All other things being equal, I should be at the SHiFT conference in Lisbon this week. Alas real work, pneumonia, airfares and other forces conspired against me, and so I’m left to look on from afar: here’s Laurent summarizing his talk and here’s a photo by Martin of Thomas giving his.

With luck I’ll be able to rejoin the reboot-SHiFT-LIFT train in Geneva; Laurent (yes, the same Laurent) has just posted a vision for what LIFT07 might look like.

A sure sign that the procrastination gremlins are in full form: another episode of The 3LA Podcast. Today’s subject: PMT.

While I tipped my hat to friend Ann (who has nothing to be ashamed about for not knowing how to use RSS in a sentence) there’s something else at work here: perhaps like you, I get lots of ideas in the shower, or on the way to work, or when I’m falling to sleep at night. Usually these ideas involve creating some sort of grand thing — a newspaper, a hovering rocket ship, a website for father with one child. And usually they go nowhere, as real life overtakes (and I realize that parts for hovering rocket ships would probably be too expensive anyway).

I’m pretty sure that if I carried out all of my crazy shower schemes I would explode or be homeless (although I might be homeless and happy). But it occured to me that the effect of so many ideas not carried out was beginning to be a downer. So I decided to take just one — it happened, perhaps at random, to be exposition on three-letter words — and just do it.

The idea actually started off in the shower as a CBC radio series. Then I realized that to make a CBC radio series I would probably have to write a proposal and send it to someone. And there would be meetings, and studios to book, and scripts to write, and T4s to receive. It all seemed Very Complicated. And so I gave up. Then I realized that if I just went ahead and did it — in an hour or two — I would, at the very least, get it out of my system. Wouldn’t be perfect, might not even be useful. But never underestimate the power of actually doing something.

Who knows — I might keep going.

My friend Ann wrote the other day to ask me about RSS. I wrote her back a little description of what RSS is. This morning she wrote back to thank me, and added:

The latent (or maybe not so) teacher in you is a side you should cultivate.

That’s a nice set of gloves to throw down, and inspired me to whip up a brand new podcast: The 3LA Podcast. The idea is that in each episode I’ll decrypt a new “three letter acronym.” Like RSS. Or GPS. In two minutes or less.

Episode one concerns the three-letter acronym TLA.

You can grab the podcast feed, and learn more, over on 3la.ca.

My archives operative G. tracked down this advertisement for a new Charlottetown bus service in The Patriot, dated February 15, 1938:

The following article about the bus service appears in the same issue:

You don’t have to talk to many people here in [[Charlottetown]] to find out that Ray Murphy, personable owner of Murphy Pharmacies, is a pretty good guy. Tales of his community generosity abound, and if there’s a health-related good cause in this city, it’s likely that Ray’s company is offering it some support.

Which is one of the reasons why I’m happy to read, as CBC is reporting, that our neighbourhood recreation centre, formerly owned by the Roman Catholic Diocese, has recently been purchased by Ray Murphy, with a goal of “turning it back into a building where people will gather for some healthy exercise.”

There’s a scarcity of recreational facilities in Charlottetown’s downtown; flipping through the City of Charlottetown’s recreation brochure you find that there’s a heavy concentration of activities out in the suburbs, but almost nothing south of Euston St. I’ve been searching for an alternative to “calling the cops” when neighbourhood kids with no place to play do dangerous things like “climbing onto the roof of our carriage house” because they’ve got nowhere else to hang out; perhaps the new “Murphy’s Community Centre” can help.

It’s nice to see that a company that’s in the “health business” is visionary enough to know that there’s more to health than prescriptions and shampoo; kudos to Mr. Murphy and his group for taking this bold move. Let us know what we can do to help.

If you live on [[Prince Edward Island]], you may have wondered what the official way to send queries to the provincial government is. Turns out that the official PEI “question box” is located deep in the woods at the Brookvale Demonstration Woodlot:

There weren’t any pending questions at the time the photo was taken, so obviously provincial officials are on the job.

If you’re trying to phone me in the office, you can’t. At least not for the moment. My old Nortel desk phone, filched from [[silverorange]] several years ago, has taken on the odd characteristic of ringing all the time. Which is very, very distracting. Simultaneously my mobile phone needs a recharge. So if you need me by voice, try Skype. Or send email. I’ll get a new phone installed here by morning.

Last night [[Catherine]] and [[Oliver]] and I decided to go up to [[The Noodle House]] for dinner, taking advantage of it being open on Sundays now. Upon arrival we were surprised to see the parking lot almost full, which is rare; we wondered whether we’d be able to get a table.

Once we got inside we found one big long table set up along the back of the restaurant surrounded by about 30 people. Our waitress explained that “the Chinese community” had gone up to Summerside for the big air show, and had come back to The Noodle House for dinner. She apologized for “all the noise.”

And there certainly was noise. And laughter. And kids running around the tables while simultaneously eating bowls of noodles. And babies crying. And a general sense of a lot of happy people eating together and thoroughly enjoying the experience.

And so we weren’t bothered by the noise, but rather enlivened by it. It was so nice to be eating with Oliver at a restaurant where “being on best behaviour” wasn’t the order of the day.

Which made me think: when we go “out to eat” we often cast the experience as “getting away from the kids,” and, perhaps as a result, the environment of many restaurants here in Charlottetown is quiet and sedate — more like a funeral home than a carnival. Everyone’s supposed to keep to their own table, look straight ahead, and not cause a stir.

I expect that the police would be called if, say, a bunch of kids went running around Sirenella with bowls of spaghetti in tow.

Now I’m not knocking the value of “getting away from the kids,” and I don’t think we need to transform our restaurants into hedonistic free-for-alls. But it was nice to eat in, or at least beside, a raucous community bubbling over with energy; brought back memories of our better meals in Spain and Portugal. And reminded me that eating out is as much or more about the experience, the theatre, as the food.

The Think Organically, Eat Locally episode of the YANKEE Magazine New England Travel, Food, and Home podcast is an excellent primer for understanding why it was probably not so wise to be eating organic spinach from California in the first place. YANKEE’s Food Editor Annie B. Copps has a background in both public health and food, and she’s got a good take on the food system and how to make best use of it.

See FDA to consumers: Don’t eat ANY fresh spinach if you’re outside of North America and wondering what I’m talking about.

The CBC is reporting that “Cadet leaders are heading into Charlottetown’s junior high school classrooms on a recruitment drive that coincides with one underway for the Canadian Armed Forces in Atlantic Canada.”

It’s one thing to make me pay for your senseless wars, another thing entirely to try to recruit my child into your war machine behind my back (their next stop is kindergarten, presumably).

The mind boggles reading quotes like this, from Capt. Hope Carr:

“Are they made aware of the Canadian Forces? Absolutely. Do we utilize some of the same things that the Canadian Forces do — such as uniforms, the rank structure? Absolutely. What our goal is is to teach young people to be good citizens, to be good members of the community, contributing members of their community, and to take with them skills such as leadership, teamwork, learning to deal with difficult situations and making the right choices.”

Sheesh.