For anyone who’s doubted my pronouncements about the sky-scraping nature of the building that’s quickly being assembled next door, witness the following photo that clearly demonstrates that it is now as high as the Sun itself!

Every Wednesday in my email in-box is Air Canada’s announcement of their weekly mini-seat-sale, a customized list of on-sale fares from Charlottetown. Because you can customize this email for any of Air Canada’s departure cities, I have to assume that the selection of the destinations is done by a computer not a person, and so often I end up with unexpected cities as suggestions. This week it as Düsseldorf:

My only experience of Düsseldorf to this point in my life is through the mid-1960s American television show Hogan’s Heros. Not American television’s finest hour, but we watched it eagerly nonetheless (and gained not only a warped perception of World War II, but also a warped perception of Germans).

And now Air Canada thinks I should go there. I’m tempted to do so, just to call their bluff.

(see also On Sale Now: St. John’s to Bogota — similar thoughts from 2005)

It’s very cold here this morning — current temperature is -22°C with a wind chill of -32°C:

It’s days like this that you can start to wonder why we choose to live in such an inhospitable place; if this was an episode of Star Trek, we’d be marvelling at the strange alien tribe of cold-dwellers and wondering what insanity led them to abandon their balmy cradle of humanity and head north.

One of the things I realized during the 24 hours of darkness this weekend was that microblogging (the emission of pithy 140 characters-or-less “status updates” through sites like Twitter, Jaiku and Faceboook), while addictive, is, for me, the digital equivalent of empty calories. It took 24 hours out of the loop to realize that while microblogging has the appearance of substance, it shares more in common with a nervous tick than with writing a novel.

So, at least until I have another epiphany, I’ll be blogging only in the macro format (here), and my Twitter, Jaiku and Plazes streams will end abruptly.

With Facebook I’ve taken the additional step of deleting my account completely (you can do it right here if you want to join me); if following the lifestream of my familiars was distracting, following the lifestream of that guy who sat across from me in grade 12 biology was simply pointless.

Having streamed the minutiae for almost 5 years in one form or another, this will take some getting used to, as the reflex to ping won’t just disappear overnight. So if you see my hands trembling with frustrated glee over the next while, you’ll know why.

The first formal assignment for the Philosophy 105: Technology, Values & Science course I’m participating in this winter is a “case study” that requires abstaining from digital technology for 24 hours. While I’m not technically, as an unofficial interloper, required to carry this out, it wouldn’t feel right to sup from the digital table while everyone else was voluntarily starving, so I’m in.

Thus, as of of 4:00 p.m. Atlantic Time today, January 24, 2009, I’ll be offline.

What offline means is, of course, an arbitrary thing, and the case study guidelines make it clear that figuring out where to draw the line is part of the activity. Do I need to shut off the furnace at home, for example, because it uses digital thermostats? If I was a purist, yes. But I won’t (it’s going down to -20 degrees C tonight!). However I’ll unplug the TV, the clock radio, the computer and the phone. I’ll shut off my mobile phone, leave the car parked, and try to convince Oliver to leave his Nintendo DS turned off (after an initial bout of enthusiasm that involved running around shutting off all the lights, Oliver has turned negative on the whole idea; I’ve got 4 hours to bring him back around).

My jury is still out on the espresso maker — it seems pretty manual, but I’ve a suspicion there’s a chip in their somewhere. And while our oven is clearly out — it has digital-only controls — I’m considering ignoring the fact that the range, which has seemingly analog controls, may also have digital wizardry buried inside.

My original thought was to sequester us away for 24 hours in a primitive cabin but that seemed to ignore the spirit of the case study — it’s easy to shut off when you’re outside of your home environment, a lot harder to confront your dependence on the digital when you’re faced with its stark absence. So we’ll try to maintain some semblance of a normal life and see what it is we miss.

See you on the other side.

I’ve Loved You So Long is playing this weekend at City Cinema. It’s near the top of my “best movies of 2008” list, and I highly recommend it. It is not a comedy.

What with all the brouhaha of late, it seemed like a good idea to become more aware of who controls the “Dizzy Block” — the block at the heart of downtown Charlottetown bordered by Queen, Grafton, University and Kent. So I gathered the disparate sources of corporate and property ownership together to create Who owns the Dizzy Block?, a visual guide:

(this is just a thumbnail image, get the full-size PDF file for maximum utility)

Fitzroy Street is closed this morning (and will be closed for the next 6 to 8 weeks) and the neighbourhood is filled with the pitter-patter of structural steel being unloaded from flatbeds: construction has started on the Homburg skycraper next door.

And, two blocks away on Grafton Street, the relocated “now with more towering-over-you power” Hotel Homburg is, reports The Guardian, slated to start construction in April and open in 2010.

Oh, and the $2 million Homburg underground passageway connecting the conveniently-relocated hotel to the Confederation Centre across the street (that you and I are donating half the cost of through our tax dollars) received approval from City Council as well.

Bow down before your new overlords, Charlottetown: the era of Homburg has begun. I hope it all works out.

CPAC, the parliamentary channel in Canada, ran a series of C-SPAN documentaries on The White House last week in anticipation of the Obama inauguration. Besides the rather mundane discussion of the Red Room and the Blue Room and the Green Room there was the amazing story of The Truman Reconstruction; my conception of The White House as an “historic building” was changed by images like this:

The “reconstruction” really was that: not a renovation or an addition, but a complete from-the-ground up rebuilding of the structure (although the exterior walls were buttressed and remained intact).

One of the anecdotes in the documentary was that the truck and bulldozer in the photo were too big to fit through the openings in the walls, so needed to be disassembled, carried inside, and then reassembled.

During the reconstruction, the Trumans lived in Blair House across the street; the West Wing, which was a newer addition, was not affected by the reconstruction and remained open and in use. Learn more at unofficial White House Museum.

Camp David was named by President Eisenhower for his grandson David Eisenhower.