If you frequent the area of Queen and Fitzroy in Charlottetown, you are well aware that our brothers and sisters at Aliant have been on strike for several weeks now. And if you’ve been paying really close attention, you will have seen the Aliant security force hiding out in a white Chevy Cavalier coupe across the street, presumably poised to shoot any strikers that get out of line or try to say, secretly switch 411 and 911.

In a very sneaky move this morning, Aliant switched the white Chevy Cavalier coupe to a red Chevy Cavalier coupe. As a result, it’s almost like the security force isn’t even there.

I joined my landlords, and various of their religious followers, in York tonight for many rounds of exciting paintball action, phase three of Dan’s extended bachelor party.

This was my first paintball experience. Indeed it was my first “men doing manly things together” outing in perhaps twenty years. Here’s what I learned:

• Their is an odd allure in being led. Conventional wisdom is that a web hermit iconoclast like me would buck at the notion of being told what to do. But when one of my Team Red mates took up the leadership mantle and sent me down, left and forward, it was great: sometimes being told what to do isn’t such a bad thing.
• Their is an odd allure in men doing manly things together. This goes against 20 years of hard-edged feminist training my by various consorts. Or rather more honestly, 20 years of hard-edged pseudo-feminist posturing by me as a sort of awkward mating technique. But it’s true: running through the forest and then drinking beer and talking about it fun. Who knew?
• Wearing glasses when playing paintball is awkward. Wearing the mandatory super-goggles over my glasses — which I need to see, I’ve only recently realized — meant that I had two layers of fog and grime to see through. When the wee glasses-free dynamo brother of the bride lunged from out of nowhere and shot me point blank, and I only vaguely knew what was happening, the true nature of my disadvantage became obvious. Please note that the “squirt some dish soap” advice that the paintball master offers as a solution to this problem only results in an extra layer of gunk to see through. By the way, as a sign of my extra-special geekliness, I kept reading the “Goggles Mandatory” sign as “Google Mandatory.”
• Rarely engaging in physical activity makes running through the forest harder. Given that my comrades spend a roughly equal amount of time engaging in physical activity as I do, this wasn’t a huge disadvantage. But then again, they are all 10 to 20 years younger than I am, so their bodies have had less time to atrophy. I made it through the night, and even rolled down a couple of hills and leaped up into a tower once or twice under heavy fire. But I will be very, very sore in the morning.
  
• Holding and firing a gun isn’t that weird. Indeed it felt strangely comfortable. I find this equally disturbing and encouraging. And for the same reasons. It’s good to realize that people who do bad things with guns aren’t a species apart: they’re just like me. That makes me hopeful because it suggests that rationality can prevail given the right environment. It also makes soldiers seem less abnormal — it’s hard to demonize a population when you’ve felt the initial tentative roots of their predilections in yourself. But for the same reasons, I’m disturbed: I would have liked to have thought that there was a stronger firewall between everyday regular rational people and the ability to comfortably wield weapons. I don’t want to make this into more than it was — essentially a video game played outdoors with more sweat — but there’s at least something to be learned here.
• Not working sometimes is probably a good idea. Short of dating my lady-love and outings with my small family, I mostly work and sleep and eat and drink lemon iced teas and watch Survivor All-Stars. And procrastinate. It’s a good idea to do something that has nothing to do with work and family at least once in a while. I’m not going to take up paintball as a regular avocation. But doing something else has a new attraction.

The lads were very kind to let me come along for the night tonight, and, what’s more, to refrain completely from “how’s it going old fart?” or “hey, you’re the new Alan!” allusions. A good time was had by all.

Barb McKenna reports from the canine frontier [RealAudio] about Tim Hortons’ new policy of charging 18 cents (including GST) for Tim-Bits for dogs. They used to be free.

Let’s say that Tim’s gives away 100,000 Tim-Bits a year on PEI (that seems like a lot, but who knows) and the cost of making a Tim-Bit is, say, 5 cents. That means that $10,000 of lost profit over the course of a year.

That seems like an awfully cheap way to engender the goodwill of dog-owning Islanders.

On April 5, 2004, CBC reported that “[t]here will be no more loans or grants to small businesses from the province. Businesses will have to make do with tax incentives.” and quoted Development Minister Mike Currie:

“We’ll have to learn to be more creative and innovative and make do with what we have,” says Development Minister Mike Currie. “I have a very capable staff and I’m certain we’ll come with the right answer for the private sector.”

Today the CBC reports “P.E.I. first to bite sandwich deal” and says:

The owner of a New Brunswick sandwich company said he’s moving to western P.E.I. because the provincial government was the first to offer him cash upfront.

Apparently staff will have to be “more creative and innovative” at some later date.

On Saturday I happened upon a balsa wood model of the new federal government building on Euston Street. Today I took a closer look at the artist’s rendering of the building at the construction site. I have concluded that the building will look much, much better if it is built out of balsa wood.

Six years ago Catherine and Steve and I went to Lincoln Center in New York City to see Robin Williams interviewed by Lillian Ross. About halfway through the performance — which, predictably, took on a life of its own — the man sitting next me to an said “son, remember this: you’re at a happening”.

The same thing could be said of tonight’s Eric MacEwen Celebration at the Confederation Centre. A who’s who of Atlantic Canadian musicians gathered to pay tribute: everyone from Lennie Gallant and Richard Wood to Bruce Guthro and Ron Hynes. I think almost every one of the 1,107 people in the audience left the hall thinking “man, this is a great place to live.”

Highlights:

• Wow! Richard Wood is talented; I missed his career from the age of 12 until tonight, so this came as something of a surprise. Do not miss the opportunity to see him live when it is presented.
• Same thing goes for Cynthia MacLeod.
• Allan Rankin and Bruce Guthro, who sang Northwest Passage together at the after-party, have voices perfectly suited to sing together. They should do it more often.
• Lennie Gallant has aged like good scotch.
• Urban Carmichael is actually quite funny.
• Ray Brow may, in fact, be running everything without the rest of us knowing. This doesn’t appear to be such a bad thing.
• That black velour dinner jacket that Kevin O’Brien wears to all formal occassions never wears out: it always makes him look like a million bucks.
• To see Leo Walsh grooving to the sounds of Gordon Belsher and Richard Wood belting out Beatles tunes was worth the price of the ticket. Rock on, funky mandarin.
• Fourteen year old fiddler Connor O’Callahan has more juice in him than a lot of musicians twice his age. Watch this guy.

Much love, respect, and admiration was expressed for Eric. To see so many express so much for one man was heartening; if we could all earn 1% of the regard in which Eric is almost universally held, we would live good lives.

Bob Boyle at the Brackley Drive-in updated his website today with news of their screen rebuild (regular readers will recall that Hurricane Juan took down the screen last year). Bob’s looking for help from the public in advocating for some support from the compensation fund from the government; if you’re able to lend a hand, please do. The Boyles have a great facility in Brackley: arguably the drive-in with the greatest location in Canada. It’s a great place to see a summer movie.

It’s the 49th anniversary of VE Day today (the German High Command surrendered unconditionally to the Allies on may 8th, 1945). Also on this day, Rochester, New York received ten inches of snow in 1989.

Through a lucky happenstance, Catherine and I scored the last two tickets to the Eric MacEwen Celebration tonight at the Confederation Centre: Oliver and I were en route from the Confederation Centre Art Gallery to the Library when we ran into Mac Campbell, who’s helping to organize the event and Mac connected us with two tickets that had just come free.

Speaking of the Confederation Centre Art Gallery, you should get yourself there by May 16th to see Taken, a large interactive digital art installation by David Rokeby. It’s the first piece of digital art I’ve ever seen that knocked my socks off.

Oliver and I went out to Strathgartney Provincial Park this afternoon to act as the fan base for a frisbee golf tournament, the first event in the marathon bachelor party for Dan. It turns out that frisbee golf is actually a lot of fun, and isn’t at all rugby-like, which I incorrectly thought it was. The fun continues without Oliver and I tonight, and I’ll rejoin the party on Monday night for exciting paint ball action; the chance to virtually kill my landlords is too enticing to pass up.

I joined the Quality of Island Life Coop today. I don’t know much about the initiative, but they keep peppering me with interesting email messages, and their mission — providing new metrics by which to measure quality of life on PEI — appears both noble and reasonable. They are holding meeting on Thursday, May 13th at the Farm Centre that will introduce their ideas to the greater world; click on the link above, or check yesterday’s Guardian for more details.

Spring is decidedly here on Prince Edward Island now. Thank goodness.

The airline SAS has an online emission calculator that allows you to “estimate your share of aircraft emissions when you travel with us.” Very neat.

If you’re not flying, but you want to calculate your own contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, the Government of Canada can help. Thanks to the PEI Climate Change Hub for this link.

My personal calculation: 6.65 Tonnes/year. That places me above the national average (5 Tonnes) and below the provincial average (7 Tonnes). My biggest contribution, 4 Tonnes, comes from home heating. If I did the following things, I could reduce my contribution to 3.88 Tonnes:

• Caulk, weatherstrip and professionally air seal your home throughout.
• Upgrade attic insulation to R-51 where possible.
• Upgrade basement wall insulation to R-20 where possible.
• Upgrade wooden doors to steel, foam core doors.
• Install a programmable thermostat and set it to automatically reduce temperatures in your home in winter.
• Replace your refrigerator with an Energy Star rated high-efficiency refrigerator.
• Use a cold water wash and rinse instead of warm or hot water to wash your clothes.
• Use a push mower instead of a gas-powered mower.
• Use 50% green electricity in your home.

My MLA, Richard Brown, is the only member of the Legislative Assembly with a real-world technology background, so he’s the closest thing we’ve got to a technology expert in the house. Here’s what he said on Tuesday, speaking about the Atlantic Technology Centre:

But I believe in technology. You have to understand, information technology is software development. That’s where the money is to be made, not in grandiose buildings. I personally would have invested in the people more than in the building myself.

Leaving out the fact that Richard is trying to embarrass the government and score politically, he make a valid point: the new economy isn’t about infrastructure, it’s about ideas.