koady playing. So, Jake and I decided to sit down at the piano and the fiddle and have our take of it. Really, the ‘sea spirit’ title comes from Koady. We all love the sea, but Koady especially loved it and made his living on the sea as well. We thought it was an appropriate way to wrap up the album. There’s a lot of themes throughout the album, but “Sea Spirit” wraps it all up.”

“There’s an interesting moment recording that too,” added Charron, “I live right across from an elementary school and while we were recording it, the recess was on, and you couldn’t really hear it inside, and we thought, we should put a mic outside and capture some of this. It just felt that the timing was really nice because Koady had such a youthful energy too. There is melancholy to it, but a bit of hope. It turned out really nice.”

“There is melancholy to it, but a bit of hope.” That’s it, exactly.

November 16, 2005 was the day I first encountered Gordon Cobb, who died at age 61, just before Christmas. I know this because I sent an email to a friend, reflecting on Gordon’s taking the “no” side in a small debate about a plebiscite, then soon to be held, on proportional representation:

You once told me (and I paraphrase, but closely) that Ivan MacArthur and Gordon Cobb are the “two smartest political organizers on PEI.”

Last night I had my first meeting with Gordon Cobb, a small event
organized by Cynthia Dunsford at the Queen St. Commons structured as a “debate about the plebiscite.”

Gordon was representing the “no,” and the young fellow who’s head of the “yes” spoke to the affirmative.

Both speakers made a good case, and I came away more confused than not.

Before the session I was leaning “yes” quite strongly; Gordon’s
eloquence, and his well-rationed arguments have me leaning equally in both directions.

Inasmuch as I was, and remain, a fervant believer in proportional representation, that Gordon had me wavering was testament to his oratory, his intelligence, and his political smarts (my correspondent replied, in part, “Gordon is that he is without a doubt the most devastating debater I know of…”).

That was 20 years ago. Gordon and I were friends, of a type, since.

Not a close friendship—I never went to his house, he never came to mine; we never exchanged emails or texts; I have no photos of him, knew nothing of his personal life; we never met, indeed, outside of happenstance encounters —but a friendship nonetheless. 

More often than not we would end up chatting at Receiver Coffee on Victoria Row, and more often than not we would end up chatting about the broad political or cultural themes of the day.

Gordon was a determined thinker, with a reasoned, deliberate, systematic mind; he had a way of seeing the larger picture, understanding the players and their motivations, perceiving how the chess board might move forward. In conversation, he listened (an uncommon skill, especially for men of our generation).

In the month since he died I’ve come to realize that Gordon was knit into the fabric of Island life very deeply. The list of people who counted him as a friend is long; the list of people testifying to the depth and importance of their friendship with him longer than I could have imagined.

Last Thursday we went to The Trailside for an edition of the Jack Pine Folk Club dedicated to Gordon’s memory (before he died he was to have appeared in the guise of Milton Acorn). Poets read poems—their own, Gordon’s—songs were sung, glasses raised. 

Someone from away, landing in the middle of it, would think it an unusual gathering, in part because of the very nature of the “and now a few jigs, reels, and hornpipes,” but, more so, because, as Gordon himself wasn’t there, they’d encounter only the shadow he cast, and be left wondering about the strength of one person’s imprint on such a motley collection of people.

James Baldwin wrote this in 1955, reckoning with life in Paris:

One had, in short, to come into contact with an alien culture in order to understand that a culture was not a community basket-weaving project, nor yet an act of God; was something neither desirable nor undesirable in itself, being inevitable, being nothing more or less than the recorded and visible effects on a body of people of the vicissitudes with which they had been forced to deal. And their great men are revealed as simply another of these vicissitudes, even if, quite against their will, the brief battle of their great men with them has left them richer.

Surely, in that light, Gordon was a “great man.” In thousands of conversations, scores of appearances on stage, prose and poetry, political machinations in the back room and out front, he made a mark. On Prince Edward Island. On all of us.

Prince Edward Island electricity load exceeded 400 MW for the first time ever today, measured at 5:44 p.m (chart). The temperature at the time was -16ºC, with a wind chill of -21ºC.

The previous peak was yesterday (398 MW); before that it was February 4, 2023 (394 MW).

At the time of today’s peak, 25% of load was being met by wind generation, 18% from on-Island fossil fuel generation, and 56% was being imported by cable from the mainland.

Buy a Print

Mandy Brown wrote, in Too Much and not enough:

Once you accept (or re-accept) that there is too much, it becomes easier to turn some things away. You may still feel grief or loss at the things you cannot do. You may feel guilt, especially if an institution or person benefits from you feeling that way. But accepting that you must leave some things undone shifts the problem from one of *being not enough* to one of *being in a position to make choices*. And even when those choices are coupled to difficult or prickly constraints, they are still choices.

Deciding to do something means deciding to not do all the other things. If you walk west, you’re deciding not to walk east, or north, or south.

Faced with this realization, a comfortable place to land is in the paralysis of inaction. There’s an allure to the infinite choices available before a decision is made: having limitless possibilities in the air is intoxicating; why not just stay there.

This phenomenon is at play in me, in matters big and small, every day. Writing down a list of things I’ll commit to doing today is a powerful route to productivity, but it means leaving off all the other things. So why not just do nothing!

This was all very much in the air this week, and so, mindful of Brown’s advice that “you must leave some things undone,” I created myself a reminder that sometimes the way forward is to narrow the options.

I’ve printed a limited edition of 14, and they are for sale in the Queen Square Press shop.

When Lisa and I were in the first flush of new love, Mondays would see a flurry of texts from me to her, a deluge of sparks and inspirations, pointers and exclamations, all to fill the hole that was left when she and L. returned home to Brighton after a weekend together.

It turns out that text messages are the worst way to run an intra-couple social network: shared objects of fascination get intermixed with requests to pick up milk and warnings about icy sidewalks.

Lisa already has an RSS feedreader purring along on her iPhone, so I realized that I had all the pieces of a solution to this: I could build her a custom RSS feed of things I wanted to share with her, liberating them from the prison of SMS. 

Here’s how I did it.

First, I built a very simple MacOS Shortcut:

This Shortcut—which automagically works on both MacOS and iOS—receives a URL from the “Share Sheet” and sends it to to a URL, as JSON, on a webserver, and then displays a notification that it happened.

In practice, using this from a browser is as simple as clicking the “Share” icon, selecting Shortcuts, and then selecting “To Lisa.”

On the server side, I have a PHP script that does the following:

1. Receives the JSON from the POST, and looks for the ‘url’ payload.
2. Grabs the page in question, and uses readability.php to turn it into a simple, stripped-down readable chunk of text.
3. Adds the URL, the page title, the body text from Readability, and the current date, and adds a record to an SQLite database.
4. Dumps all the URLs in the SQLite database into an RSS feed, which Lisa has subscribed to in her feedreader.

It’s 130 lines of pretty simple PHP.

On Lisa’s end, the feed looks like this:

This all took about an hour to put together, and I’m proud of my home cooking.

My friend (and prototypical blogger) Catherine gave me her Olympia Monica electric typewriter many years ago. After a flurry of typing initially, it sat fallow for a time. When I returned to use it a few years ago, it suddenly stopped working, due, I found later, a slipped drive belt.

When I finally got around to fixing the drive belt last month, I was disheartened to find that the typewritter ribbons I’d been carefully saving had gone missing in one of our print shop cleanups. I was ribbonless.

Fortunately, Toronto Typewriters is still in business, and a few days ago my shipment of a Black Dog Universal Typewriter Ribbon arrived. 

It’s not cheap, the ribbon is made in the USA, but at least it’s “lovingly spooled in-house” in Toronto.

It took me awhile to remember how to properly wind the ribbon through the typewriter, but I figured out out.

Stay tuned, correspondents, for typewritten missives.

If Air Canada cooperates, I’ll move back home tonight, after spending the last 11 nights up the street, caring for my mother, and the resident cats, as my brother Mike and his partner Karen have been away on vacation.

This has gifted us a lot of time with Mom, and a lot of time with cats. I’m allergic to cats (but not to my mother); Claratin has done a halfway decent job of keeping my allergies at bay. 

Also, cats are, I have to admit, occasionally adorable.

CatCamp is halfway between regular everyday life and suspended animation, and I will be happy to sleep in my own bed tonight.

Mita Williams, writing in this week’s University of Winds:

Last week, [Jamelle] Bouie published a 14 minute video on YouTube called Everything is Gender which is “a look at the gender politics of, and gender anxieties behind, MAGA foreign policy in the second Trump term.” It is very good and you should watch it.

You might blanch at the idea that having an understanding of gender politics is critical to better understand both historical politics and this present moment, but consider that reaction is also (likely) gender politics.

It is very good, and you should watch it.