The Chronicles of Narnia film opens later this week, and so we need to decide whether it’s a good idea to take 5-year-old Oliver or not. Here’s how the film was rated in various places:

• British Board of Film Classification — PG plus “Contains mild threat, battle and fantasy violence.”
• The Nova Scotia Alcohol & Gaming Authority’s Film Classification Division — PG
• Alberta Film Ratings - PG plus “May Frighten Young Children.”
• Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification — PG plus “Mild fantasy violence, Some scenes may upset young children.”
• British Columbia Film Classification Office — PG plus “frightening scenes violence.”
• Ontario Film Review Board — PG plus “frightening scenes; violence; not recommended for young children.”

So, the western world’s general consensus is “young kids will get scared.” Hmmmm.

Did you know that the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has an Office for Film and Broadcasting that is, among other things, “…responsible for reviewing and rating theatrical motion pictures.” They have a page of current reviews that is updated weekly. Their reviews are surprisingly well-written and I suspect they would be quite useful if you were concerned that your movie choices mirrored your religious ones; they haven’t reviewed Narnia yet, but here’s their capsule review of Shop Girl as an example:

Shopgirl — Languidly paced story of lonely and lovelorn Saks salesclerk (an appealing Claire Danes) who, after a tentative fling with a nerdy, awkward font artist (Jason Schwartzman), meets a wealthy older man (Steve Martin) and commences a no-strings-attached affair that proves only fitfully satisfying for her. Director Anand Tucker’s adaptation of Martin’s novella — though striving for old-fashioned Hollywood gloss and a bittersweet tone about people’s search for connection — feels patently unreal, and the characters (although human in their imperfections) display less-than-commendable behavior, though the ending would seem to be morally sound. Smattering of crude language, brief profanity, partial and rear nudity, sexual situations and banter, a permissive view of premarital sex and condom use. L — limited adult audience, films whose problematic content many adults would find troubling.

Any review that begins “languidly paced” deserves some credit; their review of Syriana starts “Intermittently engaging but mostly confusing political thriller…” which earns them even more. The Catholic Church in Australia has a similar office.

If you’re looking for more “film reviews from a religious perspective,” check out Focus on the Family movie review site. Their reviews are somewhat more strident than the Catholic Bishops’ are, and they’re much less well-written. Here’s a snip from their Shop Girl review:

Shopgirl brings Steve Martin’s best-selling novella to life by painting a poignant, painful picture of the consequences of soulless sex. Even as Ray’s and Mirabelle’s bodies unite, we see that sex alone is not enough to sustain a relationship. The film shows that physical intimacy promises a depth of emotional connection that it can never deliver apart from a lasting, committed relationship.

If you want to jump right in to the hard-edged “this is truly evil” film reviews from the religious perspective, it seems like Dr. Ted Baehr’s reviews hit the mark. Described as “a ministry dedicated to redeeming the values of the mass media according to biblical principles, by influencing entertainment industry executives and helping families make wise media choices,” Baehr pulls few punches. While our Catholic friends think Syriana simply “mostly confusing,” Baehr rates it “Abhorrent” and says, in part:

Very strong humanist, socialist, politically correct worldview with very strong anti-capitalist and Anti-American content that demonizes big oil companies and the U.S. government for Middle East oil interests by painting them as materialistic fiends and heartless profiteers, as well as some very strong anti-biblical and anti-Jewish elements that depict Christian theology and Western philosophies as failing worldviews and empathize with Islamic terrorists.

Seems like this might be a case of “if Ted doesn’t like it, count me in” — I’m all for demonizing big oil and the U.S. government. His take on Narnia, which he calls “Absolutely Thrilling!” and rates “Wholesome,” begins:

Very strong Christian worldview with clear incarnational allusions to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the only way to break the power of sin and defeat the powers of darkness, slightly mitigated by a strong empowering of human beings and a very slight failure to include the full sacramental references of the book and the Creator references to the Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea, as well as a couple of politically correct nods, including a statement dismissive of war, a nod to defining the contents of a healing potion given to Lucy, a modernist view of women in allowing Susan to fire a bow and arrow in war, and a slightly attenuated mention of the Creation, not the Creator, in the coronation of the four children (these discrepancies are all very minor, however, because they are presented in a context where the Christian perspective of the novel dominates); no foul language; action violence and scary creatures that may be too frightening for younger children, including bombing of London, battles with wolves, swordfights, ugly creatures, the witch stabs Aslan to kill him, and many battle scenes; no sex; minor upper male nudity; no alcohol; smoking a pipe; and, nothing else objectionable.

In case you’re keeping score, that’s one very long sentence. And perhaps that sentence is enough to keep me home watching Sesame Street with Oliver instead; scary scenes is one thing, but there’s no way I want him exposed to something as dangerous as a “modernist view of women” or “a statement dismissive of war” to say nothing of “a slightly attenuated mention of the Creation.”

Sigh.

Here’s a 5-year chart (courtesy of Yahoo!) showing the value of the Canadian dollar vs. the U.S. dollar:

I know next to nothing about the currency market, and even less about trend lines and predicting, but it seems pretty clear to me that, all other things being equal, we’re heading for equivalence sometime in 2007.

Here’s a federal issue that it’s hard to know how to get behind. Certainly governments have marketed the lower Canadian dollar in recent years to those in the U.S„ especially Hollywood and tourists, as a reason for doing business with us — “your dollar goes farther,” etc.

As this benefit quickly slides away — which, if I understand economics correctly, is a generally good thing, economy-wise, as it means that others think Good Things about Canada, and thus consider our currency worthy of owning — I wonder what the federal stance should be now.

At some point does having a more-valuable currency have more of a downside than an upside?

Sudden need to procrastinate leads me to ponder: what is the oldest Prince Edward Island-hosted Internet domain name, still in active use?

My first domain name registration, crafts-council.pe.ca for the PEI Crafts Council, was approved on June 26, 1993. But the Council switched to peicraftscouncil.com after I left the organization, and the original domain is no longer in use. So that doesn’t count. Kevin O’Brien registered farmctr.pe.ca for the Farm Centre (and the Fan2000 project) on May 6, 1993, but it’s gone too.

My first personal domain name registration, for digitalisland.com, was 11 years ago, on November 3, 1994. But that domain passed off to the mainland back in 1999, so it doesn’t count either.

The University of PEI’s upei.ca shows up as being registered on Oct. 24, 2000 in the WHOIS database, but I know its registration pre-dates that (and maybe all else?) because my email address in 1993 was caprukav@atlas.cs.upei.ca. A check of comp.mail.maps suggests its real registration date was Jan. 11, 1988, which I dare say makes it the oldest.

Of PEI Internet Service Providers, it’s surely isn.net that is the winner here: it was registered on January 6, 1995. All of ISN’s contemporaries — PEINet, Cycor, Auracom, et al — renamed themselves or moved off Island years ago.

Other early PEI domains that are still in use:

• hollandc.pe.ca (Dec. 10, 1991)
• gov.pe.ca (Jan. 15, 1995)
• dclchem.com (Feb. 4, 1995)
• city.summerside.pe.ca (Aug. 28, 1995)
• edu.pe.ca (April 24, 1996)
• piping.pe.ca (May 9, 1996)
• islandtel.pe.ca (May 9, 1996)
• athi.pe.ca (June 25, 1997)
• library.pe.ca (June 25, 1997)
• theguardian.pe.ca (Dec. 1, 1997)
• city.charlottetown.pe.ca (Sept. 8, 1997)

What have I missed?

Perhaps the rest of the world has been listening to Tegan and Sara for years? I just heard them for the first time on DNTO last week and I immediately bought Where Does the Good Go from iTunes.

Island fiddler Roy Johnstone has been a friend and client for many years. Last week we moved his website from an aging manually-constructed collection of HTML pages to the open source Drupal (which is equal parts wonderful and damningly perplexing).

The switch will let Roy take the site out for a ride as never before: Drupal makes podcasting easy, for example — you just attach an MP3 to a page and the page becomes a podcast.

If you’re a fan of Roy’s, or prone to becoming one, watch the site. There’s also an RSS feed in place, which will not only let you listen to Roy’s podcast experiments, but will also alert you to any upcoming performances.

Clip attached to give you a taste.

It seems that most of the excitement in my week happens on Saturday mornings. With Oliver. This week:

• We bought iced tea from Haida Arsenault-Antolick, working at Karin LaRonde’s stand at the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. Haida is the Green Party candidate in Cardigan and I can’t imagine a better opponent for Laurence MacAulay.
• We decided to split a smoked salmon bagel instead of ordering two. To pull this off I had to unilaterally declare today “Sharing Day.” As such, if you feel an urge to share, today’s the day to do it.
• It being Sharing Day and all, Oliver made me take four of his Baby Einstein DVDs into the office and put them on the silverorange DVD sharing shelf for Isaac’s new baby Saul.
• We revisited the Home Depot, but decided that we couldn’t fit an 8 foot by 3 foot piece of hard insulation in the car.
• We made out usual stop at the Ellen’s Creek Plaza Formosa Tea House. If you sometimes pine for the Formosa of olde, when it was small and on University Ave., I highly recommend visiting the new location, for, although it’s in an otherwise dreadful strip mall, it faithfully recaptures some of the spirit of the original.
• We stopped at Mark’s Work Wearhouse to buy a new belt for me. Found a good belt, but the line at the cash register was 8 people deep, and there seemed little hope in getting out in less than 20 minutes, so I dumped the belt and resolved to shop for one in the quieter climes of downtown Charlottetown.
• With the Christmas play only a week away, Oliver is managing a pretty decent rendition of “We Three Kings.” Although it comes out a little bit like “We three kinds of Orient Car.”

More from the frontier next week.

I never thought this would happen to me, but I’ve become one of those “disaffected youth voters” you hear so much about.

I admit, approaching 40 years of age at a fast clip as I am, that calling myself a “youth voter” is a bit brazen. But I’m not ready to hop over the fence from the dungarees to the suits just yet, so humour me.

It all started last week when Steve Sutherland, from CBC Radio in Halifax, called to see if I’d be a good person to have on some sort of “election issues panel.” I told him that I wasn’t a good person, and that, in fact, I had no thoughts whatsoever about federal issues. I didn’t actually realize that this was true until I said it. But it is.

While I might feel close to my municipal and provincial politicians (how can I help but, given the small size of their districts and the fact that I know both of them, and they’re actually indirectly related to each other by marriage), Canadian federal politics exists for me on some disconnected ethereal plane that bears more in common with Survivor and The Apprentice than it does with “real things that affect my life.”

Indeed I’ve found myself relatively unaffected by the whole sponsorship scandal thing, mostly because I simply assumed that sort of thing happens all the time. There’s little difference, in my books, between crooked cash transactions and, say, the Solicitor General putting an Addictions Research Centre in his riding. Sure, one is perhaps criminal while the other is simply “working for the people of Cardigan.” But come on…

I don’t think any of this means that the people involved in federal politics are evil — indeed I happen to think my local MP, Liberal Shawn Murphy, is a stand up guy. I just think that politics practiced at such an abstract level is both liable to corrupt the sensibilities of just about anyone, and so far removed from real people’s lives as to be essentially irrelevant to the individual.

Yes, I know that federal politics can make Important Changes for Canadians. It’s just not clear to me how I’m actually a participant in this process in any real way.

And so I’m left to simply treat my franchise as I would the purchase of a car or a brand of toilet paper. And those running for office seem content to service me on this level: Stephen Harper is an evil worm, Paul Martin is corrupt, Jack Layton is a spendthrift, Gilles Duceppe wants to pull apart the country. None of which seems substantive, real, nor particularly interesting.

I think I might just sit this one out.

This post has been brewing in my mind for two weeks. Truth be told I considered not writing it for fear that my revelation of my own stupidity might render me unemployable.

But I must come clean, if only because sharing my own story might help others: for 39 years I have been under the impression that toasters know how toasted the toast is.

For example: I dial the “darkness” dial up to 3, put in a slice, and wait. The toast pops up, and it doesn’t look dark enough, so I dial up to level 4, put the toast back in, and assume that the toaster is smart enough to take the darkness from level 3 to level 4.

In other words, I simply assumed that (somehow — I really have no idea how) the toaster could “read” the toast, judge how “toasted” it was, and react accordingly.

I have really, honestly, wholeheartedly believed this since the day I was born.

It turns out that I have been wrong.

Toasters have timers in them. The “darkness dial” simply sets the length of time the toast stays toasting: the higher up the dial, the longer amount of toasting time.

While this might seem like minor-league revelation — I didn’t see Mary’s face in bowl of corn flakes or anything — my world has been rocked. Mostly because I now have to re-examine my assumptions about every other piece of technology I use on a daily basis. Not such a bad idea, actually. But it does put my relationship with the physical world in a bit of flux.

If the last federal election here in Canada was the dawn of the “blog campaign,” this one brings podcasting into the mix. So far there are signs of two parties at it:

• Conservative
• Liberal

Only the Conservatives actually have podcasts so far. And calling them “podcasts” is perhaps correct only in the strictest “using RSS to deliver audio” meaning of the word, as the content appears to be “Stephen Harper giving speeches.”

No sign yet of Greencasting or NDPcasting.

By the way, where is Shawn Murphy’s campaign website? It has been 404 all week, displaying “No pages are found on the rootlevel!” Surely someone can figure out how to make it say at least “coming soon.”

For almost 10 years now I’ve been working as a volunteer with the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust, a non-profit charitable organization working to preserve the scenic, agricultural coastal lands between French River and Sea View, Prince Edward Island.

Over those 10 years, the pressure to develop these lands has intensified dramatically — land that once sold for $3000/acre for development is now demanding $15,000/acre or more. At the same time, the agricultural economy has suffered several bad years, and so the economic pressure on local farmers in the area to sell land is tremendous.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust works with local land owners to find ways to keep non-developed agricultural land free from development. We do this using a combination of seeking donation of “development rights” for land (or outright donation of land, which we then resell, minus development rights) and purchase of development rights. We’ve had three successful transactions to date:

• 75 acres of land near Cape Tryon was preserved by purchasing land slated for cottage development from a U.S. developer and reselling the land, by tender, to a local farmer with a restrictive non-development covenant attached.
• 38 acres of land at Cousins Shore was donated to the Land Trust by a developer; the land was then resold to a local farmer with a restrictive non-development covenant attached.
• The development rights for 17 acres of farmland at Park Corner were purchased from a local farmer. The farmer continues to own and farm the land, but is restricted in perpetuity from developing the land by a restrictive non-development covenant.

Currently the Trust is working on several fronts: the land surrounding the Cape Tryon lighthouse is under imminent threat from development, and we’re working on several fronts to try and keep the land in agricultural use. And we’re working with several sympathetic cottage owners who own large parcels of agricultural land, seeking donation of the development rights.

The Land Trust website has more information about who we are and what we do. In particular, this presentation to Cabinet will give you a good overview of the organization.

And, starting today, you can make donations online to the L.M. Montgomery Land Trust. If you’re concerned about the loss of Prince Edward Island’s agricultural lands to development, and want to help the Land Trust’s work, I encourage you to make a donation.