Years after the independent video rental market has all but dried up elsewhere, we’re very lucky here in Charlottetown to have That’s Entertainment — it’s a tour de force that makes renting from the multinationals feel like eating cardboard.

Last Sunday I stopped in to rent a menagerie of DVDs to tide us through the winter storms and holiday week; they’re due back tomorrow and we made it through almost everything (credit to my in-laws for putting up with the box-set marathons). Here’s what we’ve seen:

• Long Way Down is the television series about the motorcycle journey by actors Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman from John o’ Groats at the tip of Scotland to Cape Town at the tip of South Africa, a follow-on from their Long Way Round journey around the world. They’ve done a decent job of turning what could have otherwise been endless footage of motorcycles on dirt into compelling viewing, and they deserve credit for shining a light on Africa as a something other than an endless crisis. The soundtrack is particularly impressive.
• Ballykissanel Series 3 is twelve episodes of quirky Irish dramedy. It’s the season I’ve dreaded watching since I became a fan many years ago; suffice to say that episode 11 is a shocker. Perhaps an acquired taste, but if you manage to acquire it, you’ll find all six series at the Provincial Library as well as at That’s Entertainment.

• The Shop Around the Corner is a 1940 starring Jimmie Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. The film served as an inspiration for the 1998 You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan, and the broad themes of the two films are very similar. The Shop Around the Corner is set in Budapest, but although the names of the characters are Hungarian, the films entirely in English and might as well have been set in London or Chicago. Not a must-see movie, but well-acted and interesting nonetheless.

Thank you, Charlottetown, for purchasing every copy of The Old Farmer’s Almanac at Indigo but one (and I’m this last one will go before the end of the day). When you buy the Almanac you’re supporting Reinvented putting the food on our family’s table.

I’ve created a tool that lets you make a customized Charlottetown Transit schedule, suitable for printing. You can choose to print it index-card sized (so you can paste it on an index card or inside a Moleskin notebook) or business-card size (tiny print, but fits easily in a wallet).

I’ve brought the Charlottetown Transit Map, the Mobile Transit Schedule and the telephone schedule at 367-3694 in sync with the new transit schedule released earlier this month.

Besides minor changes to stop times, the biggest development is the addition of two new runs from the Confederation Centre to the University of PEI on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights, leaving downtown at 11:00 p.m. and 11:30 p.m.

I’ve also modified the map and mobile schedules so that they react properly to the current day of the week — so you will no longer see weekday runs on the weekdays, and vice-versa.

Orange, the French mobile provider, just topped 10 million subscribers in Romania; they say it’s one of their most important markets, and they use it as a testbed for features that they will roll out elsewhere. Vodafone Romania, meanwhile, has over 9 million subscribers.

I know this because I was listening to Radio Romania’s international service this morning at 5:30 a.m. on the overnight service of CBC Radio.

I was up before the dawn to ferry Johnny, Jodi and Ava to the airport so they could fly home to Ontario for Christmas on the 6:00 a.m. Air Canada flight.

Getting up 3 hours earlier than usual made for a restless night, as I experienced alarm-missing-panic-disorder and woke up every hour on the hour. On the half hours I was woken up by the backup alarms of snow-moving equipment. And on the quarter hours it was downtown ruffians up to their eve eve antics — I recall someone yelling “Ronda…” at 3:45 a.m. down Prince Street.

Given all the effort I’d gone through to get up early it seemed like a shame to just go back home and sleep some more, so I recalled that Wal-mart was opening 24 hours a day during the holidays and my attraction to novelty overcame my Wal-mart aversion and I swung Johnny and Jodi’s crumbling headlight-less Chevy Blazer over to the mall to do some last-minute Christmas shopping. I expected half a dozen others to be there; I found the parking lot filled with a hundred cars and the store bustling with pre-Christmas consumer energy.

Going to Wal-mart alone before the sunrise allowed me to heed Catherine’s emailed advice from several weeks ago:

And for my stocking remember to keep this from Oliver (i.e. do not go shopping for any Santa things with Oliver).

This came, I presume, in reaction to last year’s debacle where I did go shopping for Catherine’s stocking with Oliver, which required some last-minute “um, Santa shops at Shoppers Drug Mart too!” explanations.

By the time I got home it was still only 6:30 a.m. and everyone was still asleep, so I hidden the Wal-mart proceeds away under a blanket in the corner and headed off to the office, stopping at Beanz to grab a coffee and a muffin on the way.

As I write this I’ve been up for three and a half hours and it’s still not daylight yet.

Catherine and Oliver and I took the bus out to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market for lunch this afternoon, and I was never happier to not be driving, as there was traffic the likes of which I’ve never seen in Charlottetown.

University Avenue was pretty well bumper-to-bumper from downtown out to the Charlottetown Mall. Belvedere Avenue was jammed between Mount Edward Road at University, with spillover down Mount Edward Road for as far as I could see. The Superstore parking lot was completely full, and reports were that the lots at the Charlottetown Mall and at Canadian Tire were full too.

Free from the stress of driving, we were entertained on our journey by the public transit bus-to-bus radio, with a constant stream of banter from the drivers around the city: there was a bus vs. car accident at Ellis Brothers, reports of frayed and murderous drivers, and of spending 20 minutes getting up North River Road.

Three hours later we’re back here at Reinvented HQ for a bit and from the bus ride back it seems things have only gotten worse out there.

In other words, if you don’t have to be somewhere today in your car, best leave it at home; you’ll be much happier.

The Guardian reported earlier this week Binns moving to new Dublin home as ambassadorial residence sold and identified the new residence as being at 22 Oakley Road, Dublin.

Back in April 2008, the Irish Times reported Record price for Oakley Road on the property, writing, in part:

If Sherry FitzGerald gets the asking price of EUR12 million for 22 Oakley Road it will be a record for a family house in Ranelagh but then this is a jaw-droppingly impressive property.

It’s been worked on for the past year by owners who intended living there as their family home, so everything is done to the highest specifications - from the underfloor heating throughout downstairs to the solar panels on the roof - and all with cool, sophisticated and expensive good taste.

The Times also reported on the new ambassadorial housing: If you can’t sell, swap: how the rich do it. They included a photo of the property, which looks suitably grand.