I was riding my bike down Grafton Street tonight around sundown, and noticed, to my surprise and delight, that there appears to be a new Thai restaurant on Pownal Street, in the location formerly occupied by the comic shop. The sign on the front says simply “Thai Food.”

If this is true, and the food is good, then I believe Charlottetown will have tipped into a full-fledged North American city.

On Mr. Dressup this morning they played a game of “I Spy.” The introductory line to this game is “I spy, with my little eye…”

Why little eye?

I was at the Interlude this afternoon eating a very tasty lunch and reading The New Yorker when I came across an advertisement for Better Than Sane: Tales from a Dangling Girl, described in part as: “[b]orn into a wealthy Palo Alto family, Rose, a depressed and isolated child, didn’t take a real job until age 40, when she became a receptionist at the New Yorker in the 1980s.”

As a sucker for the non-fiction sub-genre of “books about The New Yorker”, I was moved to make an impulse purchase.

On a lark, I pulled out my cell phone, searched “amazon” in the stock “Google: WAP” search on the phone’s little web browser, got connected to the Amazon.com “cell phone enabled website,” search for and ordered the book. In about 2 minutes.

I never understood why “one click ordering,” Amazon.com’s patented scheme for a sort of “instant checkout,” was all that useful. Now I do: having your billing and shipping addresses, and your credit card information on file at Amazon.com and attached to your username and password makes ordering by cell phone (and other devices yet to be invented) possible. Can you imagine trying to type in all that information using the phone’s keypad?

Very cool.

Here’s a photo that captures a slice of our Reinvented Frisbee Golf Team. I’m the one in the blue shirt with a disc embedded in his back (it seemed like a cool way of storing the frisbee at the time; I’m moved to reconsider this now). To my right is Catherine; to her right is Ann. To my left is Cynthia; to her left is Matthew. To Matthew’s left, although in elbows only, are Stephanie and Mollie. Team members Janice and Sam are missing from the photo.

We had an excellent day on the course, boasting the highest average score (97) of the tournament. And Cynthia won the “best individual female” award. We were beat out of the “team member from farthest away” award by an Australian (Janice came up from New Hampshire, which is far, but not as far as Australia).

On someone’s camera (Will’s, I think), is our bona fide team photo.

Drive randomly: make right and left turns when the mood strikes you. Eventually you will end up on Quinpool Road. Then you will know where you are going.

Phone (603) 258-6798. Press ‘5’ for ‘Amazon.com Lookup.’ Enter the ISBN number of a book. Hear the current price for that book on Amazon.com. Repeat.

Here’s what’s happening:

• You’re calling a Voicepulse Connect DID number in Peterborough, New Hampshire.
• The call is routed to my Asterisk server here in Charlottetown, PEI.
• The Asterisk server has an extension defined to call a Perl script that accepts a 10-digit number and then uses the Amazon.com API to look up the book price, which is read back to you.

You’re free to use the Perl source code as an example of how to do this sort of thing. No guarantees that it’s error-proof, or that it takes into account all possible outcomes.

As I suspected, prices for hotel rooms in Boston during the Democratic National Convention are a little crazy. Witness this quote from Expedia for a room at the Holiday Inn Express (aka a generic bland hotel):

Of course it does include parking!

By some miracle, I’ve been accredited as a blogger for the Democratic National Convention. Given that the convention starts on July 26 (in 14 days), I think that qualifies as “late notice.”

Now the question is whether or not I can make the practical arrangements to attend. I would expect, to put it mildy, that hotel rooms are in short supply.

The phone call was fun: “Hello, is this Peter? This is the DNC.”

We had a colleague staying overnight in Charlottetown on Saturday, headed for a 6:15 a.m. flight on Sunday morning. She overslept, and awoke with a start at 5:38 a.m. She made the flight with time to spare — indeed she had to wait in line at the check-in counter.

Try that in Toronto.

As far as I know, I have never watched people dancing nakedly in a bar-like setting. I can’t say as though I’m particularly excited about the notion of people dancing nakedly in a bar-like setting in my home province. But, beyond the effects that such naked dancing might have on the surrounding neighbourhood — noise, lecherous disorderliness, etc. — I don’t think my government should be expressing opinions or taking action on the naked dancing issue.

I don’t feel this way because I think governments shouldn’t involve themselves in the business of enhancing or policing morals-related issues — clearly there is at least some role to play for government there. A small one, but a role nonetheless.

No, I feel this way because when governments try to speak out on issues of morality, inevitably something approaching inane xenophobic ranting tends to result.

Witness this comment from our Premier on the naked dancing issue, as quoted by the CBC:

“I think P.E.I. is a fairly homogeneous society and our norms, and customs and values I think are such that we want to encourage sort of wholesome entertainment that reflects the history of this community. The Island community. And we just think that this kind of entertainment is going in the wrong direction and that’s not where we want to be.”

I gather that, if the Premier had his way, we would all be attending historical pageants wherein fully-clothed Scottish and Irish people would enact vignettes from the Island’s past.

Surely there has to be a way to express concern about the naked dancing, and even to work to control the unseemly parts of the naked dancing, without casting Prince Edward Island as some sort of chaste homeland for like-minded boring people?

One more tip for the premier: it’s probably not a good idea to be reinforcing to the media how PEI is a “fairly homogeneous society” in the middle of Pride Week. It makes you — and all of us — look more antediluvian than we should be striving for.