The CBC is reporting that Mary Lou Finlay is retiring as of November 30. Currently the host of the radio program As It Happens on CBC Radio One, Finlay is perhaps least well remembered for co-hosting The Journal with Barbara Frum starting in 1982.

The CBC Archives page on The Journal says that Finlay left the show after two years because producer Mark Starowicz “believed a 38-minute show was too short to justify two hosts.” I always thought she was the better of the two hosts, and I’ve always enjoyed her on As It Happens.

Here’s some audio to remember the good old days by.

From the blog of Piper:

In 1985 I was listening to music that would have earned me “cool points” like I now collect Shopper’s Drug Mart “Optimum Points.”

Dad sent along a link to this interesting Ancestry.com page that provides a map, from the 1920 U.S. Census, of all the Rukavina families in America. Also interesting to note their definition for the last name:

Croatian and Serbian: nickname from an augmentative form of ruka ‘hand,’ a nickname for someone with large hands.

This just in: Johnny reports sighting a new tea house, “Aing’s Tea House,” on Grafton St. opposite the Polyclinic. Is it possible that Charlottetown is going to become the most cosmopolitan city in the Maritimes?

I’ve had the website of the CBC here in Charlottetown bookmarked for a long, long time — perhaps seven years? And the site has gone through a lot of URLs since I hacked together the very primitive first version back in the mid-1990s:

• isn.net/cbc
• charlottetown.cbc.ca
• pei.cbc.ca
• cbc.ca/pei

Of those, all but the first one (which, confusingly, redirects to the Charlottetown Yacht Club) still work. Or at least they get you to the right place in the end. I finally decided today to update my bookmarks to use the cbc.ca/pei address for the page; I fully expect that a committee in Toronto will decide that this should become something crazy like cbc.ca/local/pei as soon as I do this.

It looks like MarinaGrill, formerly Viva’s, formerly Eddie’s Lunch, has closed. At least there’s a “For Rent” sign in the window, and it doesn’t seem to open any longer.

Longtime readers will recall that much of Oliver’s body is made up of raw materials that originated in cheeseburgers, french fries and chicken shwarmas from the various restaurant incarnations of the King-Prince corner, as Catherine and I ate most of our meals there after moving into the neighbourhood the summer she was pregnant. Before that, when we lived at 50 Great George St., around the corner, Eddie’s was our local corner store; those were the days of the Callbeck government, and Eddie’s served, at least for some on the Liberal side, as a sort of Prince St. office.

If you’ve always had the hankering to run a neighbourhood joint, perhaps you should give the space a thought: with the right people at the helm and a good menu, you’ve got a ready-made neighbourhood customer base.

I am a confirmed poetry agnostic. I don’t read it in The New Yorker. I don’t go to poetry readings. And I give the “chapbook” section of bookstores a wide berth. I know this is wrong. I know that I’m missing out. But me and poetry don’t grok each other, and I’m not sure there’s anything to be done about it.

While I’m fairly sure that it won’t bring me over to the poetry dark side, it is worthy of note that Shauna McCabe’s first book of poetry is being launched this Friday. You may remember Shauna from earlier episodes of the weblog like Charlottetown Remixed and Plazes Comes to Charlottetown.

Of the aesthetes in town, Shauna’s work has always struck me as being the most “relatable to,” — although she can trade in the language of “deconstructionist allegory memes” and “stunning Rabelaisian bio-quirks” with the best of them, the works she curates at the Confederation Centre always seem to have elements that “everyday people” (like me) can jump into. As such, there’s a remote chance that I might even appreciate Shauna’s poetry. A remote chance.

Today’s another important day in Charlottetown transit history: all four of the initial bus routes are now in service. I’ve updated the Interactive Transit Map and moved it to a new URL:

Update: Just got off the phone with Mike Cassidy from Trius Tours, operators of the transit system. Mike says they’re making lots of little adjustments to the service as they get feedback from riders — things like running Route #4 over to the Charlottetown Mall. They’re still keeping to the printed schedules (which is what I used for the map app); they’re going to release a formal new schedule and route maps towards the end of October or into early November.

After remaining high much later in the season than I recall from previous years, Air Canada’s international fares have taken a dip, with the Halifax to London (England) fare now at $418 CDN, which is as low as it’s been in a long, long time. Even Halifax to Delhi, at $1600 CDN return, and Halifax to Sydney (Australia) at $1698 CDN return are deals. From the complicated terms and conditions statement, it looks like these fares are good for travel up to December 8, 2005.

Tim Piper has been, by times, my roommate, my bandmate, my travelmate, my confidant, and my friend. It’s largely due to the efforts of Tim and his former consort Diane Gallagher that I met Catherine those many years ago (14 at last count). Tim is both a great storyteller, and someone to whom great stories happen (that several of those great stories happened with me along for the ride is something I’m grateful for).

As Tim recounts here in some detail, his first girlfriend our mutual friend Yvonne, was from Saskatoon. And all of us from those days remember the time that Tim disappeared off to Saskatchewan with Yvonne for a time; our friend Stephen Southall used to say “Pip’s in Sask” when people asked.

Now Tim has a weblog. And an RSS feed. Enjoy.