Alert: I am in the midst of consuming an iced café mocha. Anything I write here for the next 8 hours should be read with that in mind.

As I write this by cover of darkness, sequestered here in my office, the entire Island is without power. CBC Radio had a brief announcement about this on the 10:00 a.m. news, and then went on with regular programming, presumably based on the assumption that we Islanders would rather be lulled to sleep by Shelagh Rogers than informed about a power calamity. Fortunately, due the good offices of my powerful landlords, the Reinvented server still has power, and is humming along one floor up. Not that it has anywhere to go: our upstream Internet is dark, so I’m writing to an audience of no more than one.

There seems to be a lot of siren traffic around the city: perhaps people are trapped inside elevators, or have tried to use propane furnaces to brew coffee? On the way here in my car, intersections were well-behaved, and everyone was observing the 4-way stop rules one is supposed to observe when traffic lights are out (I know this because CHTN told me so).

I made a horrible discovery this morning, courtesy of the same CHTN: I am now a candidate for “golden oldies” radio. I always thought of CHTN as a bastion of music by groups with names like The Platters, and The Rondelles, with little bits of Elvis for effect. But CHTN now plays Bruce Cockburn and the Doobie Brothers: the same music I listened to with the crystal set under my pillow on CKOC Hamilton thirty years ago. Thank goodness nobody else, especially the hipsters upstairs, can read this; who knows what mocking might result.

I’m off to a meeting uptown. I imagine it will be at least supper time before the full-fledged looting begins, and perhaps Friday before we have to arm ourselves. Stay tuned.

Update: the power came on 30 seconds after the above was posted.

I love this fakeisthenewreal.com website. It may qualify as the first truly interesting website I’ve seen in years.

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.