Let’s say I have this friend.  We’ll call him Dwayne.

Dwayne and I have this routine.  Every night at 6 o’clock Dwayne comes over to the house for a chat.  We talk about all sort of things: local events, world issues, the weather.

We’ve been doing this for years, and it’s one of my favourite parts of the day.  As far as I know, Dwayne has always felt the same way.  Indeed Dwayne and I have what I’ve always thought to be one of the stronger friendships around.

Suddenly, at the beginning of this week, Dwayne goes a little weird on me. Says we’ve gotta start getting together at 5 o’clock instead of 6 o’clock.  And we can’t really talk about things so deeply any more, he warns me; gotta keep it light, breezy.

Or maybe we can talk about serious things later.  Like he’ll say “I heard about this crazy thing that happened downtown this morning.  Tell you about it later.”  It’s very off-putting.

To make matters worse, at 5:30 Dwayne suddenly gets up to leave, and this other guy, a guy I don’t know named Maurice, from New Brunswick, shows up.  Tries to go all Dwayne on me, but in a way that makes it clear he’s got no idea about Dwayne, or about me.

Just as I’m getting over this whole Maurice thing, at 6 o’clock Dwayne’s back, and wants to rehash everything we talked about at 5 o’clock, but now he’s all serious and deep again.  Except he wants to talk about the weather too.

Needless to say, my once close relationship with Dwayne is getting strained.  I feel like I don’t know him any more.  I feel like he’s at the mercy of forces beyond his control.

It may be over for me and Dwayne.  Which is really sad.  Because, like I said, my daily time with Dwayne has always been one of the highlights of my day.

I’ve written before about the excellent isle@sk service, also known as “the only useful project to come out of the Smart Communities pot of gold.”  You ask a question, and within a day one of the Island’s crack reference librarians gets back to you with answer.  I’ve used it several times, and I’ve always been pleased — overwhelmed even — by the results.

If you’ve read The 4-Hour Work Week, you know that “personal outsourcing” is all the rage these days: using the Internet to get “it doesn’t matter where you do the work from” work done for you by pay-as-you-go teams of “virtual assistants.”  GetFriday is a popular example, and I’m just in process now of setting up an account with them for my friend the choreographer, who’s always coming up with questions he needs answered like “I need photos of 6 designer penthouse apartments with skyline views” to fuel his creative pursuits.

Somewhere in the middle between neighbourhood librarians and on-call virtual assistants are the research services that spun off from the erstwhile Google Answers.  I’ve a friend who’s outsourced much of his day-to-day business research to outfits like this, and speaks highly of the results.

So much so that I decided to try out Uclue, one of the better known gathering places for the Google Answers dispossessed.  So I posted my question — the same one I asked here earlier about the closing credits music for the season opener of Mad Men — and, whadyaknow, within 24 hours I had my answer (the music is an original composition by David Carbonara).  Cost me $20.

Was it worth it?

Well, before I thought of Uclue, I spent much, much longer than the 20 or 30 minutes of my own time that would buy futzing around in my amateur way looking for an answer.

So to buy may way out of a diverting obsession, yes, $20 is an excellent price, and a fair deal.

Olle pointed me toward Kulturexpressen, a program of the City of Malmö, Sweden that, machine-translated into English, is described like this:

Creativity of the locals will now have the opportunity to realize their ideas. Culture Express is a scholarship that can quickly take advantage of creativity… Culture Express is a form of “quick coin” … [i]t is intended to facilitate  those who want to realize your creative ideas and projects and get a cultural support with handling and response within a month. It is for those who do not work with a professional culture, but living in Malmo and want to show your cultural projects for more.

In other words, quick-turnaround, low-bureaucracy micro-finance for non-professional creative people.  Like “I want to hire street urchins to follow the Fathers of Confederation actors around Charlottetown.”  Or “Charlottetown needs a subway map.”  (i.e. the kinds of ideas I have)

You can get up to $1500 for a project, you just have to be 13 years old or older, and they turnaround applications in 30 days.

What an amazing program.

Remember back in May when the City of Charlottetown bowed to developer pressure and sacrificed some trees in the name of capitalism?  Well someone should have sent a clipping up to Starbucks headquarters before they sent down the “Coming Soon” sign for the window:

Note the presence of lovely trees setting off the model Starbucks store. What a shame we don’t have any trees like that in front of our new Starbucks.

I first met Bill Coleman almost 20 years ago on a plane to Cuba.  Two years later, while driving up the United States, I visited Bill in Bartlesville, Oklahoma  and met his friend and sometimes co-conspirator Mark Shaub.  And a year after that I saw them perform The Brothers Plaid, their tap dancing paean to the Winnebago lifestyle, on a barge in the Ottawa River.

As if further proof was needed that anything really important in this world happens in Charlottetown, Mark and Bill first met in here in the mid 1980s when they were both part of Montage Dance Theatre, the Island’s erstwhile unlikely modern dance company.

Bill and Mark have been here on the Island since Friday for Montage’s 25th anniversary, and tonight we had the pleasure of seeing The Brothers Plaid return to the stage at The Why:

My friendly server at Casa Mia Café this afternoon asked me to spread the word about a photography exhibit happening next week at Ampersand. The exhibit is called Qoriwaynacunas (Quechua for “Youth of Gold”) and the photographs were taken by 9 youth in Peru with disposable cameras taking pictures of their everyday life.

The show opens Saturday, September 5, 2009 from Noon to 8:00 p.m. at Ampersand (98 Water Street, Charlottetown) with live acoustic music, and continues daily until September 11.  Admission is by donation and the photos are for sale; 100% of the proceeds from the sale of the photos go back to the community of Chocco, Peru.  For more information, phone 629-5834.

We had about 20 people out last night for our first OpenStreetMap Mapping Party in Charlottetown.  It was a great bunch of enthusiastic people: young and old, artists and technologists, new to mapping and seasoned GPS veterans.  Special thanks to Bob Shand and Dan James for doing “get the GPS traces off the GPS units” technical support, and to Mark Leggott for facilitating our use of the excellent Language Lab at Robertson Library (it was the perfect facility for this sort of session).

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Apparently it’s very good, as it found me in my backyard in the Adirondack chair I was sitting in holding the phone:

Once again this year I’ve taken the official Eastern School District School Calendar and created a set of public calendar files to make it easier for parents and others to shunt the information around their digital devices.  Here you go:

• Google Calendar
• iCal format

In the August 3 and 10, 2009 issues of The New Yorker you’ll find a two-part essay by Ian Frazier on his 2001 road trip across Siberia (part one, part two, sketches, podcast).  The second part of the essay contains one of my favourite paragraphs of travel-writing ever:

Soon after Bikin, we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we emerged at the other end of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, anti-freeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open and tried it — delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons.

It’s the kind of paragraph you have to read over and over.  If you’re interested in Siberia, or in long road journeys, or just in good travel writing, I recommend you search out both parts of the essay.