Oliver and Catherine and I went out to see City of Ember last night — we’ve got to seize any opportunity to see non-animated films that don’t involve evisceration or casual drug use.

There were few scenes of implied giant-rat-on-man violence that caused Oliver to shriek loudly, but otherwise the film lived up to its “family” designation and I think we all enjoyed it.

On one hand it’s a simple adventure story, but it’s also got good doses of “kid empowerment,” “self-reliance will win the day” and “wonderfully executed whirligigery.” If you liked Charlie and the Chocolate Factory I think you’ll like City of Ember for many of the same reasons.

By the way, with runs up and down University Avenue every 30 minutes it’s super-convenient to get to the movies on the bus. Leave a little early and have dinner at Café So-Ban in the mall’s food court: they serve great Korean and Japanese food and make a mean kimchi.

The Tourism Research Centre at the University of Prince Edward Island has released its Wind Energy Report, a study to “capture perceptions of wind energy production and wind farms, and their perceived effects on the landscape.” While the findings on wind energy are predictable (“82% of visitors and 75% of residents either agreed or strongly agreed that ‘There should be more wind farms on PEI’”), impressions of the Island’s branding as “Canada’s Green Province” showed a strong difference between Islanders and visitors:

There is some disagreement between visitors and Islanders as to PEI’s position as “Canada’s Green Province”. While over 83% of visitors feel this statement is either accurate or very accurate, only 30% of Islanders feel the same way. In addition, 37% of residents feel this statement is not accurate or not at all accurate. Only 7% of visitors feel this way.

I wonder who’s right.

Pop quiz: when you type, do you put two spaces between sentences, or just one?

Olle and Luisa were checking out of Prince Edward Island on Monday, so on Sunday night we took them out to Lot 30, Gordon Bailey’s new restaurant in the old Old Spain location on Kent Street.

It was, quite simply, a sublime experience. I have no recollection at all of what I ate (perhaps due to the bottles of wine we shared), but I do recall it was quite good.

Perhaps more than anything else it is the memories of service that remain, as it was of such a high level as to make other service in Charlottetown feel akin to being hit over the head with a blunt instrument: invisible when appropriate, witty and helpful when not, and never cloying.

The room itself is somewhat stark, but not unpleasantly so; all of the ghosts of Myron’s have been exorcised. The general effect was of stepping off Kent Street and into some other world, one not associated with Charlottetown in any way, more like eating in a Danish-inspired joint on Deep Space Nine. And I mean that in a good way.

It gives me a perverse sense of pleasure that Gordon has created a restaurant that, in the end, runs circles around the one his highfalutin former employers run out in the country. Bravo.

The doors at the brand new Holiday Inn Express Halifax Airport use a new-style contactless door lock instead of the traditional magnetic-stripe system:

The cards themselves come from Ilco and there’s a story about the technology at this location. The hotel, by the way, is not your father’s Holiday Inn: it’s clean, well-designed, has comfortable beds, plasma TVs, free wifi, and a serviceable breakfast.

Shadow of a windmill at Cape Jourimain, on the New Brunswick end of the Confederation Bridge:

WattzOn:

…works by harnessing many minds to create a tool for analyzing the power usage in a person’s life. Like a carbon calculator, it allows you to answer questions to identify your individual impact on the world. However, it uniquely goes beyond fossil fuel utilization to incorporate all of the different ways you consume energy in your life; whether you are driving to work or eating meat. In addition to your actions, you can track the impact of your belongings with the embodied energy calculator.

Here’s my WattzOn profile, with roughed-in numbers: 10,001W per year. One Million Acts of Green is a different take on the same genre, with the bonus of a George Stroumboulopoulos introduction.

Pop!Tech, “the other small east-coast conference,” is streaming everything live from Oct. 23 to 25, 2008 (i.e. right now!)

Iceland Express, “Iceland’s other airline,” has a blog with a mission statement:

How Do You Like Iceland? — a blog about Icelandic nature, nightlife, adventure, shopping, eating, drinking, recovering, and much more. It’s brought to you by the good people of Iceland Express, Iceland’s low-fare airline, as a way of luring you to Reykjavík. Go on, read it.

Given the tumult that the Icelandic economy is going through, it’s obviously an interesting time to be an Icelandic airline; fortunately, they have a sense of humour about it all.

From Deb Richardson, on Zap Your PRAM:

My need to create something rather than just consume things is in absolute overdrive.