An unexpected “feature” of the “Everyday Heroes” show at the Jack Frost Winter Festival here in [[Charlottetown]] this month was Batman selling the young audience on the virtues of police and firefighter adulation:

Now I’m all for supporting police and firefighters — they do, in fact, “put themselves in harm’s way” so that I might life a safer and more peaceful life. But I also think a healthy suspicion of the police is a Good Thing, and I’m not convinced that we should employ cartoon characters to propagandize our children to mindlessly look up to the police as heroes.

Of course mindless adoration is one of the big themes of the Jack Frost Festival — mindless adoration of corporate sponsors, etc. — so this isn’t an unusual aspect of the event. But it is sort of state-sponsored self-inflation.

Our Nabaztag rabbit can stream web radio stations; last week it was streaming opera. Witness:

The following email from inside Aliant showed up in our support mailbox here this morning, the result of our nightly City Cinema mailing (email addresses obfuscated to protect the innocent):

Aliant's Content Filtering Device (an automated content monitoring gateway) has 
stopped the following email for the following reason:

It believes it may contain unacceptable language, or inappropriate material.

   Message: B00ae5df48.00000001.mml
   From:    XXXXXX@isn.net
   To:      XXXXXX@aliant.ca
   Subject: CITY CINEMA schedule for Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Please remove any inappropriate language and send it again.

The blocked email will be automatically deleted after 5 days.

Aliant's Content Filtering Device: 
Content Security (Inbound) : Block Unacceptable Language
Script Offensive Language (Basic) Triggered in Body
Expression: blow job* Triggered 1 times weighting 5
Script Offensive Language (Extensive) Triggered in Body
Expression: blow job* OR blowjob* Triggered 1 times weighting 60

It delights me to think that it’s someone’s job at Aliant to maintain the list of topics that Aliant employees shouldn’t read about in their email. I’d pay real money for a copy of the regular expression list. Do you think they have weekly team meetings — “Bob, we’ve had an upsurge in blow job traffic and we’ve really got to slap a filter on that…”

By the way, the offending text came from the description of Sleeping Dogs Lie, which contained, in part:

The story of a young woman, Amy who confides in her fiancé‚ the darkest and most shameful secret in her sexual past - that once, in college, bored and curious, she gave her dog a blow job - Sleeping Dogs had the potential to be a Kevin Smith-style raunchfest, which would have been funny, but not nearly as affecting as Goldthwait’s take.

They were testing the “crawl” last night on WBZ Boston, the local CBS affiliate; during the airing of The Unit the text “Tons of Information” came scrolling across the bottom of the screen a couple of times:

[[Catherine]] and I were up at the Credit Union arranging for our 2006 RRSP contributions. They were busy, so we had to leave our names and wait in the waiting room for a bit. When they asked me for my name I said “Rukavina” and they apparently they took this to mean that my name is “Ruka Vina” because when someone came looking for us 15 minutes later, they came into the waiting room and asked for “Ruk.”

Air Canada’s Daily Deals for today are very cheap flights to Asia including Toronto to Beijing or Shanghai for $365 each way. Oddly, the fare from Vancouver, where you have to make a stopover on the way to either, is $410. Which means, I think, that the fare from Toronto to Vancouver is minus $45. Weird. Anyway, if you’ve ever had a hankering to visit China, this is a very inexpensive way to get there — high season fares are in the $1300 range each way.

Meanwhile, the current Websaver fares from Halifax are equally “all-time low” with Halifax - London at $179 each way. You can even fly Halifax - Port Au Prince, Haiti for $150 each way.

As usual, there are only a couple of sale fares from Charlottetown: Lima, Peru ($440 each way) and Sydney, Australia ($827 each way). The only rhyme or reason I can make for the difference between Halifax and Charlottetown sale fares is that availability on the Halifax to Charlottetown route is non-existent — even Moncton is showered with super fares.

The International Chamber of Commerce publishes a Weekly Piracy Report. Just in case problems with the food system aren’t enough to keep you up at night. It appears that we don’t get much piracy up here in eastern North America.

Posting with hopes that someone can tell me why Technorati thinks I haven’t updated this blog for 73 days. Help.

If you were a regular at the now-defunct uptown [[Formosa Tea House]] in Ellen’s Creek Plaza, you’ll remember Kenny and Winnie, its amiable hosts. Last summer they left the Formosa, bought the building formerly occupied by Theo’s Thai Food on Pownal Street, and began renovations.

Over the past 9 months they have completely transformed the building on the inside, opening up what used to be a cramped first floor into a very open area with huge windows onto the street. They’ve carefully crafted the space into a new restaurant, opened 5 days ago, which they’re calling [[Tai Chi Gardens]].

[[Oliver]] and I dropped by, completely by chance, yesterday after our weekly visit to the [[Charlottetown Farmer’s Market]] and were pleasantly surprised to find them open. Oliver had his usual hot chocolate (prepared with ice cube, per his earlier arrangement established over many visits to the Formosa) and I had a lemon iced tea (excellent). We shared a stuffed bun billed with turnips and leeks which was also very good.

They’re making a tentative stab at opening on Sundays — from Noon until 3:00 p.m. — and so we’re going this afternoon for lunch by way of encouraging this idea (they would be the only tea house in town to be open Sundays).

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has a Recalls, Market Withdrawals and Safety Alerts page that’s also available as an RSS feed.

I’ve been subscribing to the feed for the past couple of weeks, and it has provided me with an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) look into what can go wrong with food; for example:

Product testing by several states has now confirmed that Peter Pan peanut butter and certain Great Value brand peanut butter are the sources of the foodborne illness outbreak of Salmonella Tennessee that began in August 2006. To date 329 individuals have become ill from consuming the contaminated peanut butter, and 51 of those persons were hospitalized.

and:

Castle Produce, a subsidiary of Tropical Produce, Inc., a wholesale importer of fresh fruit and vegetables announced the recall of cantaloupes in California due to potential health concerns. Some cantaloupes delivered on or after 2/16/2007 have tested positive for Salmonella, although no illnesses have been reported.

and:

Americas Kitchen of Alpharetta, GA, is recalling its 32-ounce packages of “Wellsley Farms” Green Bean Casserole sold from September 1, 2006 through February 22, 2007 because they have the potential to be contaminated with Listeria monocytogenes, an organism which can cause illness, mild, moderate or even severe.

and:

The American Italian Pasta Company (AIPC), the independent manufacturer of Giant Eagle brand Egg Free Pasta Ribbons, has notified Giant Eagle that a recently produced shipment of the product may inadvertently contain eggs.

And those are only from this week.