Listening to Mahalia Jackson sing Nearer, My God to Thee is a moving enough experience that after doing so, I’m almost ready to sign on for the whole baptism, drinking the blood of Christ, praying thing.

So here’s a bit of free recruitment advice to my friends of the churchly persuasion: buy up the rights to stirring religious music and make it all available, for free, to your potential recruits. If you do so with intelligence — more Mahalia and less Amy Grant, let’s say — I think you could win some converts.

Locked out employees of CBC in Fredericton have created a seven minute podcast to explain their side of the lockout.

As you all know, I’m a devoted consumer of Honest Tea-brand iced tea. When the tea first arrived at my local Shoppers Drug Mart last year I was ecstatic, as I’d only been able to consume it when visiting Yankee to that point. I’ve probably bought 250 bottles this year.

Alas the local Shoppers Drug Mart hasn’t had a regular inventory of Honest Tea of late — there have been weeks when it’s been entirely missing from the shelves — and they’ve been cutting back on their selection, going from four flavours to two.

When I bought the last three bottles on the shelves last week, my cashier told me she didn’t think they’d be carrying it any longer. When I phoned today and asked to speak to the person responsible for that section, I was told that decisions about which products are carried are “made by head office,” but that the Honest Tea problem locally might be related to “problems with the company that supplies it” (I’ve emailed Honest Tea to ask for their assistance in this regard).

In any case, it seems like Shoppers doesn’t exactly have a deep and abiding commitment to Honest Tea, as they’ve started to stock a Snapple product that, while it appears to be Honest Tea-like, is in fact a sugary-sweet pretender.

So here’s the deal: if you’re a Charlottetown retailer or restaurant, and you want my business, just stock Honest Tea. You can contact them at (301) 652-3556 and they will hook you up with a distributor. You stock Honest Tea, and I’ll promise you that I’ll come and buy it from you. Several times a week. And I’ll tell all my friends to do the same.

I found out this morning that Olle Jonsson’s enture experience of North America consists of “Duluth, MN and some riding a Greyhound bus from Chicago to there.” Olle ponders the implications.

Martin Pittenauer has updated the Plazes Menu Extra Launcher for OS X to fix “some bugs… which could cause instability and excessive memory usage under certain circumstances.”

According to the Feedster Top 500, this little weblog is 193rd of the top 500 “most interesting and important blogs.” How exactly I am more “interesting and important” than Adam Curry (#208), Google (#213) and Ross Mayfield (#344) speaks to the flukiness of the ratings, but it’s nice to be recognized, if even by fluke.

First air travel, then car rentals and Internet cafés (all of which we’ve experienced)… now hotels and cruises.

I’m thinking of getting a tattoo of the “conversion specifiers” for the PHP strftime function. I can never remember them and, as you might imagine, creating web applications for an almanac means I need them at my fingertips dozens of times a day.

I think I have a blepharospasm. Weird.

I swear that that CBC management sent themselves to monotony camp to prepare for their lockout duty. Listening to the national management-hosted “CBC Radio Morning” broadcast on Radio One this morning, I couldn’t believe my ears: it was worse than the worst college radio. Why not just turn off the transmitters?

A good source for the union side of the story is the union’s Toronto website (be sure to read the From the Floor newsletter for an exciting word search puzzle!). There are also links to employee blogs (like this and this and this). The CBC has their own website to give their side of the issues.