Ever since the Anne of Green Gables license plate was released in 1993 there were rumours about how it reflected a “half-finished” design.

Now that both my version thereof and the plate’s putative designer Baxter Ramsay have retired, I decided to get to the bottom of the story, and sent off an inquiry to Baxter last week. Here’s his reply:

This is very true. I was asked to come up with some designs for a new plate, Anne, Bridge, Government House, Province House… The most favored pick (at my office) was the Bridge Plate. The next time I saw the Anne Plate it was done on a metal plate and all the mistakes were still there: her hair curls were wrong, door on the house in the wrong place along with the windows trees etc… I just did a fast sketch on ink and from memory (which was not very good) and sent it to motor vehicle. I said if it was to be used it needed to be corrected and made to fill in the plate more… Well what you see is what we got…

So it appears the rumours were right. Apologies to Baxter for blaming him all these years for something that wasn’t his fault ;-)

Canada Post has a Food Mail Program governing the cost of shipping food to Northern Canada:

The Food Mail Program is a service offered by Canada Post and funded by the Federal government. The Food Mail Program is a commitment by the Federal government to subsidize the transportation costs incurred when shipping nutritious food and other essential items to isolated communities within Canada.

The program differentiates between Nutritious Perishable Food, Food of Little Nutritional Value and Convenience Perishable Foods.

Whenever there’s talk of regulating food in the same way that, say, cigarettes are regulated, there’s always a lot of discussion about the impossibility of drawing arbitrary lines. The Food Mail Program draws the lines; indeed the FAQ for the program makes it clear that it has a clear dietary engineering agenda:

Q. Why were some Convenience Perishable Foods eliminated from the Food Mail Program in 1996?

A. The principal objective of the Food Mail Program is to reduce the cost of nutritious perishable food and other essential items, thereby improving nutrition and health in isolated northern communities which do not have year-round surface transportation.

There was no justification for continuing to subsidize high fat convenience foods which contribute to disease rather than promote health. The increasing intake of fat from southern meats and “junk food” is becoming a serious health and nutrition concern in the North. A high intake of fat, particularly saturated fat, has been linked with an increased risk of heart disease, gallbladder disease, and cancer of the colon, breast and prostate.

Convenience prepared foods are also more expensive than similar products prepared at home. By eliminating the subsidy from convenience foods, the cost of basic, healthy foods can be kept as low as possible.

Although it would appear to be something related only to the North, surely the federal and provincial subsidies of air, rail and most-of-all road infrastructure here in the South could be considered as much a subsidy to industrial food producers as anything else. As such, I wonder whether the same logic behind the Food Mail Program could be used to, say, charge a truck filled with Jos. Louis more to cross the Confederation Bridge than a truck filled with carrots.

From the New York Times Magazine: The Road to Clarity, an article on the design and roll-out of Clearview, a new font for highway signage developed in the US (link from my [[Mom]]).

Aaron Koleszar — you may remember him from his appearance on the cover of TIME magazine — is launching a new organic vegetable delivery service this week. If you order today, you’ll get delivery on Thursday. Here’s the complete text of his email offer:

I am pleased to announce that I will be making my first deliveries of an organic local veggie box next Thursday, August 16. If you want to order a veggie box and/or anything else (see below), please reply by email or phone by the evening of Monday, August 13. If you are ordering, please provide your location, address, street (or route #), civic #, apartment #, directions (if not obvious), phone #, cell phone #, email address (if I’m not emailing you), drop-off specifics (see below), and what you’d like to order.

This week, the cost for a veggie box will be $22. I expect this week’s box will contain yellow beans, green beans, broccoli, beet greens, lettuce, zucchini, new potatoes, and young onions from Sweet Clover Farm.

Certified Organic Produce		Price
yellow beans (1lb.)			$4
green beans (1lb.)			$4
broccoli (head)				$2
beet greens (bunch)			$3
lettuce (head)				$2
zucchini (bag, mixed yellow & green)	$3
new potatoes (2 lbs.)			$3
young onions (bunch)			$3

Limited supply, by order only (chemical-free, ie. not certified organic, from my garden or nearby woods)

peppermint (bunch)			$2
raspberries (pint)			$4
chanterell mushrooms	(pint)		$4
chanterell mushrooms	(quart)		$7

Coffee (Certified Organic, Fair Trade, Locally Roasted). Please Indicate Whole Bean or Ground

Bolivian Medium Roast	(1lb.)	$11
Bolivian Dark Roast	(1lb.)	$11
Mexican Medium Roast    (1lb.)	$11
Mexican Dark Roast	(1lb.)	$11

Decaffeinated is available, but it’s not Organic or Fair Trade ($11) I can get Just Us Certified Organic Fair Trade Decaf from the Turning Point Natural Food store, but I’m not sure of the price yet.

Organic Products from the Turning Point Natural Food store - I will be selling a wide variety of organic products from the Turning Point Natural Food store in Montague (grains, beans, seeds, nuts, dried fruit, oils, nut butters, canned goods, pasta, flours, sauces, soups, condiments, teas, vitamins, cleaning supplies, and more). I will be developing a product/price list over the next while, but if you want to order something before that, get in touch. I do have a list of many items and prices, but it will take a while to input into the computer, and even then won’t be an exhaustive list.

Drop-off specifics - Where should the box be left if you are not home? front porch? back porch? at neighbor’s? in shed? Please consider inclement weather and local animals.

Payment method - How will you be paying? If you’re not at home? Leave payment? Mail a cheque? If possible, advance payment is appreciated. Post-dated cheques are one option. I am not able to accept credit cards or Interac. Sorry, only cash, cheque, or money order.

Baked Goods - Starting in the fall I expect to carry a variety of organic goods from Junellen Clausheide’s bakery.

Allergies, Preferences, Substitutions - Please feel free to indicate any allergies, preferences, or your feelings about substitutions if you order a specific product that is not available. I hope to incorporate people’s preferences where feasible, especially as the variety of available fresh produce grows (no pun intended).

Prices subject to change - Prices are subject to change, depending on supply, cost, and other factors.

Delivery charge - In some cases, I may need to charge a small fee for delivery to non-central areas. (At this time I am definitely unable to deliver to O’Leary or Summerside.)

Other Products - I will be adding other products over time. Stay tuned…

You can contact Aaron at 902-659-2575, or by email at aaronkol at isn.net.

Yesterday at the beach (yes, we did end up at the beach) I plonked myself down in Catherine’s high-tech folding beach chair and browsed through the copy of Else/Where: Mapping New Cartographies of Networks and Territories that had been sitting on my bookshelf since I bought it last summer. It’s an amazing book, especially if, like me, you’re interested in maps and visualization.

Appropriate given the subject matter, there’s a visualization of the book itself [8.1 MB PDF].

Travel writer and activist Edward Hasbrouck blogs about air travel and global warming; he writes, in part:

I’ve been saying for years that the current phenomen of world travel by air accessible to ordinary people from First World countries is not only recent (dating only to the last half century) but likely to be short-lived. That was already apparent as a consequnce of the dependence of air travel on fossil fuel, and the inherent scarcity of the same. The negative environmental effects of air travel are only likely to accelerate its rapid (in historical terms) demise over the next half century or less.

I find the intersection of travel and the climate crisis fascinating because it pits two branches of the bohemian lifestyle in direct opposition, in a way that is seemingly impossible to reconcile.

Our weekend travels took us to Scales Pond in South Freetown. We toured the International Children’s Memorial Place, explored the infrastructure left over from the pond’s old life as driver of a hydro-electric generating station, and then crossed the road and walked along a trail that runs down the Dunk River:

It took a while for me to connect the presence of the “No Fishing” signs stuck up everywhere with last month’s Dunk River fish kill — it was [[Catherine]] who noticed the odd fact of there being no fish in the river at all.

The ocean being ever-present here, I don’t usually think of PEI as having a freshwater ecosystem, but it obviously does. I’m as aware as the next guy about how hard it is to wean from a chemical economy, and you’d be hard-pressed to call me a nature lover, but when you walk along a stunning river on a warm summer day and realize that the river has been stripped of life so that we might eat properly-sized french fries, you gotta wonder about our priorities as a society.

Regular readers may recall that I spoke at the annual meeting of the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market about the possibilities for encouraging customers to get to the market by means other than automobile. Judging by the state of the parking lot on Saturday morning, my work has been a complete success:

This is not to say that the Market folks haven’t taken steps to improve things: they’ve made pedestrian and bicycle access from the Confederation Trail a lot easier by mowing the path at the back of the parking lot that joins the trail, they’ve installed a new bicycle rack (they old one was stolen), and they’ve posted public transit maps.

The sad irony in all of this for me is that one of the anchors of my talk was the fact that a city bus stopped several times every Saturday morning right at the front door of the Market. Alas when the bus schedule was reworked in May, that bus was a casualty, and so the closest you can get by bus from downtown Charlottetown is either the Atlantic Superstore plaza or the UPEI student centre.

That said, [[Oliver]] and I did manage to get to the Market, out to Owl’s Hollow, and back, all by public transit on Saturday morning. We had to walk some, and the schedule wasn’t exactly “frequent,” but it worked, and it’s certainly easily possible for almost anyone.

Bluegrass, as everyone knows, is the one true music. And the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] was graced with an excellent bluegrass quartet on Saturday morning, the Grass Mountain Hobos. The sign on their guitar case says “We’ll play your next house party.” If you want to see them otherwise, they’ll be playing Old Home Week on August 17th.