My friend Oliver asked me “Do cities have ordinances about trick or treating?” So I looked to see what Charlottetown’s Bylaws say on the subject.

Hallowe’en is covered under the same Nuisance Bylaw that covers subjects like “injuring trees” and “trnasport of rubbish.” Section 2.20 of the Bylaw reads:

2.20 (a) Unless accompanied by a person over the age of 18 years, no person under the age of 16 years shall be in a public place within the City of Charlottetown between 8:00 p.m. October 31st and 7:00 a.m. November 1st.

(b) In a year that October 31st falls on a Sunday, the restrictions provided in paragraph (a) shall also apply from 8:00 p.m. October 30th to 7:00 a.m. October 31st.

The Summary Proceedings Bylaw weighs in on the consequences of “disobeying Halloween curfew”: a minimum fine of $100, a maximum fine is $500, or imprisonment of 90 days.

This is the same penalty you get for “maintaining an unsafe hatchway,” “moving a building without permission” or “injuring city trees.”

I’m especially intrigued by the penalty for “moving a building without permission:” it almost seems like an invitation to just up and move somebody’s house without telling them. I’d gladly pay $100 for that much fun.

I’ve been surfing through the City of Charlottetown Bylaws today. It’s an interesting collection: reading through it tells you a lot about what the City thinks is important. Or at least important to define and regulate.

For example, there is the Victoria Park and Promenade Bylaw, which runs 29 pages long, and includes such things as this definition of what a bicycle is:

Bicycle means any cycle propelled by human power on which a person may ride, regardless of the number of wheels it has.

It also defines, in considerable detail, what isn’t allowed inside Victoria Park (for example: archery, using sling-shots, obscene or vulgar language, bonfires, planting trees of shrubs, trapping animals).

By contrast, the Policing Services Bylaw is only 3 pages long. And if you remove the sections titled “Emblem” and “Uniform,” the meat of the Bylaw consists of the 142 words in the section “Police Services.”

It seems remarkable that the complexity of policing our little city can be boiled down to so little. Part of me thinks this is a good thing — “small government” and all — and part of me thinks there should be a lot more in the bylaw about what the proper limits and responsibilities of the police are.

I have a lot of respect for smalltown daily newspaper reporters, most of which extends from having worked closely with them in my newspapering days. They are, as a group, generally intelligent, witty, and patient. You’ve gotta be patient to survive on a diet that includes school board meetings, parades, and stories about fantastic pets; there are only so many hurricanes, Province House explosions and general elections to being you to the top of your game.

When Jim Day from the Guardian phoned me on Thursday to interview me about the U.S. election, his original reason for calling was because his Managing Editor, Gary MacDougall, had read some of my blog posts about various election-related topics.

Jim, however, didn’t really know what a weblog was — he initially described it as “a chat room sort of thing” — and so as we were talking, he kept having to interrupt me when I offhandly used words like “blogger” and “blogging” and “posted.” I tried my best to describe what a weblog is, but I don’t really think I did it justice.

I came away from the experience thinking “wow, is he out of touch!?”

Upon reconsideration, though, I’ve come around to thinking this says more about how self-referrential and closed the “blogosphere” is. Sure there are millions of blogs written by millions of people. But I think if you drew a giant Venn diagram of the system, you would find that the world of blogs mostly intersects with itself, and doesn’t overlap with regular everyday reality all that much.

In other words, if you remove bloggers themselves, along with their immediate family and friends, from the readership, there are far fewer “civilians” left over than we all assume. We are, by and large, talking to ourselves.

That doesn’t bother me, and I don’t think it invalidates the medium at all. But it is important to remember, especially when we get irrational heady thoughts about our blogs as the new media’s new media, that we’re more like monks illuminating manuscripts for the church than scrappy New Journalists shouting out to the general public.

Here’s a larger chunk of the Guardian article that ran this morning headed “Watching our neighbours,” and written by Jim Day:

The actual number of people residing in the province who are eligible to vote in Tuesday’s United States election is not known. About 600,000 U.S. expatriates living in Canada have registered in time to vote.

Peter Rukavina of Charlottetown is one of them.

Rukavina, who has dual Canada/U.S. citizenship, considers himself a citizen of the United States. Although he spent only the first four months of his life living in the States, the website developer is in the U.S. on business about six weeks a year.

“I consider it a duty to vote,” he said.

Rukavina said he has been following this U.S. election more closely than any in the past. He has cast his ballot by mail for Kerry, which, he said, is really more a vote against Bush.

He has concerns with Bush’s war in Iraq. He said the president seems arrogant and unwilling to listen to other opinions.

Rukavina said he has friends in the United States who say they would seriously consider moving to Canada if Bush is re-elected.

“I think they just don’t feel they can stay in a country that Bush represents,” he said.

As a result of this excerpt, Catherine received four angry telephone calls this morning from Guardian readers while I was out at the market with Oliver.

In general, I was accused by the callers — all of whom somehow assumed that venting to Catherine was reasonable in lieu of me — of being some combination of anti-God, anti-family, a draft-dodger, a university professor, or naive about the war.

While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it does seem a little much to make unsoliticed Saturday morning calls, to my partner, about political disagreements. Send me a letter. Write me an email. Disparage me on your weblog. Rent a billboard.

From an article in today’s Guardian:

Rukavina said he has friends in the United States who say they would seriously consider moving to Canada if Bush is re-elected.

“I think they just don’t feel they can stay in a country that Bush represents,” he said.

We encountered several models of parking kiosks during our European travels, all generally similar to the new ones in Charlottetown.

The ones in Zagreb were, like everything else in Zagreb, covered with graffiti. But you could pay for parking with your cell phone.

The kiosks in Italy had no graffiti, and were quite elegant to boot.

I actually used one of the new Charlottetown kiosks yesterday, and it worked as advertised.

And I got to wondering: if the kiosks are all wirelessly in communication with some sort of central server, and the local parking cops are all outfitted with wireless gizmos of some sort, is there a system in place to do automatic “route planning” for the cops, based on areas where there are likely infractions given recent activity? Here’s a description of the Argus software that the City uses to administer the machines; it’s not clear how sophisticated it is in this regard.

Interesting tangent: the kiosks are made by a Swedish company.

The Firefox/Mac hidden window bug that was fixed in recent nightly builds remains fixed in the latest Firefox Release Candidate. And the Release Candidate version doesn’t have the bug that prevented “right-clicking” that recent nightly builds did.

Which is to say: the Release Candidate is approaching browser perfection on a Mac.