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.

Please join Olle, a guy from Burlington, Vermont and me on Kiva Lending Team: Hackers.

Okay. I’ve reached saturation. I will henceforth not be listening to any news about the economy, its meltdown, how the world has gone to hell, how I need to prepare to eat more bread crusts, etc.

I just don’t care.

I don’t care about the S&P 500, the Hang Seng, the Nikkei, the Dow, the TSX. I don’t care about housing starts, job loss numbers, GNP or GDP. They are equally meaningless numbers over which I have no control. But they are held out as measures of, well, something. Something that is supposed to variably make me feel happy or sad.

I have no money in the market. I never have. I don’t care if you’ve lost money in the market: it’s your fault for trying to make something out of nothing. Too bad.

I’m not about to lose my business to the bank because my business has never borrowed money. I don’t believe in borrowing money from banks. I don’t believe in businesses that need more capital than is naturally available within the community.

I don’t care what the economic pundits on CNBC and CNN say. I don’t care what the head of the Federal Reserve says. I don’t care what plans the Finance Minister has for stimulating the economy. And I especially don’t care what the Dragons think we should do.

I think it’s absurd to continue to try to plug our fingers into a dike that we ourselves have constructed, while trying to maintain that somehow capitalism is a natural state, and what we’re going through is a natural disaster. If your house falls into the ocean, maybe it’s time to stop trying to move the ocean and think about somewhere else to live.

All of this is a distraction from anything that’s actually important about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

And from now on I refuse to be distracted.

We’re in the middle of the third week of Philosophy 105, and I’ve managed to make it to every lecture so far (this may be some sort of record for me — I don’t think I’ve made it to all 8 rounds of anything in a long, long time).

After six lectures on basic philosophical concepts — values, ethics, social contracts, egalitarianism, justice — this week we started into the meat of the course, looking specifically at the philosophy of science and technology, and starting out with induction vs. deduction and, today, reductionism vs. holism.

Step number two of the Twelve Step Program is “Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves can restore us to sanity.”

If you’re a cocky “mature student” with a day-job selling access to your “rightness,” getting something out of a university requires a similar transition, albeit minus the deity: admitting that you don’t know everything, that you haven’t considered all the possibilities, and that there may, in fact, be completely valid paradigms of which you have no knowledge or experience.

For me there’s an extra challenge: leaving university early (I dropped out after a year, 23 years ago) despite the family and social pressures to stay required a certain degree of throwing the academic baby out with the personal bathwater: if university wasn’t working for me, it must be university that’s screwed up, not me. Suffice to say that, although it seems university is still pretty screwed up, I’ve become willing to consider the possibility that it is regardless still able to offer something of value to me.

Oh, and I’ve got some authority issues too.

To achieve this “okay, so I’m not so hot shit after all” state of mind, while simultaneously maintaining enough self-confidence to be able to contribute to the experience is something of a delicate balancing act: learning requires risk, but sometimes risk can manifest as false bravado.

In other words, when is it okay to quote from How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive to suggest that holism trumps reductionism, and when is just acting like a prick?

That’s what I’m in the process of finding out.

Otherwise, I must say that, to my surprise, I’m thoroughly enjoying the experience of taking 2 hours out of my day to dwell on matter completely impractical. Although it’s sucking time out of my workday, I’ve been finding that having an opener mind, rather than being distracting, is actually helpful in my day-job (this may break down entirely if I come to the conclusion that technology is evil and I have to go back to the land).

Some more technical observations:

• The course’s Moodle — the web-based “virtual learning environment” used at UPEI — has seen no contributions from students so far, and half of the students in the course haven’t used it in the last 5 days — its only role to date has been as a very complex Powerpoint and Word file distribution system. I have, however, been able to wire it up to my Flickr account.
• There’s not a lot of laptop usage in class: perhaps 5% of the students have a laptop out.
• It’s really, really annoying when the janitorial staff wheels their janitorial carts down the cobbled hallway outside the classroom: you can’t hear the professor at all. This is the sort of institutional problem that it seems almost impossible to solve (see also “screen projector flickers back and forth between white and purple background”) because it’s not an important enough issue to be worth anyone’s time to address.
• If you’re not a real student at UPEI, apparently you’re in something called “Communiversity.” At least that’s what the fitness centre membership card says. But the UPEI website doesn’t reference Communiversity at all. I wonder what it is.
• Philosophers are very attached to metaphors involving trains.
• We were running out of time in one class last week and so had take “a quick breeze through justice.” I thought that was really funny.
• Films referenced to date: Modern Times, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Crimes and Misdemeanours.
• The habit of reading PowerPoint slides aloud instead of actually teaching is called “PowerPoint Karaoke.” Fortunately it’s not a problem in this course.
• The first case study in the course is due on January 30, 2009: it involves going without electronic technology in your life for 24 hours, keeping a diary, and then assembling the diary into a report of your experiences. How long should the report be? The guideline is “three pages is too short, longer than five pages is too long.” Someone asked a question about font size.
• I know one of the pillars of the “Instrumental Realism” movement personally — he’s referenced in the course text several times. I had no idea.

Icelandair has released their 2009 schedule for flights from Halifax to Reykjavik:

• June 4 - July 9: Monday, Thursday
• July 11 - September 3: Monday, Thursday, Saturday
• September 7 - October 22: Monday, Thursday

Personally, I would have left the comma out, or tried to re-write the sentence: I don’t have the courage (or skill) to do it as elegantly as they did in The New Yorker.

So on the one hand there is Jon Favreau, born six months after me 1966, director of Elf, Iron Man and writer of (and actor in) Swingers.

On the other hand there is Jon Favreau, born 15 years after me in 1981, Obama speech writer.

Shouldn’t Favreau the Younger be forced to take a stage name?