[[Oliver]] and I completed our second round of raffle ticket selling at the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] this morning — we were selling $2 tickets on a gift basket, with proceeds to the Home and School.

To be honest, I was dreading the experience: flashbacks to the door-to-door hawking of oranges and grapefruit for the Senior Band trip to Washington, DC. Or the time I went canvassing for OXFAM and gave up after the first door I had slammed in my face. Or, further back, days and days and days traipsing through the neighbourhoods of the Golden Horseshoe selling subscriptions to The Hamilton Spectator in the semi-annual contests of paperboys.

But I’m the treasurer, and if the treasurer can’t get out there and sell tickets, well what hope do we have of getting anyone else to sign on. So we showed up at our post at 10:00 a.m. last Saturday for our 90 minute shift, and repeated again this week.

And you know what: it was loads of fun.

All we needed to do, I found out, was stand there and wait for everyone Oliver and I have ever met to walk by our booth (it turns out that Oliver and I together know a lot of people).

So we sold tickets to teachers and principals. Spinners and weavers. Slices of silverorange and their parents. Innumerable Prince Street School alumni. One Member of Parliament and one Senator. To all of our regular market vendors. To the occasional OpenCorporations supporter. Loads of friends and neighbours. To Leo Cheverie, of course. And even to Tim Banks, bless his heart.

We discovered that there’s a sort of cabal of of former raffle ticket sellers who, having gone through the experience themselves resolve to forever buy tickets from others (thank you all!).

Oliver, as you might imagine if you’ve met him, is a born salesperson: he knows no fear, is tireless, and has social skills that eclipse those of almost everyone I know.

The draw took place on the third shift, so I’m not sure who won. But I imagine we’ll be back next near for the next round, free of dread.

And I expect that, as newly-minted cabal members, we’ll be buying a lot of raffle tickets this year.

Last night was the end-of-year [[Compass]] political panel: host Bruce Rainnie gathered with pundits Rick MacLean and Ian Dowbiggin to talk about the stories of 2008. Rick gave a tip-of-the-hat to OpenCorporations, proving that one excellent way of ending up on “stories of the year” lists is to do your swashbuckling in the closing weeks of the year.

As you can see from the statistics page, traffic has simmered down considerably on the site since the crazy heights of last week; other shiny objects are now attracting our eyes.

As my friends at [[Casa Mia]] know well, I’ve got strong opinions about music played in restaurants. Admittedly it’s a hard thing to get right: too much Perry Como and you risk losing the young rockers, too much Bedouin Soundclash and you loose the suits. Personally I would be a happy man if I never had to listen to Andrea Bocelli again for as long as I live.

So here’s my proposed solution: each restaurant should have its own last.fm group and invite customers to become members of the group (here’s a group I’ve created for Casa Mia as an experiment; feel free to join it).

Then all that’s left to do is to stream the group’s radio station into the restaurant; in theory, while every track won’t appeal to every customer, at least every customer’s taste will be factored into the playlist.

My last Wordle experiment of the night: the two most recent Speeches from the Throne, one Liberal, one Progressive Conservative. Which is which?

Okay, so I’ve become a little addicted to Wordles today. But they scratch a deep itch in the data visualization part of my brain. Here’s six of Prince Edward Island’s laws rendered as Wordles:

The CBC is reporting that Ontario is to receive 21 additional seats in Canada’s Parliament as a result of population changes. The CBC quotes population figures from 105,000 (the “Quebec standard,” they call it) to 115,000 (which is what Ontario was due to receive before this increase) per federal electoral district.

The 1873 Prince Edward Island Terms of Union with Canada guaranteed Prince Edward Island four members of Parliament, one each for Prince and Kings Counties and two for Queens County. One hundred and thirty-five years later that’s exactly what we still have.

The population figures from the 1871 census were used in the Terms of Union: Canada had a population of 3,689,257 and Prince Edward Island had a population of 94,021, meaning that, on union, Islanders represented about 2.5% of the country’s population.

In the interim, according to the 2006 census, the population of Canada has grown to 31,612,897 and Prince Edward Island’s population is now 135,851. Because Canada’s population has increased since 1871 by 750% and the Island’s only by 44%, PEI now accounts for only 0.42% of the population of Canada.

One of the by-products of these population changes is that the Island’s electoral districts are now among the smallest, by population, in the country. The 2006 census by electoral district shows that only Labrador, Nunavut, and Yukon have smaller districts.

The district of Charlottetown, with a 2006 population of 32,174, is the smallest district on PEI, and the fourth smallest in the country. By comparison, the district of Brampton West has a 2006 population of 170,422, or just over five times the population.

The proposed changes in Ontario’s allotment of districts are still going to leave the province drastically under-represented when compared to the Island. With a 2006 population of 12,160,282, to achieve the same level of representation as Prince Edward Islanders — an average of 33,962 people per district — Ontarians should be alloted 358 districts rather than the 106 (they currently have) plus the 21 (they will receive).

Of course, applied across the country, this would leave us with a Parliament with 930 members rather than the current count of 308 — probably unworkable (although, by comparison, the United Kingdom has 646 constituencies).

For the Prince Edward Island legislator on your Christmas list, here’s the perfect present: Hansard on a T-shirt. Take the complete contents of the Hansard of the Fall 2008 sitting of the PEI Legislative Assembly, make a Wordle, and this is what you get:

You can buy the result on a T-shirt now.

In addition to its regular Saturday, December 20, 2008 opening (where you will again have an exciting opportunity to purchase [[Prince Street School]] raffle tickets from me and Oliver from 10:30 a.m. to Noon beside the pierogi booth!), the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] will be open on Tuesday, December 23 from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. for all your Christmas shopping needs.

Something in the Air is a “2001 documentary about the dangers of pesticides used by potato farmers in PEI” from the National Film Board:

Thanks to Suzanne Long for the pointer (to the NFB’s new snazziness).