Before he assumed the Larry King spot on CNN earlier this week my only exposure to Piers Morgan was through his appearance on the celebrity version of The Apprentice. While that show was a showcase for essentially all that is wrong with humanity, and so perhaps not a fair environment in which to make judgments about its participants, Morgan came off a prat even amongst company like Gene Simmons and Stephen Baldwin, which is an accomplishment.

So, suffice to say, I didn’t have high hopes for Piers Morgan Tonight on CNN: I assumed it would be a cross between TMZ, Access Hollywood and Larry King Live.

It is not.

The new show is simple: an one-hour interview with a single guest. It has more in common with The Dick Cavett Show than with Larry King Live.

Morgan asks interesting questions, sometimes unpredictable ones. He is kind to his guests, but not fawning (well, he was fawning with Oprah, his first guest, but he can be forgiven that). He does not try to be hip or “with it”  (see George Stroumboulopoulos Tonight) and he does not appear to have any designs on reinventing the chat show format.

The result is oddly-compelling television: last night’s hour with Ricky Gervais (ignore the first couple of minutes of mindless prattle) was entirely unlike the standard 7 or 8 minute “so, apparently you’re into ice cream sundaes!” late night show. It wasn’t quite Charlie Rose, but if you watch the 2004 interview Rose did with Gervais, I’d argue that Piers Morgan’s interview was better television.

The key to enjoying Piers Morgan Tonight is to completely ignore the CNN hype machine that surrounds it: if only CNN showed the same minimalist approach to promoting the show that they have in designing the show and its set it would feel a lot less like getting hit over the head repeatedly with a Piers Morgan hammer in the hours leading up to the show, and likely more viewers would tune in.

Soupy Saturday
Back Alley Music
Saturday, January 22, 2011
Noon to 3:00 p.m.

I support school breakfast programs – where any student who wants to can get a free breakfast, every school day, before school starts – for entirely selfish reasons: I want the all the kids sitting in [[Oliver]]’s classroom to be well-fed to start off the day. I’m enough of a “if I don’t eat I turn catatonic” to know that having breakfast is an inviolate qualification for being able to learn.

Prince Street School, where Oliver is in grade four, is lucky to have a well-run breakfast program spearheaded by the school’s resource teachers, supported by the Principal and volunteers and stocked with a small amount of core funding, milk donated by Purity Dairy and bagels donated by the Great Canadian Bagel, and from financial donations from near and far.

It’s not an ideal setup: there’s a lot of volunteer time spent by teachers and staff trying to keep the program afloat that could be better spent on, well, learning. In a perfect world breakfast programs would be publicly funded, with paid coordinators and a wider array of healthy food choices. But until that happens, we all rely on the kindness of others to support breakfast programs.

To this end, you’re invited to Back Alley Music (69 University Ave. in Charlottetown) this Saturday, January 22, 2011 from Noon to 3:00 p.m. for Soupy Saturday: there will be soup from Ted Grant (Culinary Institute) on offer, in return for a donation, and entertainment from musicians Tanya Davis, Kelley Mooney, and Peter Winn.

Thanks to friend-of-the-blog Ann Thurlow for shepherding this effort.

You might think that “debossing” is some sort of revolutionary employment tactic. And perhaps it is. But it’s also “the reverse of embossing, or the use of heated dies to stamp or press a depressed image into a substrate.” It turns out that if you take an engraving, like the Reinvented logo I had made for letterpress printing and don’t apply any ink to it, you can press it into dampened paper with the force of a letterpress and get something that looks like this:

Iceland’s musicians (see also sigur rós) continue to be some of the countries most powerful ambassadors. Witness this video from Rökkurró: makes me want to go and hang out in a barn in the Icelandic countryside. The excellent SONIC ICELAND is a great starting point for diving into the Icelandic music scene as is the compilation album Soundtrip Iceland.

This April marks the fortieth anniversary of the passage of An Act to Provide for the Prohibition of Certain Public Gatherings by the Prince Edward Island Legislative Assembly, a law considered and passed in two hours on April 6, 1971. There’s an excellent article (PDF) in the Fall-Winter 2002 issue of The Island Magazine by Greg Marquis that describes the context that gave rise to the act:

The event that sparked the national controversy, and prompted a national radio show host to dub Prince Edward Island the “uptight little Island,” was Junction ‘71. Starting in February, two local promoters planned a rock festival at the arena in the village of Parkdale, a Charlottetown suburb that hosted events such as cattle shows and Old Home Week. Given subsequent fears of sex, drugs and rock and roll, the lineup appeared relatively harmless. It consisted of Canadian pop group Edward Bear whose hits included “You, Me and Mexico,” the group Ocean whose song “Put Your Hand in the Hand,” penned by Gene MacLellan, sold two million copies, and folk singer Bruce Cockburn who had performed on the soundtrack of the film Goin’ Down the Road. Also on the bill were Maritime rockers Pepper Tree (“Love Is a Railroad”) and Sam Moon and the Universal Power. The youthful promoters, who thought that they had proceeded through the proper channels, planned to donate 50% of the gate to the Easter Seals Campaign.

With the help of an excellent reference librarian at Robertson Library, I include the text of the Act below as it doesn’t exist in digital form anywhere else.

As it turns out, cooler heads prevailed, and the Act was repealed; as Marquis relates:

At first Premier Campbell stood firm, arguing that recent riots in the United States proved the need to prevent volatile gatherings of youth before they got out of hand. The government maintained its right to ensure public order. But in the face of negative publicity, and criticism both on and off the Island, within two weeks the Liberals announced that they would repeal Bill 55 in the fall of 1971. The “Public Order Act” would be replaced by a new measure recommended by a committee of citizens. The Premier now admitted that the government had acted in haste and declared that he was opposed to neither rock music nor hippies. But he claimed that the incident had served a useful purpose in generating dialogue on “the generation gap.”

This is such a delightful slice of Prince Edward Island history; packed into the episode is so much Prince Edward Islandness, and so much of the zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Many of the politicians and public servants of the day are still with us, so I hope that some sort of memorializing of the event will take place this April. Perhaps a public gathering?

To my surprise, Netflix Canada has been serving up enough interesting stuff to keep us on the hook for the $8.00 a month subscription. Indeed if they continue to expand their selection and add more contemporary programming, the prospect of canceling the Eastlink cable and using Netflix as our television provider is within the realm of possibility.

It’s weird watching movies and TV shows on Netflix: we have our Nintendo Wii hooking up to our regular old 1990s-era Sony television, so watching something on Netflix is just like watching something “on television.” Except that there are no commercials on Netflix. And no censorship (I watched episodes of MI-5 on PBS and Netflix on the same day, and the only difference is that PBS bleeps out “offensive” language).

In this light, Netflix certainly makes “broadcast regulation” appear absurd: why “broadcast” television and “Internet television” are subject to different regulations perplexes me, especially when they ride into our television on exactly the same wire.

Here’s what’s kept me hooked on Netflix’s Canadian streaming of late:

• Survivors (Netflix has series one and series two, 6 episodes each) is a science fiction series from the BBC. Set in the U.K. after a flu virus has killed most of the people on earth. A good cast and an interesting conceit.
• Billy Connolly: Journey to the Edge of the World is a travel series hosted by the Scottish comedian that takes him from Halifax to Vancouver Island by way of Newfoundland, Baffin Island and the Northwest Passage. It’s a little goofy, and Connolly seems to have only one emotion, “giddy delight,” but it’s interesting to see my own country through other eyes, and the scenery in the north is beautiful.
• The Black Donnellys is a 13-episode Paul Haggis television series that ran on NBC in 2007 but was canceled. It’s set in New York City, and is a pretty straightforward “Irish mob drama” but with a compelling cast of characters and some good writing.
• Zack and Miri Make a Porno, a Kevin Smith film. I found it endearing; everyone else in the room hated it. You have been warned.
• Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay is another film that only I liked. I read it as “biting commentary on contemporary social mores” whereas my TV-mates saw it as “vulgar teenaged pot movie with lots of fart jokes.”
• I Like Killing Flies, a documentary about the New York restaurant Shopsins and the family that runs it, is the best thing I’ve watched on Netflix so far.
• Runaway Train is a 1985 Jon Voight and Eric Roberts movie. When I mentioned Unstoppable on Twitter, people told me to watch this instead. Very 1985 and a lot of grunting, but if you like train movies it will hold your attention.

I’ve been using a cheap Nexxtech-brand USB headset with my MacBook for several years now. I bought it at The Source (née Radio Shack) for under $20.00 and I like it: it’s light, the microphone boom swoops out of the way for plain headphone-only use, and the Mac recognizes it without problems.

There’s one vexing problem with the headset, though: when I use it on VOIP calls (with the excellent Telephone application), after 52 minutes (exactly, every time), it starts distorting the microphone output (headphone input continues to work without issue) and the party on the other end of the line reports that I “sound like the Borg.”

While this “feature” is excellent for limiting conference calls to 52 minutes in length, and while the simple solution to it would be to replace the headset, I’m curious about the root cause.

I recall Leo Laporte mentioning something about a USB chipset in headsets that had this kind of issue, but I haven’t been able to find the reference.

Any thoughts? (And any recommendations for a lightweight under-$100 USB headset to replace this one with?)

One of the great gifts we’ve received at Prince Street School this year is a large community of Bhutanese and Chinese students whose parents are becoming very involved in Home and School activities. For our last two Home and School meetings this participation has been greatly aided by the presence of simultaneous translation into Nepali and Mandarin; our next step is to work on getting printed materials for our meetings – agenda, minutes, financial reports, etc. – translated into both Nepali and Chinese.

At last night’s meeting one of the items of the agenda was Teacher and Staff Appreciation Week in February, a week when the Home and School traditionally works to show our gratitude to teachers and staff by doing things like bringing in snacks and providing lunch. After this information was translated into Nepali last night there was a lot of discussion among the Bhutanese parents, at the end of which came an offer to provide a Bhutanese lunch on the Friday of that week.

This was an important breakthrough both because it wouldn’t have been possible without a translator present, and because it means that our Bhutanese parents are taking on a more active role in the work of the Home and School.

All the parents present agreed this would be an excellent idea, with many angling for an opportunity to “help out” on that day so as to be able to dip into the reportedly-spicy Bhutanese food.

My current project in this regard is working to make the Home and School’s website multilingual. I’m working with the nascent Drupal 7 to do this, along with the Translation Management and Internationalization modules to translate content and the Locale module and the related Nepali and Simplified Chinese projects to translate the Drupal interface. What with Drupal 7 being nascent and all, this solution isn’t quite ready for prime time yet – the various modules throw the occasional error messages, and make Drupal a little funky – but it’s working enough that it makes sense to work with Drupal 7 instead of Drupal 6.

If you happen to have English-Nepali or English-Chinese translation skills and want to help out with this effort (or if you happen to have money and want to help out with this effort), we could certainly use the support: the Nepali and Simplified Chinese localizations of Drupal 7 are only partially complete, and there’s a lot of work to be done translating the daily business of the Home and School.

There’s a great article in the New York Times today titled Where Do All the Cabs Go in the Late Afternoon? which cites the following as the reason that taxi cab shifts switchover between 4:00 p.m. and 5:00 p.m.:

The explanation for the 5 p.m. dip is steeped in the history and economics of the taxi industry. Many taxicabs are used by two drivers a day, each working a 12-hour shift. To ensure that each leg is equally attractive, taxi owners schedule the shift change in the middle of the afternoon, so each shift gets a rush hour.

But the switch can’t happen too early, either: a 2 p.m. changeover, for instance, would require a day driver to start his 12-hour shifts in the wee hours of the morning. And cabbies say the midafternoon offers brisk business not evident 12 hours later, when fares mainly consist of late-night revelers.

I love it when systems design bumps up against inviolable limits like “there are only 24 hours in a day” and “people gotta sleep.”

Exactly the same logic led Oliver and I to select Bathurst, New Brunswick as the destination for our 2007 late-summer vacation, the one where I vowed that we wouldn’t involve any automobiles in our transportation.

We were catching the VIA train north from Moncton, and we needed a destination where the arriving train didn’t arrive too late at night and where the departing train, 3 days later, didn’t leave at some unholy hour in the morning. Bathurst fit the bill perfectly.

I’m very late to the party with this, but man-oh-man was this an amazing project.