All it took was 15 minutes at the Genius Bar to get the sound working on Oliver’s MacBook Air (it was simply a loose connection inside). No charge.

Is there a better room to watch movies in than The Oxford in Halifax? One of the last surviving un-multiplexed theatres. Here to see The Lady in the Van.

The proper thing to do on the way to Halifax, although it flies directly in the face of my no doubling back rule, is to stop for lunch in Sackville at the Black Duck.

Catherine and her friend BJ are working on an epic piece together.

Those were the days.

A small item on the front page of The Guardian from March 16, 1916 concerning the application for divorce of Major Hamilton Gault being denied by the Senate.

Follow this thread and you end up learning about a fascinating person; even just the story of the divorce – which he eventually secured – is compelling.

Postscript: Gault’s first wife, Marguerite Claire Stephens, the other party to this application for divorce, went on to remarry; her second marriage was to Count Luigino Falchi, an “Italian war ace.”

That marriage too ended in divorce, and after Stephens’ death her estate was disputed, as reported in the September 29, 1931 edition of the Montreal Gazette. 

The case, wherein Stephens’ ex-husband Falchi sued the executor of Stephens’ estate for $370,000 based on his assertion that, under Italian law, he was entitled to this after their divorce; Stephens’ estate responded that, because Stephens was never legally divorced from Gault, her marriage to Falchi was invalid, and therefore he was not entitled to compensation. The case was successful, and the estate was ordered to compensate Falchi.

Stephens’ executor appealed to the Supreme Court of Canada which dismissed the appear in June of 1938 with costs, ruling that the Falchi-Stephens marriage was legal.

One of the downsides to lacking a fuller formal education is that I don’t recognize concepts from Shakespeare. But fortunately I can Google them. And this is a lovely one (it’s from Henry IV, Part 2). The snippet below is from an excellent article on squash (and aging, and fatherhood) by Tad Friend in the January 18, 2016 issue of The New Yorker.

Also, I turn 50 in twenty days. So it’s timely.

On the way back to town from the dentist in Cornwall this afternoon we spotted a new shop, Natural Power Solar Products, in the plaza across from the post office. Curiousity got the best of of us, and we popped over for a look.

Inside we found owner Shirley Han, and an array of solar things, the most prominent of which, on display in the middle of the shop, was a portable solar kitchen — Kitchen of Wonderland reads the brochure:

It’s an intriguing product, one that brought back memories of trying to build a solar-powered bread oven at reboot in 2009. They have a large unit in stock, with smaller ones on the way; pricing seems to be in the $300-$600 range, although that needs to be worked out once everything is through customs.

It’s hard not to fall for the infectious bravado of the brochure – “This creation may be greater than Steve Jobs’s iphone” – especially if the reported 3-6 minutes for popcorn popping is accurate. I’ve encouraged them, once the warmer months arrive, to attract customers by setting up a unit in the parking lot: there’s steady traffic from the grocery store next door.

In addition to solar kitchens, they also sell “power banks” that you can charge from a solar panel or from the mains that you can then use to power a mobile phone or tablet, and there’s a larger array of solar products en route from China as we speak, due to arrive soon.

We’ve been beneficiaries of new restaurants and grocery stores in the Charlottetown area from the wave of Asian immigration over the last decade; it’s great to see new initiatives like this that fall outside the food realm.

A capability heretofore unavailable to we Canadians had recently been enabled for Android: identifying music that’s playing.

If you say “OK Google” (or tap the speaker icon on the home screen), if there’s music playing a musical note icon will appear: tap it and Google will, Shazam-style, attempt to identify the track.