Back in the 1990s when you thought of Empire Theatres you’d picture a pokey regional film exhibitor with tiny, cramped theatres and a bad eye for picking films.

Things have changed: Empire has expanded out across the country through acquisition, has massively improved its theatres, and has adopted new web and payment technologies in a big way (it even uses Drupal to power its website).

It has even done away with the annoying “Hi, I’m Shawn, and I just want to let you know about some of the features of this theatre” performance by angsty teens and the full-on Stash your Trash advocacy that so inflamed the readers here 7 years ago.

Alas it still shows the same old Hollywood movies as the other guys, but what can you do.

My favourite new development at Empire is the option to buy paperless tickets from mobile devices. From its empiretheatres.mobi site (which renders quickly and well on both my iPod Touch and my [[Nokia N95]]), you simply select “Mobile Ticket” as the delivery option:

Once you’ve paid (Interac, credit card, gift card), you get a text message that looks like this:

Opening that link in a mobile browser on the device displays a QR code that you simply present to the usher, who scans it and waves you on.

Scanning the barcode with the scanner on my [[Nokia N95]] resolves it to the same  number that’s shown text in the browser, in this case T061 0751751, which I presume is the key to looking up my record in the database accessed by the usher.

I’ve used the system twice now, and everything has gone smoothly, and it’s nice not to have to wait in line or fight with the slightly-out-of-alignment touchscreens in the lobby to buy tickets.

Gulliver’s Travels, on the other hand, was a total disappointment: Jack Black was running on School of Rock auto-pilot, the talents of the rest of the cast were wasted (Billy Connolly was left to bumble awkwardly), the emotional content to the story wasn’t believable (it’s not enough to rely on a stock “lowly guy in the mail room” conceit to power a romance-based plot), and while the technical wizardry that allowed Black to become a giant was impressive, it was the only interesting thing about the film, and wore thing after 30 minutes. What a wasted opportunity.

Here’s is the 2011 levee schedule for January 1, 2011 for Charlottetown and area. If you’re new to all of this and want to give it a try, read How to Levee.  And if I’ve missed anything, please leave a comment.

All levee times and locations have been confirmed.

New this year from the University of PEI: “All UPEI alumni and their friends are invited to ride the Panther Bus as it hops between all the major levees happening in Charlottetown on New Year’s Day.” And who among us doesn’t have a friend who’s a UPEI alumnus!

It’s been awhile since I turned my attention toward [[Plazes]]: since its acquisition by Nokia several years ago there’s been no evolution of the application, and I’ve been expecting Nokia to quietly pull the plug on it someday. I’m not sure anyone would notice.

In the meantime, I have a chance to pull out the 10,000-odd geolocations that I stored in Plazes from 2004 to 2009, and this provided me with an opportunity to experiment with Yahoo Query Language (YQL), which is a powerful tool that wraps an SQL-like querying functionality around data provided in XML and JSON from services like Plazes.

Step one using YQL with a new data source is to set up an Open Data Table for it; I did this for Plazes, wiring up the past_activities API method that provides access to a given user’s historical “plazings” and the result is at:

http://media.ruk.ca/plazes/archive/plazes.xml

Once this is in place, you can start to use the web-based YQL console to explore Plazes data. For example, if your Plazes userid is fiahless, you can go to the console and paste in the following text in the “Your YQL Statement” text field and click “Test”:

use "http://media.ruk.ca/plazes/archive/plazes.xml" as plazes;
select * from plazes where userid = 'fiahless';

This will return the most recent 100 plazings for this user as XML. You can use any of the XML elements in the “where” part of your YQL query to limit your search. For example, this query will find my own recent plazings that have the word coffee in the status message:

use "http://media.ruk.ca/plazes/archive/plazes.xml" as plazes;
select * from plazes where userid = 'ruk' and status like '%coffee%';

And this query will search my most recent 1,000 plazings and find those where the address of the place I checked in contains the word Prince:

use "http://media.ruk.ca/plazes/archive/plazes.xml" as plazes;
select * from plazes(0,1000) where userid = 'ruk' and 
plaze.address like '%prince%';

You don’t need to configure anything to make this work for yourself; just use these queries as a starting point and start exploring using the YQL console yourself (note that if you get a Could not load table plazes from http://media.ruk.ca/plazes/archive/plazes.xml error from the console, just click Test again – there seems to be some sort of intermittent issue at YQL in retrieving external URLs at the moment).

Although it was overshadowed by our visit to Tipoteca the following week, it was not only the Italian take on the printing museum that we experienced during our trip to Europe: our first destination, to Basel, was inspired by the opportunity to visit Basler Papiermühle – the “Swiss Museum for Paper, Writing and Printing” – that’s located steps from the Rhine on Basel’s waterfront.

Like Tipoteca, the Papiermühle is a pleasantly “hands on” museum; while it’s not quite got the “you can try out anything” wonders of Tipoteca, it is full of opportunities to try out things like paper making, writing with a quill pen, setting type and printing.

Basler Papiermühle is a short 20-minute walk from central Basel; it’s in a very pleasant area of the city, and you might want to plan to spend extra time walking along the Rhine and visiting nearby art galleries and shops if you can.

We arrived at the museum on a bone-chillingly-damp Sunday afternoon; as it turns out, I’d read the information on the museum’s website incorrectly, and we were two hours early, as it doesn’t open until 2:00 p.m. We used the extra time to take a quick run through the nearby Museum für Gegenwartskunst and to have a quick lunch at the Papiermühle’s restaurant (very nice food; as shockingly expensive as eating out anywhere else in Basel).

When 2:00 p.m. arrived we were primed and ready for action. Our first stop was the paper making hall, where an actual water-mill-powered “beater” turns rag into pulp

When the pulp comes out the other side, ready for turning into paper, visitors get in on the action, taking a screen, complete with the Papiermühle logo watermark, and dipping into the vat of pulp, evenly spreading pulp across the screen, and then removing from the water, turning over onto felt, and then squeezing the water out with a press:

With the water removed the sheets of damp paper are placed in heat (inside something that looks like a T-shirt press) and a few minutes later they emerge as, well, paper. The effect is rather amazing, in part because the final product isn’t some weird paper-like creation, but rather something real that you’d be happy to write a letter home on.

Next step was the several rooms devoted to the art of writing. We got our names written in Chinese by a calligrapher, and then, in the next room, got to write a message with a quill pen, and then select a seal and hand it over to a woman who dribbled hot wax on the folded note and impressed the seal:

After writing came printing: the Papiermühle has an excellent collection of type, casting machines and presses along with exhibits illustrating the operating of each. The highlights of the printing exhibition were watching a man cast a Gutenberg-style letter “O” by hand from molten lead and, especially, the opportunity to set type and see it printed, much like a similar workshop at Tipoteca:

We also got the chance to try out a simple table-top platen press, and to explore the museum’s excellent collection of presses large and small.

From printing we finished up on the top floor with book binding, the only aspect of the museum that, alas, didn’t include a hand-on component, leaving us to simply watch a woman go through the process of assembling a book: interesting, but not as interesting as it would have been should we have been allowed to do it ourselves.

A quick trip through the museum bookshop (they have an online shop as well) and we were back into the chilly Basel evening.

While the Basler Papiermühle is more “museumy” than Tipoteca, it’s still an excellent showcase for art and science of paper, writing, typesetting, printing and bookbinding, and if you’ve an interest in any of these, and an afternoon in Basel, I highly recommend a visit.

Still one of my favourite musical moments on Prince Edward Island: Garnet Rogers at the Trailside Café in Mount Stewart in the fall of 2007. For reasons I cannot recall I was the emcee. The night ended with a 20 minute version of Night Drive and Northwest Passage that I grabbed the audio of by setting my phone on the table. It was a transcendent performance. If you like this, please go and buy some of Garnet’s albums.

Sometime between 8:00 p.m. and 9:00 p.m. Eastern Time last night a peace sign miraculously appeared on the lawn of the Yankee Publishing campus in Dublin, NH, something captured on the webcam.

When I’m singing the virtues of travel to people who haven’t traveled that much, inevitably the question of language barriers comes up, and my stock line is as follows: in any given situation in a non-English speaking country you find yourself there is a limited set of expected interactions.

You’re not going to walk into a bakery looking to buy a hammer, and desk clerks at hotels expect that people walking up to them will likely be looking for a room. This narrowing of the expected interactions is what makes travel without language possible, and there’s almost nothing you can’t achieve with some creative gesturing.

What I usually leave out of these calming words are the two or three situations where the rules don’t apply, which are generally when something unexpected happens (like walking into a bakery looking for a hammer).

The most common situation we’ve run into this is on trains, when there’s a change schedule. Traveling from Prague to Cheb in the Czech Republic in 1998, for example, an announcement came over the train’s public address system that was obviously important but that we couldn’t understand a single word of. As it turned out, the train couldn’t proceed any further, and a transfer to bus was required. Fortunately our compartment-mates saw the confused looks on our faces and generously guided us through the change in plans.

That’s what usually happens – things work out, somehow – and it’s often these “plans going off the rails” moments of travel that turn out to be the favourite memories of a trip.

At the end of our trip to Europe earlier this month we had a partial derailment that ended up working out perfectly.

Oliver and I, leaving [[Catherine]] to explore Munich’s fine art galleries, headed off for a day of museum touring. We started off with the Deutsches Museum and my plan for the afternoon was to visit the Kindermuseums München attached to the central train station. Unfortunately when we arrived at the expected 2:00 p.m. opening time for this museum, it was empty and closed. So we needed a Plan B. While I was rumbling around for said Plan B, I came across this poster:

I snapped a photo and then Oliver and headed off for the BMW Museum near Munich’s Olympic Park (a fruitful diversion, but not something I would go out of my way to visit unless you’re a fan of brand BMW).

We met up with Catherine back at the central station at 6:00 p.m. and I proposed the idea of seeking out the circus (we were fresh off watching the PBS series Circus, and so well-primed for the opportunity). Catherine was enthusiastic, and so we decided to find the circus first, then find something for supper.

Unfortunately the Circus Roncalli website is almost completely unusable on an iPod Touch, the only web-connected device we had between us, and so exactly where to find the circus was somewhat unclear.

I consulted the U-bahn map and spotted a Westpark stop and reasoned that if we simply took the U-bahn to that stop and wandered around, we’d likely find the circus.

I was wrong.

When we emerged into the chilly Munich night at Westpark there was no circus in evidence. I popped in to a fried chicken shack to seek directions and the clerk there looked at me as though I was on the wrong planet – “you’ll need to take at least 3 buses to get there,” she said.

I decided to ignore her advice, as it wasn’t hopeful enough.

Looking again at the map, I reasoned that the circus must be in Westpark, the park, which appeared to be just up the road. So we headed in that direction on foot. The sidewalk gradually deteriorated as we entered an area of road construction, but we forged on. Eventually we came to a highway overpass that seemed unpassable by pedestrians, but I spotted an underpass that seemed to lead into a park – a park! just what we were looking for! – and so we headed down, passing, it seems in retrospect, into the heart of the construction zone, with its machinery and muck and general chaos.

By the time we ended up in darkness, tripping into a (shallow) hole that we couldn’t see, we reasoned it was time to abandon ship. We made our way back to civilization and stopped in at a gas station and asked the clerk to call a cab for us. She decided she couldn’t do this, but would, instead, give us the address of the gas station and the number of a cab company.

I tried, in vain, to call a cab. And so I did what I should have done in the first place: I called the number on the Circus Roncalli poster.

A very pleasant woman in the box office answered on the first ring. She spoke English. She confirmed that we were in the wrong place: yes, the circus was at Westpark, but at the other end, the far away other end of the park. We needed to take a cab. But tickets were still available, so if we hurried – it was now almost half past seven – we could still make the show.

At this exact moment Catherine, using some sort of voodoo magic that I don’t completely understand, made a taxi stop immediately in front of us. We got in. I showed the driver the circus poster on my phone. He drove us there in 10 minutes (it would have been a very long walk should we have been able to find our way through the muck). He dropped us directly in front of the box office. We gave him a healthy tip.

Lest you think our troubles were now over, it turns out that (a) circus tickets in Germany are expensive (or at least more expensive than the $2 I remember paying when the circus came to town in the 1970s in rural Ontario) and (b) you cannot pay for circus tickets with a credit card.

The total cost for the three of us was 86 EUR – about $110. I got out my wallet (we weren’t walking away at this point) and scoured my pocket for change. By some miracle, I managed to cobble together exactly 86 EUR.  I mean exactly, like “oh, and here’s the last 10 cents!”

Tickets in hand, we joined the line and got a look at the circus tent from the outside:

About 10 minutes later the line started moving forward and we made our way to Section B and found a seat, picking up some pretzels and popcorn with the dregs of Catherine’s change purse on the way.

The crowd – the tent was almost full – was mostly adults; I think Oliver may have been one of only 2 or 3 people under 18. A school night, I imagine; not time for family circus night. The ring awaited, bathed in spotlights:

And at 8:00 p.m. a Boomer Gallant-like janitor figure walked into the ring, transformed himself into a clown, and the circus began.

It was fantastic: two hours of unrelenting action, woven together by Beatles music, a loosely-knit drama about the clown cum janitor, and featuring some amazing performances by acrobats, jugglers, bubble-blowers, and strongmen. There were horses, and dogs. An intermission, and then more. By the time it was all over – the closing sequence saw the janitor welcomed into the circus family – there were tears in our eyes and smiles in our hearts. The evening was worth every cent I dug out of my pockets for it.

We headed off into a now-drizzling night and asked for directions to the bus home, which turned out to leave just around the corner. An hour and a bus and tram right later, we were snug in our beds, ready to catch the plane back to Charlottetown in the morning.

Sometime last month I came across a factoid while surfing the web: on July 12, 2011 Neptune will have completed its first orbit of the sun since it was first discovered in 1846. This stuck in my head, and when it came time to find a theme for a holiday card to create with my letterpress, it seemed perfect (and also a way of avoiding the banality of Happy Holidays and the insincerity, for me the irreligious, of Merry Christmas).

But how to craft a Neptune. I’m a printer, not an artist, and my ability to represent the world in things other than letters is extremely limited. But I decided to make a go of it and see if I could make a reasonable facsimile of something Neptunian on paper.

I started with a 3 inch by 4 inch piece of Speedyball’s Speedy-Carve that I bought at Michaels out at the edge of town (they have a tiny selection of lino-block printing gear, but it’s enough to start out with):

The Speedy-Carve blocks have the benefit of being relatively forgiving to the novice carver, but are otherwise a thoroughly unfulfilling medium; they lack the heft of real lino-block and the effect is not unlike carving a pencil eraser. But they’re cheap, and I needed to start somewhere. I tried to get an idea of what Neptune looks like using Google Image search and then made a sketch on paper:

The parts the “stick out” are the parts that get printed, so I had to carve away most of the block. To do the carving I fortunately had the lend of a very nice set of carving tools from [[Dave]] via [[Erin]]:

The end result of the carving was this:

Rather than trying to print this on the letterpress, I decided to just ink this block and lay the card blanks over and roll the back with an empty ink brayer. I would have preferred to use water-based ink to print this part of the card, but I only had soy-based blue ink (the dregs of a can I generously received from Kwik Kopy a few months ago), to things were messier and stickier and harder-to-clean. But it worked.

I printed 30 cards on pre-cut and folded Strathmore Stamping Cards I picked up in Halifax at DeSerres on Barrington Street (the cards were fine for the lino-block printing, but the paper wasn’t the greatest for using on the letterpress and I wish I’d invested in a better, more appropriate grade of paper).

I set the “holiday messaging” in Gill Sans 12 point and once the blue ink had dried overnight I printed the message on the 21 cards that emerged from the block printing without ink splattered in inconvenient places. The end result looked like this:

The cards aren’t 100% satisfying to me, and if I’d had more time and taken more care I could have made them more to my liking. But I’m taking a “it’s better to do a lot of printing jobs somewhat well than to do no printing jobs perfectly” approach to learning letterpress (“release early, release often” we say in the software world). So they’re Good Enough.

I’m fortunate to have more than 21 friends and family, so I was forced to choose a random group of recipients: I ended up sending 4 to Europe, 3 to the U.S., and the remainder to PEI and the rest of Canada. If you received one (or are about to: mail is slow), please enjoy; if you didn’t, then you’re still invited to have a Happy New Year and I’ll catch you at Valentines or Easter.