Inspired in part by 10 Good Reasons to Choose Vintage Gifts, here are my picks for gifts you can purchase in Charlottetown over the next 48 hours should you be of the last-minute shopping persuasion:

• The aforementioned Funkfactory Drums at 211 Euston Street. They’re open tonight and Friday and Saturday from 11:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. (Amiel says “I’ll probably be open later”). Drums and musical thingies from $5 to $500; everything’s so beautiful that even non-musical-type recipients are eligible. And don’t forget the huge collection of hot sauce on the “wall of fire.”
• Kim Dormaar will be at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market on Saturday morning from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. I suspect they’ll be a strong demand for his smoked fish products, so go early. His products are, literally, world-class.
• Once you’re done at Kim’s, turn 180 degrees and buy some of Lynne Douglas’s hand-knit slippers, hats, mits and other gear. My father’s warm feet are a product of Lynne’s handiwork.
• The Formosa Tea House, in addition to its usual selection of paintings and tea pots, has an intriguing selection of furniture arranged down the middle of their restaurant: benches, little tables, and so on. Very simple designs, and lots available for under $100. The tea house is open daily until Christmas Eve from 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. and then from 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. (they may close earlier in the evening if business is slow).
• City Cinema, open today and Friday but closed on Saturday, sells memberships for $20/year ($16 for students). They also sell “single ticket vouchers.” Is there a better gift for movie lovers? (disclaimer: client)
• Luna Eclectic Crafts & Gifts on Victoria Row (138 Richmond Street) is the less-soapy outlet of Moonsail Soapworks. They have a fascinating array of gifty things, from Japanese paper to books make out of recycled album covers. They’re open 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. every day until Christmas Eve.
• Make a donation to CHANCES Family Resource Centre in someone’s name and help support their excellent work helping parents and children. We would not have survived parenthood without them. You can donate online at CanadaHelps.org (which takes a 3% fee off the top), or send a donation by mail to 16 Brighton Road. They’re a registered charity.

If you have other suggestions, feel free to post them as comments; include details if you have them (hours, location, etc.).

Until I did some research this morning, I’d always been confused about the naming of the Dora Mavor Moore awards. My friend Laurence received one in 1998. And my friend Bill’s piece Zorro was once nominated for one.

Dora Mavor Moore, it turns out, was the Scottish-born mother of noted Canadian polymath Mavor Moore who died on Monday. This well-worded tribute should tell you everything you need to know; in part:

There were two phrases that Mrs Moore was fond of saying, and they seem to reflect her own deepest nature and philosophy. To her, ‘The greatest souls are the simplest’. She applied it to Tyrone Guthrie, and somehow, in her own long and highly pressured career she, too, managed to preserve the purity and shining integrity of the young at heart. It is perhaps how she maintained her uncommon rapport with children.

And again, on a CBC Project 65 broadcast, I remember hearing her say, ‘Life is greater than art. We use art to perfect our life’. Today, ten days after her death, when her magnificent ninety-one years of life are over (seventy of them spent in the theatre of Canada), we fondly remember both the life and the art. To the living, life is, of course, most important; but after death it is surprising how one’s art lives on, even in that most ephemeral of the arts, the theatre.

That last sentence would, of course, apply equally well to her talented son.

I believe — unless anyone has any last-minute suggestions — that I have now visited every coffee shop in restaurant in Charlottetown that serves cappuccino. At least those that open before 8:00 a.m. and are south of Euston Street.

So this morning I had to double back and take my coffee at Timothy’s.

I will take the holiday break to consider my options from here.

Amiel Lux, son of my longtime friend and colleague Peter Lux, recently opened Funkfactory Drums, a “full service drum shop” at 211 Euston Street in Charlottetown. I noticed that he was open as I was driving by tonight, so I stopped in.

Wow.

In recent years 211 Euston Street has been a second-hand store, a variety store and a video rental place. It’s never looked like a place you wanted to spend any time in. Until now. Amiel’s put a lot of work into breathing life back into the retail space, and what he’s achieved is absolutely amazing.

He’s also got more drums, shakers, bodhrans, maracas and relateed gear than you’ve ever seen in one place.

And as if that wasn’t enough, one wall of the store is dedicated to selling hot sauce, including three varieties of Amiel’s own brand.

If you’re looking for last-minute Christmas gifts for the funky soul in your family, I suggest you drop in. And even if you’re not, you should drop in just to compliment Amiel on breathing life into an old building.

From my friend Ann Thurlow comes a link to this page on shoemaker Timberland’s website that describes how each pair of their footwear now comes with a so-called “nutritional label” that lays out the environmental impact of producing it. They go as far as providing a complete list of their factories, with addresses. Like Ann wrote me, “EVERYONE should do this.”

Back in the last century, Rob Paterson and I cooked up a project called “This Bag of Potatoes has a Website” that would have meant much the same thing for PEI potatoes — a statement of provenance, so to speak, that would have linked the consumer to information about the farmer, the field, and the growing conditions for the potatoes they’d purchased. The project never gained enough traction to take on a life of its own, but it’s obvious that this is going to be a growing trend, driven by consumer demand.

In the same vein, Dan James is working to encourage Smitty’s Restaurant here in Charlottetown to have a variety of fair trade coffee available; Dan reports that they’re looking into it, and signs seem encouraging.

Today is one of those days when the weather in my MacBook’s “dashboard widget” is an exact representation of the weather outside my window:

It’s useful for me to recall that on the Mediterranean in Cannes 9 days ago in sunny 18 degrees C weather:

You know those annoying Subway commercials featuring Jon Lovitz? Since they started airing earlier this year, I’d wondering about who the target demographic for them is. I don’t pay any attention to them and, in fact, I will often click to another channel when they come on because they’re so annoying.

Well, on Sunday Catherine and Oliver and I had to go to Home Depot (yes, even though) and as we were hungry mid-trip we stopped at the new Subway out by the Charlottetown Mall for a quick sandwich. As soon as the restaurant was in sight and our plans were clear, Oliver shouted “Eat Fresh!” (the tagline for the ads, similarly shouted by Jon Lovitz) at the top of his lungs. And then continued the theme for the next hour or so.

So now I understand.

A short collection of odds and sods:

• I suppose everyone else already knows this, but if you go to Google and search for keyword what is followed by a word, you get the definition. Like what is miscellanea.
• More help catching image spam in OS X Mail.
• Dannie Jost relates a tale of mobile woe in Switzerland.
• Uncle Mark 2007 Gift Guide & Almanac by Mark Hurst is very compelling.
• I found that link on Kevin Kelly’s Cool Tools site. The Whole Earth Catalog echoes on.
• Freeware to make your Series 60 phone home if it’s lost or stolen.
• The PHP-based PhotoStack photo gallery system looks interesting.
• Perhaps I’ve linked before, but Plazes + Google Earth is still very cool.
• s60tips.com points to Analysis of IMEI numbers, a tool that parses a mobile phone’s IMEI number. If you’ve got a Series 60 phone, they’ve also got some useful secret codes for revealing things like the IMEI.
• 43 Folders points to NextBus, a real-time transit information website.
• Notes on In-Ear Headphones for your Nokia.
• Create Quicksilver plug-ins using PyObjC and py2app (pointer from Olle — who has been busy at Polar Rose this season).

I’ve long had the idea of sending a GPS unit, left on and gathering “location breadcrumbs” by mail or courier just to see where it went. Here’s someone who actually did it. Neato.

Having failed to obtain cappuccino this morning, I launched a special follow-up mission at 11:45, integrated with lunching with Dan and Steven. Our destination: The Marketplace Café, the restaurant arm of Bruce MacNaughton’s multi-tentacled downtown retail space in the old Woolworths store. I was not disappointed:

The coffee was excellent — Bruce tells me he sources it from Robert Bourgeois — and it was served piping hot in a quality Island-crafted mug. While the foam was a little too foamy for my taste, given the dreadful foam I’ve experienced elsewhere, I’ll not complain. Given the hour I had chocolate sprinkles added to the top, something I wouldn’t do at dawn; they were a nice touch.

All said, it was a pretty darn good cup of coffee; not quite hard-scrabble Italian workaday, but enough to satisfy my cappuccino fix.

Sadly the Marketplace Café doesn’t open until 9:00 a.m., thus disqualifying it from a place in my newfound early-morningness. But as a later-morning fallback, I’ll happily put it into rotation.

The rest of the lunch, by the way, was also quite good: I had a toasted club sandwich on focaccia and a bowl of cauliflower soup. This was served, pleasantly and unusually for french fry-obsessed Charlottetown, with a healthy bunch of raw carrots and celery . It was all very tasty.