When Oliver and I arrived at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning as usual, we were greeted with the sad news that Kim Dormaar had been abducted by aliens:

While, of course, we had some concern for Kim’s welfare — what kind of aliens? for how long? are they treating him right? — our chief thought at this point was “what are we going to have for breakfast?”

Fortunately Karin LaRonde was standing by, ably assisted by various members of the Nicholson clan, with tofu scrambler and walnut cranberry tofu crumble cake (the name of which I probably have wrong, but it’s very good).

I should be smart enough to reason that if Kim was too occupied by his alien adventures to properly service the market, he would also be too busy to provide smoked salmon to Casa Mia. But I am not, and thus visions of smoked salmon bagels danced in my head when Oliver and I showed up on Sunday morning. Alas there was no smoked salmon in the house, and so I was forced to innovate.

Being an egg liberationist as I am, most of the breakfast entrées were off limits. Fortunately Chef Cam came to the rescue by agreeing to prepare an egg-free variation of the breakfast burrito, substituting grilled vegetables for the eggs. It was fantastic, and I may be forced to place it into the regular Sunday rotation.

An Ambiguous Animation Painted on Public Walls. Thanks to pointer from Dave Hyndman.

On Wednesday the CBC Radio program Spark recorded a live interview with Bill Buxton and they used a little bit of tape I sent them (it’s about half-way through) wherein I talked about how the CBC’s traditional “hub and spoke” technology model has led to a CBC worldview where Toronto is at the centre and the rest of us are in “the regions.”

Yesterday the CBC announced that “the regions” are officially no longer to be known as such: it changed the names of “regional production centres” to “centres.”

I wonder if this will change the CBC worldview accordingly.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull opens tonight at the Brackley Drive-in Theatre.

Apparently there is a category of shoes known as vegetarian. Who knew. Unfortunately there seems to be some great degree of overlap with the “ugly” category.

For some reason there’s been an unusual amount of comment spam here this week, all directed at one post. As a result, and looking to the future, I’m considering replacing the existing commenting scheme with one that requires that you sign in with an OpenID before you can leave a comment.

As OpenID is becoming quite widespread, and you can get a free OpenID from many different places (or set yourself up with one), this doesn’t seem an entirely unreasonable thing to do.

Thoughts?

The IP address of our WAN here at Reinvented HQ was set to change at 5:00 p.m. today, which was to have made for a busy day scurrying around updating various places here and abroad where our IP address is hard-coded. Unfortunately, it turns out that what we thought was to be 5:00 p.m. was, in fact, 5:00 a.m.. So when we woke up this morning, we were entirely off the air.

I’m gradually catching up with the changes that need to be made — this site just came back online after I turned on routing. Email seems to be working. Our phone system needs a little more work. And there’s some DNS catchup work to do. But we’re on the road to recovery.

At CasaMiaMail.com you can sign up to receive a daily email letting you know what the specials at Casa Mia Restaurant are. I’d appreciate any feedback you might have on the mechanics of signing up.

Back in the late 1980s I shared the top floor of 408-1/2 George Street North in Peterborough with the late David Bierk. David had one cassette tape, Famous Blue Raincoat, which features Jennifer Warnes singing the songs of Leonard Cohen. David listened to the tape over and over and over; while he was painting his large canvases, I was programming in Turbo Pascal, and the songs on that album became infused into my DNA.

That album was my route into Leonard Cohen and, to be honest, listening to the man himself always seemed like a come-down: for me, they were Jennifer Warnes songs that happened to be written by that Cohen fellow. It really never got much deeper than that.

Catherine, on the other hand, is a Leonard Cohen fan of the “he’s a deep and profound songwriter who touches me deeply” school. I’m sure there’s an unspoken degree of “…and twice the man you’ll ever be” in there too. Not in a spiteful way, simply as a matter of fact.

And so this spring when it was announced that Cohen’s Canadian tour would be stopping in Charlottetown, I gave passing thought to igniting Catherine’s passsions and getting tickets. Unfortunately my devotion to the cause was half-hearted, and when tickets sell out in two hours, the half-hearted man never wins.

Fortunately my billionaire industrialist friend happened to have four spare tickets at his disposal, and casually mentioned that I could take two of them off his hands if I wanted. I immediately agreed, and Catherine, suffice to say, was pleased.

Which is how we came to be in Balcony Row B, seats 4 and 5 last night for the big show, Catherine prepared to be swept off her feet, me reconciled to hearing half-hearted gravely renditions of Jennifer Warnes tunes.

An older performer staging a “comeback” tour like Cohen — he’s 74 now and on his first tour since he was 60 — is going to end up somewhere on a spectrum that starts with Buena Vista Social Club and ends with The Love Boat. In other words, you’re either seasoned pro who’s still got it, or you’re Cab Calloway dancing with Captain Stubing.

For the first act of last night’s show things weren’t looking good: the orchestrations were very poppy, with lots of Hammond B3 and synth. It felt like 1988 all over again. The fact the Cohen is, by his very nature, a parody of himself, didn’t make the situation any better.

The second act, however, saved if for me. Not only was the music more adventurous, but Cohen relaxed and became more engaged with the audience, and the considerable talents of his band were allowed to shine. By the time Hallelujah rolled around, I was ready to call myself an adherent, and after the fourth encore I was sold.

Catherine, of course, didn’t need to be convinced.

It was quite a show.

Dan is in Panama on vacation. Cynthia Cudmore is living there. Both are blogging about the country.