Every once in a while a plesant bit of the vernacular sneaks into an advertisement. Like this one for Northumberland Ferries:

In an industry that comes up with things like “in preparation for disembarkation,” to say “or just show up as usual” in an ad is something of a miracle. They could have said “if you don’t have a reservation you can still sail, but you must wait in line with everyone else” or “reservationless parties must queue.” Thankfully, they didn’t.

My friend in California sent me a story from the Boston Globe about the excavation of a blue whale here on PEI. He wondered why he hadn’t read about it in this space, what with the “history’s largest exhumation of a single creature” and all.

Truth be told, other than following the progress of the excavation on [[Compass]] for a few weeks, this event didn’t strike me as particularly significant or newsworthy. Perhaps because it didn’t seem to strike Islanders as particularly significant or newsworthy. You certainly didn’t hear of people making pilgrimages up to Nail Pond to see the great beast.

I remember when we first arrived on PEI there was a local businessman who’d purchased a Jaguar after making it big. It was suggested to me at the time, in hushed tones, that this sort of thing was best avoided, as it would be seen by Islanders to be “putting on airs.” Success was fine, you just didn’t want to be obvious about it.

This is a strong chord running through Island society, and it’s not limited to expensive motorcars.

The Confederation Bridge, for example, is, by any measure, an engineering wonder: a billion dollar stucture that runs 13km over icy waters. And while there was something of a flurry the week it opened — much of it assoicated with runs to Fred’s in Cap Pelé for lunch — a month later the bridge faded into the background, and it’s been years since I’ve heard anyone make mention of it.

Which makes me think that the reason that Islanders weren’t captivated by the uncovering of a “beast bigger than any dinosaur,” was a feeling that, what with being so superlative and all, the whale was, in its own way, putting on airs.

It’s fine to be so big and massive an all, but it’s just not right to lord it over everyone.

If you use Google Calendar, Apple’s iCal, or any other iCalendar-compatible appliction, you can now subscribe to the Casa Mia Daily Specials Calendar:

Once you’ve subscribed to the Daily Specials in your calendar, you can sync them to your phone, and thus have them in your pocket whenever you need them:

I’ve make some renovations to the Brackley Drive-in RSS Feed. It now includes one item for every weekend (early in the season) or week (once shows start playing daily), rather than an item per night.

In the spring of 1992 I was working at the Peterborough Examiner newspaper in the Composing Room, and doing freelance graphic design work on the side.

The Peterborough Festival of the Arts hired me to design and produce a season brochure for them, and after playing around with some ideas I decided to take a photo of my 1978 Ford F-100 pickup truck and use it as the signature image, running over all 5 folds of a standard accordion brochure.

I took the photo with Catherine’s SLR film camera (digital cameras didn’t come along for another few years), scanner the negative at the Examiner and used their stand-up camera to blow it up to the required size.

When I showed the mock-up to the people at the Festival they needed some, well, convincing that this was the appropriate image for their brochure. Which led me to deliver an impassioned plea about how the DIY ethic of the Festival was well-captured by the DIY ethic of the pickup truck. I was mostly full of shit, but I really liked the image, and I wanted ever-so-much to use it. In the end, they gave the go-ahead, and this is what we ended up with:

On the day the brochures — 10,000 copies! — were ready, I picked them up at the printer and delivered them to the Festival’s office on George Street. That night the building burned to the ground, and took all 10,000 brochures down with it.

With the help of a sympathetic printer, and a Festival that didn’t balk at the notion of committing to the truck image again, another 10,000 copies were produced in short order.

It was the most exciting design/print job I ever did.

Perhaps this has been there all along? I just noticed this afternoon that there’s a nice Wikipedia search built into the Apple Dictionary application:

The Robertson Library at UPEI is doing a gutsy thing: they’re migrating from their proprietary Sirsi Unicorn-based library system to the open-source Evergreen system. Over two months of frenzied activity. And they’re documenting their adventures in public.

Here’s the legacy public catalog and here’s the Evergreen-based one.

This all goes to prove my longstanding hypothesis that any technical project can be accomplished in any amount of time given the proper motivation.

Dave Winer has been blogging about his jury duty. Which got me to wondering how we select juries here in Prince Edward Island. According to the Jury Act, it’s the province’s healthcare database that’s mined:

The sheriff shall prepare a jurors roll by requisitioning from time to time from the person in charge of the register of the names of Prince Edward Island residents registered under the Health Services Payment Act R.S.P.E.I. 1988, Cap. H-2, the number of names and addresses which the sheriff anticipates will be required in the county pursuant to subsection (3) and no other information shall be transmitted.

It’s an interesting dynamic — if you want healthcare, you’ve got to be prepared to serve on a jury. Not a bad deal.

I was called to serve several times about a decade ago, but every time the trial was cancelled for some reason, and eventually, if memory serves, I received some sort of “enough already — we’re going to leave you along for now.” And I’ve not received a notice since.

Somewhere back there this spring we celebrated 15 years of living here in Prince Edward Island. Our anniversaries were a little out of sync: I came in the true dead of winter, [[Catherine]] followed on a month later when the trees were just opening up. I was 26 years old when we made the move, an age that I recall seemed very old at the time and now seems impossibly young.

I’d known Catherine for all of two years; as her grandmother told me the day before I set off from Ontario, moving east was about as close as we were every likely to come to getting married. And she was right.

We came for 18 months, two years if I did a good job and had my contract extended. I truly don’t think either of us expected to stay longer than that. But we bought a house, found some friends, got other jobs, found some more friends, moved to town and bought another house, had a child, got other jobs, and just kind of forgot to leave. Not a unique experience, certainly — the woods are full of summer visitors with a VW microbus that broke down in 1968 and hasn’t gotten around to being fixed yet.

Our love for the Island has been nowhere near consistent, nor has it always been requited. There have been months — years — when it felt like we were trapped on a remote Island prison. Mostly these episodes have passed. But not completely. What can one day feel like the warm embrace of a close-knit community can sometimes, the next, feel xenophobic and insular. But the good, somewhat aided by inertia, ultimately outweighs the bad.

As much as here feels like home now — I’ve lived on PEI longer than I’ve lived anywhere else — I’ve reconciled myself to always being more of an anthropologist than a true resident. For the longest time I found this frustrating. Then I began to realize that anthropology can be fun too (and the well here is very deep — and it grows deeper the more you look at it). And so I’ve ended up in a not-unpleasant purgatory with one foot on the Island, the other in the, um, real world.

David Weale, in his book Chasing the Shore, writes the paragraph that for me best captures what being a Prince Edward Islander means:

Being a Prince Edward Islander is something different: something layered over top of being an islander. It’s not about land, sea, and shore, but about custom and tradition, and being influenced by powerful undercurrents of ethnicity, piety, and political tribalism. It’s about the unwritten laws of community life and the tricky and deliberate dynamics of inter-personal relations within a tightly knit community where little is forgiven and nothing forgotten. It’s about feeling alert to those nuances of body language, and subtleties of vocal inflection that signal approval or anger; about being proud and prickly and deferential all at the same time; about learning the art of understatement; and, sometimes, about making a fist in your pocket. And, as in every other place in the world, it’s about pursuing our own visions of kindness, and our own habits of cruelty.

You could spend a lifetime parsing those words and trying to understand how they play out in those that circle round you. I suppose that’s what I’m doing.

One of my favourite blogs at [[Yankee]] is Justin Shatwell’s New England Music Reviews; we have very similar tastes in music, Justin and I, and I find myself liking almost everything he writes about.

And if you’re hungry, Food Editor Annie B. Copps is Eating New England. If you’re a fan of Annie’s, be sure to listen to her podcasts on Thanksgiving Turkeys, New Hampshire Brewmasters and Think Organically, Eat Locally.