I returned to the Town & Country this afternoon, my second visit (first one got reported here) since Louis and Faida retired.

Wow — what a different a couple of weeks makes: everything was running like a top, service was super-quick, complete and friendly. And the food — I ordered the chicken saté with rice — was well-prepared and spiced with an excellent amount of fire. After we’d eaten the owner came over to make sure everything was okay.

So it looks like the T&C is back — it’s not the old T&C, and it never will be. But if they keep this up, it will become a regular stop on my lunch rounds.

My brother Steve is on the bus with PQ leader André Boisclair during the Québec election campaign. He’s writing a daily Reporter’s Notebook and, from time to time, you’ll see him, Forrest Gump-like, on the front page of a daily newspaper holding his microphone up to Boisclair: today they’re on the front page of the Globe and Mail (although not, apparently, on the Toronto edition, where the front page story is “ ‘Stay off the streets,’ mayor says”).

Jaiku underwent a UI upgrade while I wasn’t looking. Apparently “Jaiku” is now a noun — “type your new Jaiku here.” Rhymes with haiku?

Remember last year when Radio Shack got all switched around here in Canada, the end-up of which was that “Radio Shack announced that it would be forming a Canadian subsidiary to oversee its expansion into Canada, using the Radio Shack brand name.” Well my Dad pointed out that they’re giving up on that plan:

RadioShack Corporation closed nine company-owned stores in Canada at the end of January 2007 as the company focuses its attention and resources on strengthening its core business in the U.S.

In response to the work of CBC Prince Edward Island, the PEI Department of Health has begun to publish details of Warnings and Summary Offence Tickets issued to restaurants.

The first restaurant listed there today is Donkin Donuts Mobile, cited for the rather cryptic “operating under a Type IV license when a Type II license was required.”

It would seem to me that beyond their issues with the Dept. of Health, Donkin Donuts probably has some copyright-related litigation in its future, but that’s just a guess. In any case, I happen to have spotted the self-same mobile donut dispenser while waiting in line for a sleigh ride at the Jack Frost Festival earlier this month:

It’s obviously crying out for Type II licensing.

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.”