Hey, there’s a blog all about teapots. And they included my Formosa Tea House photo. Cool.

Those of you in Charlottetown may know Cynthia Mulder, née Cudmore, sister of Chris and daughter of Brian and Beth. Cynthia is quite a nomad and has recently landed in Panama after several years in Japan. She’s written an article about the experiences that saw she and her family make Panama their new home. It starts:

Almost five years ago, we stepped off the Isla Taboga ferry on a bright sunny morning with the intention to explore.

Catherine and I went to see The Constant Gardener on Saturday night at Empire Theatres in Charlottetown. While walking to our cinema, we noticed that they were selling Dasani-brand water (bottled by Coca-Cola) for $3.35 for a 590 ml bottle:

That’s $5.67 a litre, or roughly four times the price of gasoline.

I know, I know, I should have shrugged off the whole “we have to worry about those poor people with 640x480 screens” thing long ago. But I sincerely believed, all suggestion to the contrary aside, that there were lots of them out there. For the past couple of days I’ve been running the excellent Mint traffic analyzer on my site, and one of the neato charts it produces is this one:

Obviously it’s time to stop worrying about 640x480. Indeed it’s almost time to set 800x600 aside too.

Mostly because Olle Jonsson pointed the way:

…I’ve added Gravatar support to the comments section of the blog. What this mean? Go and sign up for a Gravatar and upload a 80x80 pixel photo of yourself (it’s free). Then every time you post a comment here (assuming you use the same email address to identify yourself as you did when you got your Gravatar) than the boring textual wasteland of:

Will flower into the photo-rich paradise of:

Cool.

Through my handy Flickr subscription to keyword “Bourges,” I came across this super giant panorama of Bourges (warning, it’s 12,000-odd pixels wide) taken from the top of the Cathedral (who knew you could go out on top!). Bourges is a wonderful city; we had a nice two day stay there in May.

What is arguably the nicest feature of the city, Les Marais, can be seen if you pan to the far-right of the panorama.

I’m not completely sure about this (Heisenberg and all), but I there’s a good chance that I’ve been taking the “race” in the phrase “human race” to mean “running race” as opposed to the (as it turns out, proper) “group of people united or classified together on the basis of common history” kind of “race.”

You know, we’re all in a hurry, striving together in a race for survival or a race for redemption or a race for perfection… that kind of thing.

File this under “ways in which Peter is an idiot.”

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust presentation to Executive Council appears to have gone well.

I was up late last night putting together John Sylvester’s photography and my own words in an Apple Keynote presentation (you can download the slides as a big PDF file).

Thanks to silverorange, I had the lend of a screen projector to show the presentation; when I woke up this morning, though, I realized that I didn’t actually have a screen. I tried getting through to Executive Council Office to see if they could help, but the phone kept ringing busy; finally, just as I was ready to give up, the phone rang. It was Executive Council Office, just calling to make sure we were on track (this is the sort of serendipity that happens all the time on Prince Edward Island). An hour later I picked up a screen from the Shaw Building.

I showed up at the New London Community Complex at 11:30 a.m. Much to my surprise, my fellow Directors of the Land Trust had all heeded my request to show up early, and they were milling about in the parking lot.

As it turns out I was the only one wearing a tie; the rest of our Directors were turned out in everything from shorts and T-shirt on up (our President, Hon. Marion Reid, was an exception of course; she was, as always, well turned out). It seems as though I am cursed to be the guy who never wears a tie when everyone else is. And vice versa.

We took a few minutes to discuss strategy, caught up on the usual sort of thing that Islanders catch up on (who started school today, who got a scholarship to Mount A, who died), and then went inside to wait for our 12 Noon appointment.

Cabinet was running about 15 minutes late (we were their last meeting for the morning), so we cooled our heels in the waiting room and discussed our presentation some more.

At about 12:15 we were ushered upstairs to the mezzanine where Cabinet was meeting. We quickly set up the screen, the screen projector and my laptop, and I was just firing up Keynote when Premier Binns introduced Marion.

As Marion delivered an impassioned speech about the importance of preserving our scenic coastal landscape, I showed a series of John’s photos in the background; they truly are stunning shots (they’re in here too) and they clearly show the reason we’re doing what we’re doing.

After about 10 minutes Marion handed things over to me, and I ran through the rest of the presentation: a brief review of the Land Trust’s history and reason for being, a summary of how we work and what we’ve done, ending up at an explanation of the situation at Cape Tryon.

Cabinet followed up with a series of questions, and by 1:00 p.m. we were done. The bulb didn’t blow in the projector, my laptop hard drive didn’t crash, and nobody kicked out the power cord by mistake.

Our immediate challenge at the Land Trust is that 90 acres of land around Cape Tryon may come up for sale in the near future; this is arguably the iconic image of the Island’s coastal agricultural landscape (John Sylvester says “it’s our Peggy’s Cove”). We’re working to ensure that, no matter what happens, this land is preserved free from development in perpetuity. Watch the Land Trust website for updates.

Maybe the real problem in New Orleans was that everyone in a position to plan for emergencies simply assumed that everyone has a car.

Think about it: if an announcement came that you had to leave your home right now because of an impending disaster, how would you get away? And if you have a car yourself, how many of your neighbours don’t? Would you remember them? How would we ensure that nobody got left behind?

I live on a small, narrow Island. My house is 3 blocks from the ocean. I have no idea what, if any, plans are in place to get me, my family, and my neighbours to safety is Katrina-style weather was on its way.

Well, technically Shelagh Rogers did not say “shit” herself, she lured one of her minions into doing so, in this CBC lockout podcast.

But it got me thinking: although the CBC lockout podcasts are messy and angry and flippant and not at all “professional” like the “real CBC,” they also serve to make the CBC presenters — like Shelagh — a lot more likable and, well, human.

I’ve heard Bill Richardson and Ian Hanomansing and Kelly Ryan and a gaggle of other CBC hosts through their podcasts, and I think they’re making better radio than when they’re forced inside the straightjacket of CBC “authoritativism.”

Yes, there is a place for rigor in broadcasting, and that is indeed one of the appeals of the CBC. And I’m not quite sure I’m ready for an anarchic improvised Island Morning.

But perhaps in the lockout CBC staff are rediscovering parts of their soul that, of necessity, they lock away while they’re working “on the inside;” would it be such a bad thing if, once they’re let back inside, they keep some of that soul around?