Did you know that when advertisements on television say “pet stains” they actually mean “the stains from where your pets peed on the carpet”? I didn’t. I think I have a genetic mutation that makes me incapable of grasping common euphemisms. I thought “pet stains” were like when your dog knocks over a bottle of red wine or your cat tracks mud in from the garden.

Almost a year ago Clarkie Innis died, and shortly thereafter Hambly & Innis, his clothing store on University Avenue, closed. Once the stock was sold, and the fixtures removed, here’s what it looked like inside:

And here, after the start of some substantial-looking demolition, is what the inside looked like this morning:

When I was a kid — it was probably grade 4 or grade 5 — the cooler kids used to tease you by asking “do you wake up with hair in your mouth?” It was a trap: if you answered “yes,” well, there were implications. And if you answered “no,” then they would respond with “Professional, eh.”

Of course the specific nature of the implications was completely lost on me. In the same way that the meaning of the insult “suck me off” lobbed at another kid was lost on me (I’m willing to bet that it was lost on most of the other kids as well). Actually, I think my Dad tried to explain it to me once, in a somewhat awkward discussion that may have involved additional awkward explanation of the meaning behind the name of the band Teenage Head.

All of which leads me to a discovery I made this morning.

I’ve always had issues with those sporty water bottles with the squirty nozzle at the top: I’ve never been able to get them to work and, at best I can get a trickle out of them.

When I headed off to the gym this morning [[Catherine]] handed me a metal water bottle, which was even worse because I couldn’t squeeze it, and thus couldn’t get anything to come out of it.

It turns out — and I have Catherine to thank for educating me on this — that effective use of sporty water bottles requires that you suck the water out, not to squeeze it out. Once I understood this my relationship to the bottle changed completely, and it hydrated my workout this morning quite effectively.

Speaking of Q, I was finally able to watch Q on Bold, a one-hour weekly televised version of the radio program. It’s not really a TV show, per se, but rather a filmed radio show — in other words, more like Don Imus on MSNBC than This American Life on Showtime. There’s a Q YouTube channel too, where you can get a similar videotaped view inside the radio studio.

Generally I’m not an advocate for CBC-style synergy — the drive to “unite the platforms” that see news stories from [[Compass]] running the next morning on [[Island Morning]]. And I’m not entirely convinced that running a radio show like Q on television is a useful exercise that adds anything to the experience.

That said, it is interesting to watch partially naked radio in action. Even though I’m no stranger to the radio studio, for example, I was surprised to see just how scripted everything that Jian Ghomeshi utters into the microphone is, from intros and extros to questions — when Jian takes a breath and casually mentions “so, you were born in Utica, what was that like,” it’s not casual conversation, it’s a scripted prompt. I suppose it’s a testament to his skills that he’s able to make it sound like he’s making everything up off the top of his head.

What would be really interesting is if they had cameras rolling from before the radio show started until after it finished, and added cameras to the control room — that would really give us an archaeological dig through the radio-making process, and while it might expose even more of the artifice, it might also demystify the process enough to make more people consider taking it on as an amateur practise. (Example)

I chanced upon an interview with writer Dea Birkett on CBC Radio One’s Q on Monday talking about the Kids in Museums Manifesto. It’s a brilliant piece of work with a compelling back-story that should not only be adopted by all museums and galleries, but by any public or private facility that might engage with families.

My favourite item from the Manifesto is #19:

Remember there’s no typical family. Families can span generations, including toddlers, teenagers and grandparents. A visit should be enjoyable for the whole family together - not just the kids.

Even museums that do well otherwise often break down on this point, positioning “family activities” for a narrow age range, and structuring them so that it’s really more “adults watch or assist while kids do crafts” than it is “engaging activity for everyone.”

If you’ve got a Mac and an Asterisk-based phone system, I highly recommend you check out Telephone, an open source OS X “softphone” with the following design philosophy:

I don’t know why they think you should like a mobile phone interface on your computer.

Which is, I assume, a shot over the bow of softphones like X-Lite. And, true to those words, here’s the simple UI:

I’ve been trying Telephone out for a few days on long conference calls. Other than not being able to figure out “flash the switch hook” to be able to transfer calls (it’s a feature request), it’s performed flawlessly, and has enabled me to switch away from Skype to live the headset dream.

One of my favourite new magazine finds is on site, which aims to “democratise and widen the discussion of the production of space.” It’s published in Alberta and I found Issue #19 on the newsstand at the Atlantic News in Halifax last summer.

At the back of that issue there’s a short piece by Joseph Heathcott, Associate Professor or Urban Studies at The New School, about an exercise he gives his new students. He writes, in part:

One of the first exercises that I have students undertake is to draw a cognitive map of their childhood neighbourhood with key landmarks — in under ten minutes. This exercise introduces the relationship between memory, place, and time.

I was intrigued enough by the exercise to do it myself. Here’s what I came up with in 10 minutes of my neighbourhood village of Carlisle, Ontario, where I lived from 1972 to 1985 (click for a larger version):

I’d be interested to see what your sketch looks like — if you’re up for it, just scan (or take a picture or) your sketch and upload it to Flickr with tag mychildhoodneighbourhood and leave a comment here.

So I’m into week number two of the fitness. My plan was to make it in to the UPEI Sports Centre three times a week; I managed two days last week because Wednesday was a snow day, and I had a sort of hybrid half-workout half-lesson day today as I had an appointment to receive my format “fitness program” for the next five weeks. But so-far, so-good.

While my activity to date has consisted, other than the initial fitness baseline, entirely of 15 to 20 minutes on the treadmill, tomorrow I’ll add something called “circuit training” into the mix: 20 to 30 minutes of work on the various weight machines, switching through upper, lower and middle-body workouts every three days. Stan my fitness man and I ran through my starting weights on each of the machines this morning, and while I think I’ll be able to pull off my scheduled circuit and repetitions, if last week’s tentative dip into the world of the machines is any guide, I may be temporary rendered motionless from the after-effects, at least for the first week.

I have, I’m happy to report, found the locker room, and thus have been able to have a bona fide change and shower experience rather than changing in the fitness centre washroom, which was not only weird, but also tainted with scent of poor hygienic practise.

With apologies for the intimate imagery, I’ve also realized that proper (or at least practical) protocol for a boxer-shorts-wearing man like me, when faced with gym shorts that have a built-in lining, is to not try to somehow squeeze the boxer shorts into a place they’re not made to fit. These are the kind of daunting practical questions that can only be answered by doing it the wrong way a few times first.

Although I’m happy to have found the locker room, it’s not exactly a Shangri-La of cleanliness, especially compared to the “you can eat off the floor” cleanliness of Reykjavik’s public pools, where not only do you remove your muddy shoes at the door (and place them in specially-provided bags to avoid locker soiling), but there are strictly-enforced “you must try off completely before leaving the shower” regulations too. The UPEI lockers are old and rusty and covered in filth, the floor is muddy from the slush of many boots, and the aesthetic is more “modern dungeon” than “spa.”

But it’s a university, and it serves the purpose, and I’m not really complaining.

In terms of the actual fitnessing, I’ve managed now to overcome almost all of the fears from the early days: I no longer fear the muscley people in the free-weights, nor the lithe people on the elliptical machines, and I can happily jog along beside intensely fit people without worrying about them turning to me and saying “hey, you’re not one of us.”

Aforementioned upcoming arduousness aside, I’ve also come to realize that, like they say, 90% of fitness is just showing up: the rest pretty well takes care of itself. Which is to say that it’s something of a minor miracle that I’ve managed to work out the logistics not only of going to making my way to class three times a week, but now tacking on a fitness elective onto the site. Once I actually get myself there, doing the fitness is easy.

Well, at least until tomorrow morning’s lower-body workout. Stay tuned.

[[Catherine Hennessey]] turned me on to Pex Mackay’s website, wherein he links to old films of Charlottetown and the Island, including Driving Through Charlottetown, 1966 and Prince Edward Island, 1952, Once Upon a Time in Parkdale. Amazing stuff.

The first time I ever met Catherine was at an event she organized at Charlottetown City Hall in the early 1990s of old films of Charlottetown; seems like it might be a good time to repeat that, as there’s a new generation of people to see them, and 15 years of history to fill in.

I uncovered an interesting connection today: both Arthur, the Trent University student newspaper, and Harold, the form of improvisation, derived their name from the same source: the Beatles’ haircut.