It’s Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.A. which means that our colleagues at Yankee are off for the week, leaving Johnny and I free to muck about on our own.

By coincidence, there are three particularly interesting “of the day” items running on Almanac.com today:

• What’s the best way to get rid of athlete’s foot?
• Is it difficult to grow your own saffron?
• Advice of the Day: Soak pine cones in a solution of 2 pounds Epsom salts and 1 gallon of water. When the cones are thoroughly dry, toss them into your fireplace for colorful flames.

Truth be told, Thanksgiving Day was well timed for us this year, as I’ll likely be spending a fair amount of the rest of the week assembling the digital infrastructure to support the plebiscite results tabulation on Monday.

And just to ramble off completely, let me mention that, as presaged by millions of Tivo users, the presence of an Motorola 6412 DVR from Eastlink in our house for the past three weeks has completely changed my relationship to television.

First, I haven’t seen a commercial in a long time — I just fast forward through them (this isn’t a good sign for advertisers; at the very least they’re going to have to design ads that still convey a brand message when broadcast at 4x speed).

Second, because I’m not watching commercials I can watch three shows in the space of two (an hour long show is 44 minutes of “editorial”, and I tend to fast forward through the boring “establishing the scene” segments now).

And finally, I don’t need to stay up to midnight to watch Charlie Rose any more — I just set up the show as a series recording, and watch it the next morning over breakfast (last night’s interview with Maureen Dowd was a classic).

Here are three easy-to-remember web addresses to get information about the Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System:

• vote.electionspei.ca - where to vote
• results.electionspei.ca - results (starting Nov. 28th after 7:00 p.m.)
• display.electionspei.ca - results suitable for display with a projector

Rogers Magazines, publisher of titles like Maclean’s, has a promotion on wherein new subscriptions to their magazines can earn you Aeroplan miles.

Under the terms of the promotion, subscribing to 1 title earns 350 miles, 2 magazines earns 1,000 miles and 3 magazines earns 1,350 miles.

All other things being equal, does it make financial sense to subscribe only to earn the miles?

Let’s find out:

The cheapest three magazines one can select are Chatelaine, Loulou and Loulou (French), each of which costs $14.95 a year for a subscription.

Aeroplan allows for the purchase of up to 15,000 miles a year, and they charge 4 cents a mile. So here’s how outright purchase compares to magazine subscription cost:

It would seem that, assuming you were going to buy the Aeroplan miles anyway, it does make sense to buy magazines instead, and get the miles indirectly. Of course this is only true if you buy the cheap magazines like Lou Lou — subscribing to Maclean’s ($39.95) and Canadian Business ($34.95) would cost almost $75, so there’s no deal to be had there, unless you were going to subscribe to the magazines anyway.

Maclean’s hasn’t exactly won points in the “integrating the website with the print publication” game this week. The magazine launched a new visual identity starting with the issue dated Monday, but much of the branding on their website, including their subscription pages, still bears the marks of the old brand.

About 95% of Reinvented’s income comes from the U.S.A. So we get paid in U.S. dollars. And U.S. dollars keep getting less valuable. He’s a snapshot of the last week, for example:

In the real world of cashing cheques (or rather checks, as they spell down there) this means that a $US10,000 check cashed last Wednesday would have garnered $CDN1630 in exchange while the same check cashed today would garner only $CDN1450, a difference of $180 in only a week. That’s a lot of lunches at the Formosa Tea House.

The unfortunate irony of all this is that it’s in my best interests for the Canadian dollar to be worth less, something which happens, I presume, only when Canada is a less attractive and stable place to live. If only Quebec would separate, I could cash in!

We’re in the midst of a Plebiscite on Mixed Member Proportional Representation System here on Prince Edward Island this week: advance polls ran last week; office voting is this week; Plebiscite Day is Monday — see vote.electionspei.ca to find out where to vote.

One of the interesting side-effects of the plebiscite is that I have spent more time talking with friends and family about the intricacies of the democratic process in the past month than I have in my entire life leading up to this month. Evidence suggests that I’m not alone.

No matter the results of the plebiscite vote, an enduring legacy of the plebiscite will be a population more aware of how we are governed. And that’s a Good Thing.

Regular readers will know of my fondness for Honest Tea iced tea, and of my difficulties with finding a local supply.

I’m sad to report that it looks like Shoppers Drug Mart, the only local supplier of Honest Tea here in Charlottetown, has given up the ghost, as shelf space previously dedicated to Honest Tea has been given over to Bottle Green, a link of lightly-carbonated fruit drinks from the Mississauga-based Canadian licensee of the U.K. softdrink maker.

I’m drinking a “Cranberry & Orange Pressé” as I write. It’s certainly a cut above the common soda, but it is, alas, no Honest Tea. I purchased the entire fleet of flavours tonight, and I’ll report back once I’ve had time to sample them.

Every Saturday morning Oliver and I go to the Charlottetown Farmer’s Market. We’ve developed a regular routine: first we go to Kim Dormaar’s stand and order up two bagels with smoked salmon, cream cheese, capers, dill and lemon (no onions). Then we head over the Karin LaRonde’s stand for an iced tea (see here) and, in recent weeks, a tasty “double chocolate and ginger” cookie.

We learned from Kim this week that he’s found a solution to the draconian food exporting regulations that the U.S. passed after 911: he’s got a warehouse in Maine. As a result, Americans can order Kim’s Medallion Smoked Salmon products for quick U.S. delivery without all the costs and time required to get individual orders across the border.

As Oliver and I can attest, Kim makes an excellent product, and if you’ve got a hankering for smoked salmon, eel or trout, I can’t imagine a better source.

Regular readers may recall that Dick Gordon left WBUR earlier this year. Eric Eggertson reports that Gordon will soon surface at WUNC, the NPR station in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

dartmaps is a Google Maps-based application that shows “the (estimated) locations of all running DARTs (suburban train service) in the city of Dublin, Ireland.” Cool.

For some unexplained reason, our ISN high-speed Internet here at home has suddenly got blazingly fast. I mean blazingly fast. Wow.