Henry Jamison dropped a new album today, Tourism:

The songs are about the road but also about the effect my touring had on my relationship (which was…not good).

The subject matter is clearly very personal, to me almost in a crushing way, so it felt especially good to work with more collaborators than I ever have. Each track features one of my favorite artists, all of whom I met out on the road.

The City of Charlottetown is in the final stages of rebuilding the traffic signalling at two downtown intersections, Kent & Great George and Kent & Prince. The new infrastructure at both intersections includes pedestrian call buttons, and these are of the “jam your finger into a rubber nobbly bit to activate a button underneath” type that look like this:

At other intersections in the city, rebuilt earlier, there’s a different kind of pedestrian call button, a large silver disk. The advantage of this type over the newer ones is that you don’t need to jam your finger into anything and, indeed, you can press the button with your wrist, your arm, your hip, your cane, or anything else. So you don’t actually need to touch anything directly:

While I like the fact that I don’t need to touch this kind of button, it also doesn’t have a lot of “travel,” meaning that most of the time I’m not 100% I’ve actually activated it: although in most cases there is an LED and and sound to provide feedback, I often remain unsure of whether my press has “taken.”

There’s a rarer third type of call button, the Guardian APS, installed at the corner of Prince and Euston when it was rebuilt some years ago. Confoundingly, these call buttons were disabled shortly after installation and have remained installed but non-functional in all the years since. While this model of button has laudable accessibility features, including audio and haptic feedback, and a design that reinforces, visually and by touch, the direction the signal activates, like the rubber-nobbly signals, they also require contact, and cannot be activated without it.

Which are the right buttons for the pandemic? Which are the right ones for accessibility? Is there a model that works for both?

Rules for using the telephone from The Island Telephone Company. We need the equivalent for Zoom.

The Morning Message from Archdeacon John Clarke today uses the sitcoms of Gary Marshall as its starting point. In other words, it is as if targeted directly at me.

Publisher Black Ink’s free May Day book this year is Cherish x Abolish. You can download a free PDF, or receive a printed book for the cost of postage.

In September my subscription to The New Yorker expired. I didn’t renew it.

I’d been a subscriber for more than 25 years, and I felt that a lapsed subscription, due nothing more than a change in credit card number, deserved a call from Calvin Trillin to make sure everything was okay.

No call came. So I let it lapse.

Eight months passed.

Today I opened my mailbox to find the May 4, 2020 issue waiting for me, with a label indicating expiration a year hence.

It was not outside the realm of possibility that I had inadvertently renewed the subscription: I haven’t been 100% myself for some time; who knows what I get up to in my dark midnights.

I called The New Yorker.

I talked to the friendliest person I’ve ever talked to on the phone. Way better than Calvin Trillin.

She looked up my record.

“You’ve received a gift subscription!”, she exclaimed.

“From whom?”, I asked, surprised.

“All it says in the system is ‘a friend’,” she replied.

“Isn’t it nice when that happens: you’ll always be wondering…”, she added.

“Indeed I will,” I chuckled.

We said hearty goodbyes, better-than-Calvin-Trillin clerk and I.

Whoever you may be, friend, þúsund takk.

With most of the new apartment buildings that are going up in Charlottetown these days coming right out of the “Apartments, Boxy” pages of the Sears catalogue, it’s easy to forget that, in Harbourside, we have an example of a well-designed, dense, mixed residential & commercial development that embraces the waterfront rather than dominating it.

Oliver is organizing an unconference, in Zoom, for this Friday.

Because we have all been confined to our homes for many weeks, the theme of the unconference, taking off from the theme of earlier unconferences, is “House Stuff that Matters” (HSTM), and we will gather and seek to answer the questions:

What have you learned from the pandemic that you want to keep for the future?

What do you like about the place where you live?

All are welcome to attend. Spread the word.

Friday’s update from the Chief Public Health Office, announcing a slight easing of the Prince Edward Island lockdown, makes allowances for polyamory, but with limits:

You may extend your household unit by one or two members, who are important to supporting your household or who you feel may need closer contact and support (ex: hug, handshake, etc.)