It says here (but oddly not here) that Sam Roberts is playing the Festival of Lights on July 2, 2004 here in Charlottetown.

Thanks to our undercover operatives on the west coast for digging this up.

As far as I know, I only learned who Jessica Steen was about 5 minutes ago. I was looking for information on the ill-fated CBC sitcom Hangin’ In. Jessica appeared in one episode of the series, and she showed up in my search.

Reading her filmography I have become convinced that she might be the classic Canadian actor; among other things, she has appeared in:

• The Uncle Bobby Show
• SCTV
• A Swiss Chalet commercial
• The Littlest Hobo
• Night Heat
• An Eatons commercial
• John and the Missus
• Street Legal
• Due South

In other words, save The Beachcombers, she has appeared in every significant piece of Canadian cultural output in the last 25 years. And she’s only an year older than I am!

Recently she has gone on to fame and fortune in the U.S., appearing in episodes of The Practice, Navy NCIS, and ER. The role you might recognize her most from is the Michael Richards love interest from the 1997 movie Trial and Error.

I’m following Rob’s lead:

On our way to the hotel, I looked out the taxi window as wonderingly as though we had just landed on another planet.

It’s from Give Me the World by Leila Hadley, a delightful book about a trip across Asia and Europe by Hadley and her six-year-old son Kippy in 1951.

To play along yourself:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Oliver and I went to the Pinch Penny Fair on Saturday (an event my mouth insists on calling the Pench Pinny Fair).

In amongst the tattered cast-offs of the cultural intelligentsia — toasters, Thomas the Tank Engine books, plants, grappling hooks, PDP-11 microcomputers — were a couple of boxes of 33-1/2 RPM long play records.

And in one of those boxes I found a collection of albums that could have well been my own collection, circa 1987. It included Solitude Standing from Suzanne Vega, Love Over and Over from Kate & Anna McGarrigle, and even a couple of Loggins and Messina albums. Freaky.

If this happens to have been your record collection, kudos on your fine taste.

If you need to quickly geocode U.S. addresses, and you can’t afford a commercial solution or a service bureau, Daniel Egnor’s winning entry in the Google programming contest will get you at least part of the way there. I’ve used it. It works.

Here is an interesting opportunity to sponsor a gypsy wagon, and travel with a gypsy cabaret.

Via my father comes the revelation that you can cut and paste plain text into QuickTime Pro.

In versions 5 and earlier, the text would all be pasted into a new frame, white text with a black background, sized accordingly, centred. In version 6.5, this behaviour has changed, and the text is split, frame by frame, using carriage returns as the delimiter.

Dad’s contractor found this link at Apple about QuickTime “text descriptors,” that can be used to format QuickTime text tracks, including those that you cut and paste in.

Kudos to Editor Gary MacDougall for this column in yesterday’s Guardian about the new waterfront developments in Charlottetown.

Ironically, Jim Larkin, whose obscene Lobster on the Wharf expansion has removed the view of Charlottetown Harbour down Prince Street, received the Premier’s Award for Tourism in 2004. While there’s no doubt that Jim has done much good for the tourism industry on the Island, I’m afraid that this behemoth of an expansion makes it difficult to remember that.

Strike procurement question: how do picket lines so quickly get equipped with flaming oil barrels that strikers can warm their hands over? Aliant workers down the street haven’t been on strike more than 48 hours, and they’ve already got one going. Are oil barrels really that easy to come by? Give ‘em hell, guys.

Catherine and Oliver and I went to the Formosa Tea House earlier in the week. We showed up near closing time (which is now 7:30 p.m., by the way), so it was empty, and we had a chance to chat with the owners.

During that conversation, I commended them for sticking with it, knowing that the first “reputation building” phase of a restaurant’s life is often not only the most important, but also the most frustrating for the owners. They agreed, and said during the first month they were open, at the old location on University Ave., they were empty more often than not, and made a grand total of $400 for the entire month.

Of course today, in the new location with lots of room, an expanded menu and, most importantly, several years worth of word of mouth, you can often not get a table during the lunch hour. They stuck with it, and they’ve got a sustainable business now.

Monsoon, the new sushi restaurant that occupies the Formosa’s old location, is at the beginning of this curve now, and I hope they stick with it too. I was there for an hour today, and I was the only customer. Their sushi, freshly prepared, is very nice, and they serve a mean jasmine tea. While they’ve got some work to do on the interior decor, the owner is incredibly kind and helpful, and I’m sure that once word gets around, she will be as busy as the Formosa was in that location.

In the meantime, if you’re an early adopter, and want to get in some good sushi and a nice cup of tea before the crowds start to arrive, drop in.