Experimental new feature: Comments Explorer.  Behold the power of Drupal Views.

You may recall that when the calendar struck 10 on this blog, y’all in the readership had contributed 17,987 comments on the posts here.  When I flipped the switch over to Drupal, those comments got temporarily left behind.  I’m happy to announce that the comment are now back in their proper place, and you can relive old chestnuts the the 347 comments on Tim Hortons Responds and the 222 comments on WigWag Bar from the Tuck Shop.

Through series of happenstance events that started with a tweet from my Dutch friend Elmine, I’ve been accepted as one of 81 participants from around the world to participate in round number two of the European Blogging Competition (insert joke about “typing really really fast” here).

The competition involves a three month commitment to blog about climate change on the Think About It website.  And, somewhat ironically, it kicks off with all 81 participants flying into Copenhagen for a two-day launch event (insert wry ironic comment about flying across the ocean to blog about climate change).

The allure of getting to hang out with an international crew of 81 bloggers, combined with the usual allures of Copenhagen, my favourite city, were enough to get me over my misgivings about competition (blogging — competitively!?) and to try to rationalize the whole “causing climate change to blog about climate change” travel thing.  In this regard the words of Edward Hasbrouck proved some comfort:

But I haven’t stopped flying. I continue to believe that long-haul travel, even by air, can in particular cases have a net positive effect on the world, mainly through the secondary effects of the permanent changes it can bring about in our worldview, which result in changes in how we go on with our lives.

It’s at least something to hang my hat on.

That said, it did seem absurd to fly to Copenhagen from Canada for two days, so I’ve arranged to extend my trip to 10 days, at my own expense, to at least spread the travel over a longer period of time.

My next travel grapple is related to SHiFT, the Lisbon conference being organized by my Portuguese friends in mid-October.  I’ve been planning to go to SHiFT every year it’s been held, and it’s never worked out (last year we happened to hold Zap Your PRAM on the same weekend, which had the additional downside of keeping Zap a Portuguese-free event).

I was inspired to think more deeply about the implications of going to SHiFT by my friend Henriette, who’s launched the shift09 DIY transportation crusade around her own plans to skip flying and take a 41-hour train trip from Copenhagen to Lisbon.

In the end, there’s just no practical way of getting across the Atlantic ocean that doesn’t involve flying. 

I looked into the possibility of taking the October 9th sailing of the Queen Mary 2.  I’d have to get myself to New York City, and then from Southampton to Lisbon on the other end, it would cost me about $1,200 each way, and I’d have to be prepared to spend 12 days at sea in total.  All that and it’s not clear that cruising is any less harmful, climate-change wise, than flying.

There’s the possibility of hitching a ride on a freighter cruise, which would be a little cheaper and perhaps someone more environmentally friendly given the lesser degree of opulence.  But that seems to involve even more time at sea — up to two weeks in either direction — and I simply don’t have that amount of time to spend away from my family and away from work.

Then there’s the more obvious solution: combine the September trip to Copenhagen with the October trip to Lisbon, and join Henriette on her 41 hour journey of hope.  I’ve considered it, believe me.  But that would involve missing Oliver’s 9th birthday, skipping out on the Access 2009 conference that I’m both helping to organize and am scheduled to speak at, and, in the end, being away from home for more than a month.

Of course the most obvious solution is just not to go to SHiFT at all, and as much as the prospect saddens me, I’m considering that too.

If I do decide to go on a planet-destroying two-trips-to-Europe-in-a-month I will, if nothing else, have a lot to write about during my three month rumination about climate change.

Because I’m a fan, and because I appreciate the app, I will play along. Here’s my Man Men self. Note that I opted for a “realistic” design rather than an “aspirational” one: that’s why I look more like Lou Grant than George Clooney. Oh the 60s, what a crazy time.

Okay, I give up.  Both Oliver and my mother have expressed discontent with FD Helwoodica, so I’ve swapped it out in favour of a more traditional Helvetica — i.e. one not scanned from woodcut prints.

The other night I found myself on the couch with Oliver around bedtime needing something to read as a bedtime story (the heat and humidity sapped my ability to make up another original “Yarky the Yak” story). I found my iPod Touch within arm’s reach — and important criterion — and fired up the Stanza e-book application, poked around for a while and finally ended up downloading the Project Gutenberg version of Anne of Green Gables. Two minutes later we were learning about that busybody Mrs. Rachel Lynde.

Having lived in Prince Edward Island for 16 years, I’ve had a significant exposure to the Annedustry (a term I believe I have just coined).

It’s difficult to avoid. I live 500m from Anne’s nightly musical rampage.  I used to work for the Anne of Green Gables Store as a product developer (my great accomplishment was developing a line of Anne-themed jams and jellies). I wrote the original business plan for what later became Avonlea Village. I used to advise the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority on domain name issues. I’m the president of the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, which has a missing of preserving the heritage landscapes the inspired L.M. Montgomery in the first place. Heck, in grade 3 at Balaclava School in Ontario I was in the chorus of the school’s go at the musical.

Me and Anne, in other words, we’re pretty tight.

And yet, in all those years, I’d never actually sat down to read the book.  Until this week. And you know what? It’s pretty good.

Of course we’re only two chapters in — last night at 11:00 p.m. Oliver couldn’t sleep and so I pulled Matthew Cuthbert is surprised out of my pocked to calm him down — but Montgomery obviously has a way with the language, and Prince Edward Island does come off looking pretty good:

They had driven over the crest of a hill. Below them was a pond, looking almost like a river so long and winding was it. A bridge spanned it midway and from there to its lower end, where an amber-hued belt of sand-hills shut it in from the dark blue gulf beyond, the water was a glory of many shifting hues — the most spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green, with other elusive tintings for which no name has ever been found. Above the bridge the pond ran up into fringing groves of fir and maple and lay all darkly translucent in their wavering shadows. Here and there a wild plum leaned out from the bank like a white-clad girl tip-toeing to her own reflection. From the marsh at the head of the pond came the clear, mournfully-sweet chorus of the frogs. There was a little gray house peering around a white apple orchard on a slope beyond and, although it was not yet quite dark, a light was shining from one of its windows.

It’s easy to be snide about Anne and the narrow lens through which an Anne-centred tourism industry casts Prince Edward Island. But it’s important, I’m learning, not to cast out everything Anne as kitsch either.

A tip from friend-of-the-blog and longtime reader Valerie: there’s an outfit in Morell called Kingfisher Outdoors, based in the Morell Welcome Centre, that rents kayaks for use on the Morell River.  You can park your car in Morell, they’ll shuttle you up-river, and you kayak back to Morell, which takes, they say, about 2 hours.

They charge $50 per trip for a double kayak, $30 for a single kayak, and there’s a $20 shuttle fee for parties smaller than four.  They suggest calling to make a reservation the day before you want to take your trip — you can reach them at (902) 961-2080 and they’re open from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m.

While we’re waiting for our canoe blocks to arrive, we might just take a run out to Morell and give them a try.

Alan Holman weighs in on the renaming of the Main Stage at Confederation Centre. He makes some excellent points.

If you watch this video by Tod Maffin about the CBC’s new “integrated newsroom” in Vancouver you’ll get a good overview of the corporation’s new view of “content” as something akin to generic slop that you ladle out of the universe, pass through a magic content-massaging machine, and then distribute on multiple “platforms.”  It looks something like this:

In this model radio, television and the web are reduced to lowly status as “content delivery vehicles” and the central notion is that content is content, no matter the “platform” and the old medium-specific model of the CBC is no longer relevant.

Here’s what I think the content model for the CBC should look like:

Central to my model is the notion that there is no such thing as content before you take real life and mix it with the unique characteristics of a particular medium.  The reporting process, in other words, and most importantly the medium-specific reporting process, is what conjures this thing called “content” into being.

The simple-minded notions of radio as “television without pictures” and the web as a “newspaper without printing presses” ignores the notion that, dare I say it, the medium is the message and that the storytelling capabilities of each medium each have unique qualities.

We’ve already seen the foibles of CBC’s new cross-platform-synergy here in Prince Edward Island where on some days we end up hearing two or three re-purposed television news stories from the previous night’s Compass replayed on Island Morning verbatim but for the “back to you Bruce” handover at the end.

When, as happened earlier this week, the television news story happens to contain narration that refers to things that you need to be able to see — this week’s example saw reporter Sally Pitt referring to “the man in the black shirt” — it’s simply a glaring demonstration of a larger underlying problem: radio isn’t just “television without pictures” and demands the care, experience and skills of a radio journalist to be used to its full potential.  Running television news stories on the radio makes no more sense than running radio news stories on television.

I’m afraid that, as CBC Prince Edward Island journalists are called to do more with less — operating a 90 minute newscast without a third-larger complement of reporters, for example — we’re only going to see more of this.  And that’s too bad, especially for CBC Radio.  Telling stories on the radio is one of the things the CBC has always excelled at, and the corporation has produced some of the world’s finest radio journalists.  

If radio is to be repositioned by the CBC as “television lite” and the web is to be simply another amorphous bucket for medium-neutral content, I’m afraid what we’re going to end up with is a gelatinous mass of poorly reported “content” that is capable of truly informing absolutely no one.

Oliver and I found ourselves in downtown South Rustico on Thursday night, so it seemed pre-destined that we would stop in at Gallant’s Clover Farm and purchase tickets for last night’s Lennie Gallant Songwriters Circle at Harmony House in Hunter River.

Wow. It was a fantastic evening.

Sharing the stage with Lennie were Meaghan Blanchard, Dennis Ellsworth and Gary Gallant, and while all were a joy to listen to, it was the other Gallant who was the real stand-out for me. With a day-job as a certified organic dairy farmer, Gary Gallant has an intriguing and infectious guitar style, sings with wit and passion, and tells a good story.  Alas he is unrecorded to this point, something he promised to rectify “before the decade is out.”  If you have a chance to see him in concert, do.

Harmony House itself just keeps getting better and better: this year’s addition is a bar and lounge in the basement, hand-crafted by the multi-talented pharmacist, musician and carpenter Kris Taylor.