Compass ran a story on Friday evening about how the Children’s Wish Foundation built a playground in the back yard of Cameron MacDonald. Part of the story was an interview with some of the builders at a local cabinet company who volunteers their time to help build the playground, and one of the builders was a man named Barry Calder. Here’s a transcript of what he says:

I’m healthy. And this childen that we’re doing this for is not. And I wish I could give him my health. But you can’t. So… every little thing you do to brighten somebody’s day is a worthwhile thing to be a part of.

I’d always been something of a cynic about the Children’s Wish Foundation — yes, I realize that makes me tantamount to the devil — but in 14 seconds Barry Calder convinced me of its value. Hats off.

With moves by the Government of Nova Scotia this week, Prince Edward Island will soon be the only province in Canada to have laws preventing wide-open Sunday shopping. Which means, in practice, that while we can shop for Catcher in the Rye and quality Island crafts on Sundays (there are exemptions for bookstores and craft shops, among others), we’re prevented from doing a full-on weekly grocery shop and from purchasing 39-inch plasma screen televisions.

The issue of “Sunday shopping” makes for strange bedfellows. You’re not likely to find me in church on Sunday; indeed I’ve been accused of “outright hositility toward the choice made by the vast majority of Island society who follow a Christian lifestyle and are devout worshippers.”

You would think then, given my irreligious attitudes, I’d be in favour of wide-open Sunday morning Canadian Tire attendance. But I’m not.

I’ve got nothing against shopping. But I tend to think that we’re all growing a little too used to deriving much of our sense of personal well-being from the acquisition of stuff. So when historical precedent, religious or not, hands us a day without shopping, a day when, in theory, we can look elsewhere for our well-being, I’m on board.

Whether it’s going to church, or going to the golf course, or playing with Lego, going for a walk, or reading a book, our current largely commerce-free Sundays here on PEI are a valuable gift that we should treasure.

“But what about the other 32 million Canadians — shouldn’t we strive to stay in step with modern times?” one hears in response. To this I offer the suggestion that it might just be possible that Prince Edward Islanders are smarter than the rest of Canadians, that we recognize that life doesn’t have to revolve around Home Depot, and that it’s okay to take a day off every week.

Or perhaps one hears “this is a Christian thing — we can’t impose Christianity on everyone!” No we can’t. But there’s something special about a shared day off. A sense of quiet, you might say. A collective recognition. That this choice of day happens to extend from Christian practice doesn’t need to imply that we’re all up for Jesus — but it is useful that there are so many Christians who take Sunday so seriously, and that’s a useful fact to leverage for the good of all of us, Christian or not.

“But the cruise ship visitors — they want to be able to buy diamond jewelry on Sundays!” Right, sure. Even if that were true, I think it’s time we draw a line in the sand, a point beyond which we will not go to prostitute ourselves to the tourist economy. Cruise ship visitors in particular add little to the life of our community; they’re hear for a few hours, take a zip around in their air conditioned tour buses, and then they’re gone. If we can fleece them for a few bucks in the process, fine. But should we really reconfigure our lives for them? Aren’t there better, more honourable, less destructive ways to build an economy?

The final wave of pro-wide-open-shopping protest comes from those on the other side of the current Sunday exemptions. Sobeys and the Atlantic Superstore, for example — large grocery store chains — led the fight in Nova Scotia, presumably in part because they felt it unfair that little grocery stores were allowed to open and they weren’t. Bookstores can open, but shoe stores can’t. Nurses and police officers have to work, but programmers don’t. “It’s so unfair!” one hears.

I would hold, however, that our current laws have been rather skillfully crafted to allow for least impact on what’s special about Sunday. It’s one thing to pop over to Brighton Clover Farm to grab a tub of Cool Whip for Sunday dinner, quite another to spend two hours at Sobeys buying groceries. And that small crafts shops, serving the tourist economy, are allowed to open seems a reasonable compromise. Laws are imperfect tools that we use to shape the nature of our society; they don’t have to be black and white, and they should be allowed to reflect the eccentricities of a community. So while it’s impractical to shut down everything on Sundays (remember that, historically, Islanders weren’t even allowed to drive automobiles on Sundays), there’s no reason why the alternative has to see Sunday turn into another Monday.

Prince Edward Island wrapped itself in the promotion tag-line “What if the world had been to Prince Edward Island?” this year. And while the campaign itself was widely derided (and appears to not have actually worked very well), there’s truth in them thar words: what if the world had been to Prince Edward Island? Isn’t it possible that we’re on to something here, that we understand something about how to have a better quality of life, and quality of life where not everything has to come down to dollars and cents?

It is said that Islanders are averse to change. While this actually isn’t true (PEI has changed more than any other province in the last 40 years), there is a sense here that “the Island way of life” is something worth thinking about, and preserving. At its worst this leads to cruel xenophobia; at its best, however, the mere fact that there is a collective notion that we share a “way of life” — in other words a recognition that we’re all living “in community” — is a rare, even amazing thing. Something we shouldn’t take for granted.

And so while the Island seems to have fared the introduction of the horseless carriage and end of prohibition basically intact, I fear that the coming of Sunday shopping might reflect the smashing of an important buttress against becoming just like everywhere else. And that would be very sad indeed.

Online Travel Review points to a Reuters story reporting that Irish discount airline Ryanair has made a $1.9 billion offer for Irish “flag carrier” Aer Lingus.

By coincidence, I just finished reading Ryanair: How a Small Irish Airline Conquered Europe, a compelling account of how Irish entrepreneur Tony Ryan founded the airline, and how brash CEO Michael O’Leary turned it into the European colossus that it is.

Ironically, Tony Ryan began his aviation career working at Aer Lingus. One of his responsibilities was to oversee the leasing out of the airline’s planes during slack periods. This business evolved into a standalone spin-off business called Guinness Peat Aviation, which is where Ryan earned his first fortune.

At last count I’ve got 30 shows set up to record every week on the DVR. I’ll need to start winnowing that down soon, both to cut down on mandatory TV watching time, and also because I don’t think I can take much more courtroom drama.

While there are a couple of sitcoms that are attracting my attention this year — The Class has promise, for example — this year seems to be the Year of Hour Long Drama. And big themes seem to be the aforementioned courtroom (Justice, Shark), weird shit happening (Jericho, Six Degrees, Heros) and kidnapping and crime (Kidnapped, Vanished, Smith).

The real big trend, however, is the “last five minutes power montage,” a phenomenon that started a few years ago, and is even more the rage this year. The formula involves taking the last five minutes of a drama — basically everything after the last commercial — and running a mournful pop song or power ballad over a montage of one or more characters as they work out the ramifications of whatever killing, kidnapping, or random happenstancing they’ve engaged in over the episode.

So the end of an episode of Smith might be made up scenes of Ray Liota driving home from the latest crime spree, fading back and forth with scenes of his wife lying in bed wondering whether he’s back to criming again, overlaid with an Imogen Heap song.

I hope Imogen Heap is making out like a bandit herself this year, by the way: I’ve encountered her songs used montagely, in Six Feet Under, and also in several movies. Her Hide and Seek, which starts “Where are we? What the hell is going on? The dust has only just begun to fall…,” is all over the place this year, presumably because that opening line can be used to illustrate so much of the angst, criming, and weird shit that’s all over TV.

The DVR — or Digital Video Recorder — is sometimes known by its most popular manisfestation, the Tivo.  Indeed to “Tivo” something has become a verb.

You can think of a DVR as a Video Cassette Recorder, but with a hard drive instead of video tapes used for recording.

More importantly, however, is that DVRs are also computers, albeit ones with a features limited to TV recording and controlled by a remote rather than a keyboard.  And because they’re computers, they can be a lot more powerful and easier to use that VCRs.

I don’t think anyone ever got user interface on the VCR to the point where it was universally usable.  And it’s not that there weren’t attempts — the crazy “VCR Plus” system comes to mind.

With DVRs, things are getting pretty close to “anyone can use this.”  The printed TV Guide is gone, replaced by up to two weeks of electronic TV guide, navigated on the TV screen with a remote.  Want to record something?  Press the “RECORD” button.  That’s it.

DVRs can also be used to record entire series — you tell the DVR to record every new episode of your favourite program and it just does it.  Indeed more sophisticated DVRs, like the Tivo, can be set to record automatically based on other criteria, such as actor, or genre.

Because DVRs automatically invisibly save some amount whatever you’re watching “live,” even if you’re not recording a program you can generally “pause” and “rewind”.  Which makes it a lot easier to watch credits, and listen to confusing dialog again.  To say nothing of making for easier washroom breaks.

We’ve had a DVR for almost a year, and perhaps the greatest change it’s made in our television watching life is that we simply don’t watch commercial anymore.  We’ve got the DVR set up to record the programs we want to watch, and we generally watch them anywhere from an hour to a day after they’ve aired, which means that when commercials happen, we just fast-forward through them.

Most cable and satellite providers now have DVRs available, usually as a more expensive version of the digital box you need anyway.  We pay an extra $10 a month for ours.  It’s not without its quirks — two or three times a month it won’t record something, it’s “crashed” on us a couple of times, and the interface could use some polish.  But it’s also changed the way we watch TV completely.

I know that all of you have been waiting by the phone for news of my pneumonia.

Well, my second course of antibiotics ended on Friday, and over the weekend it looked like things were finally coming to an end.

Alas by Monday the cough had returned, and my chest again felt wheezy.

By some miracle I was able to make an appointment with my doctor with an hour’s notice this afternoon. She listened to my chest and found it mostly clear-sounding, and prescribed a chest-xray and another course of the same antibiotic (Levofloxacin) I’d been taking last week.

If you’re in the market for a casual affliction, I’d recommend against pneumonia — it’s unpleasant, makes it hard to hold a cough-free conversation, and knocks the wind out of your sails. I’d suggest you look into a common cold, or perhaps a light influenza as an alternative.

Starting with a CBC story yesterday, there’s been a minor flap here on PEI about biofuel development.

It seems that the Green Party of PEI had several representatives at the announcement of a proposed ethanol plant in Georgetown, and that they raised several issues, including the potential of air and water pollution from the plant, and the notion that “producing ethanol takes more energy than is derived from the product.” Provincial Green Party leader Sharon Labchuk characterized ethanol production as a “huge hoax.”

On tonight’s Compass there was a follow-up story, with an interview with Ms. Labchuk, in which the reporter asked about the opposition in light of the following statement in the party’s 2006 national election platform:

Green Party MPs will work to: Employ incentives to increase the percentage of ethanol content in gasoline and the availability of other biofuels.

Ms. Labchuk, appearing quite uncomfortable, defended the apparent inconsistency by suggesting that the platform was only in force during the election, and has “no official standing outside of the election period.”

However at its 2006 Convention, the Green Party passed many resolutions, including the following regarding biofuels:

• A follow-up to the 5% biofuel content target of 2010. The GPC will promote 10% biofuel content by 2015 and 20% by 2020.
• GST and other taxes will be collected from consumers only on the percentage of non-renewable resource fuel. The biofuel portion will be tax-exempt.
• Shift government supported research away from GMO biotechnology towards organic food production and efficient biofuel crop development.

Presumably these resolutions, made only a month ago, are still reflective of the party’s views. And while they don’t specifically mention support of ethanol, they don’t come out against it either. And given that ethanol is so prominent in the world “alternative fuels,” this amounts to at least tacit support.

Now I’m no stranger to inconsistency myself, but I figure if you’re going to wrap yourself up into party politics, the least you can do is to get your story straight. It’s hard enough convincing everyone that we need to worry about our energy use without muddying the waters; indeed water-muddying is one of the favourite tools of Big Oil when they want to convince us the purported “half-bakedness” of alternative energy sources.

What do other federal parties think about ethanol?

The NDP has a policy to “[r]equire that at least 5 per cent of the gasoline supply consist of ethanol by 2008, and move to meet a goal of 10 per cent by 2010.”

In May the Liberal opposition said that “[i]ncreasing the use of ethanol may be a way to boost the use of renewable fuels and stimulate rural economies, but, as a stand alone measure, it will not have a significant impact on reducing greenhouse gas emissions” but also reported that “the [former] Liberal government made significant direct investments in the expansion of ethanol production in Canada.”

The ruling Conservatives says that it “believes in promotion of alternative energy (such as wind, solar, geothermal) and transitional fuels (such as biodiesel, ethanol, natural gas) to help develop hydrogen as a fuel.”

Ethanol, in other words, has a lot of supporters, on both sides of the aisle. I have no idea whether it’s a viable, sustainable component of our future fuel mix; indeed I share Ms. Labchuk’s suspicions that it in fact takes more energy to produce ethanol than the fuel itself provides.

Which is all to say that when standing up against ethanol it’s probably a good idea to have the facts straight, the media under your control, and to check with the party platform to see if you’re in sync. Otherwise, you just come off looking confused, and the ethanol train keeps on rolling.

A bonus episode of The 3LA Podcast tonight wherein I take a stab at explaining why the airport code for Charlottetown is YYG.

Today’s episode of The 3LA Podcast: ZIP, a brief tour through the US ZIP code.

Six years ago tonight Catherine and I walked over to the The Town & Country. We split an order of nachos. We walked over to the video store on Grafton St. and rented Message in a Bottle, the Kevin Costner movie, and then walked home and watched it.

We went to bed early, as Catherine was due to have labour induced the next morning — our as-yet-unnamed baby was two weeks late, and we’d waited as long as our OB/GYN advised was reasonable.

Throughout the night, Catherine had little contractions — I still have sheet of paper I wrote the times on — but nothing wild and closely spaced enough to suggest real labour was coming on.

Sunday morning we went to the hospital, and while I will spare you the details, the rest of the day, culminating in a “we’ve got to do this right now” C-section, was rather stressful all-round. We’ve lost track of the real value, but both Catherine and I remember him having a negative APGAR (which is not technically allowed).

We spent the next several days with Oliver in the NICU, hooked up to various machines and holding our breath to see how he would emerge from his sudden entry. By Tuesday it was clear that all systems had, as if by magic, powered up to normal. The tubes came out, the machines got turned off, and we finally got to hold Oliver in our arms.

We were so distracted by the utter reality of it all, that we forgot to give “Baby Male Miller” a name until Tuesday. By Wednesday, things had calmed down enough so that I could announce Oliver’s arrival to the world.

Oliver turns 6 years old tomorrow afternoon around 2:30 p.m. As he stands beside me as I type this, he emphatically states “after this day I am six!” It’s all somewhat miraculous to me that this all worked out as wonderfully as it has.

Happy birthday, Oliver.