David R. Brooks, an Australian I found through his pages about the Half-Safe expedition (the book about which I reviewed here), has posted pages about his own trek, from London to Perth, undertaken by Land Rover in 1974.

Brooks’ original vision was to circumnavigate, and his plan included three phases: England to Australia, North & South America, and Africa back to England. As his website relates, however, “This Logbook records the history of Phase 1… In the event, we all decided to settle in Australia, so Phase 2 never materialised.”

Nevertheless, it’s a great tale, well-illustrated, and worth a read.

Liberals plunge into scandal and infighting, Conservatives elect a right-wing idiot as a leader and, with no other choice, anyone with half a brain is forced to vote NDP. It worked for Bob Rae.

The Michael Apted films 7up, 14up, 21up, 28up, 35up and 42up are airing this weekend, in repeating series, on the Documentary Channel. I’ve never seen any of them before, and I find them quite compelling: they follow the same group of British children from 7 to 14 to 21, and so on, the latest series filmed when the original 7 year olds were 42.

Whenever parents of young children get together, inevitably the conversation turns to our childless friends. Bill and Laurence and Catherine and I fell this way last week at dinner.

I recalled how a childful couple, in a sort of low-key propaganda move before Oliver was conceived (physically or emotionally), told me that all their deliberately childless friends seemed spiritually bereft and somewhat selfish, as though the absense of a need to think of their children caused an overabundance of inward focus.

My friend Stephen says that having children is liking being admitted to a club the rules and character of which can’t possibly be understood until you join.

This isn’t to say that having children is for everyone — I’m the last person to try and woo people into this life, however wonderful it might be — but simply that once you’re “in” the “time before” seems strange and foreign.

Laurence said it seems to her that couples without children are always “talking to their dogs, and about movies.”

That about sums it up.

Longtime readers will recall that there’s a tricky bug cum feature that inconveniently forgets the “New since your Last Visit” and “Discussion since your Last Visit” items once you’ve clicked on a link anywhere on the site. This has always kind of made these features only half useful (you could work around by clicking “Back” in your browser, and reading the page with the links that was cached, but that was kind of inelegant).

I’m happy to say that I’ve [probably] solved this problem once and for all. The fix hasn’t received extensive testing yet, but suffice to say that the site should now remember the new items for the entire duration of your visit.

We’re back on the Island after a week away.

Friday last we drove over to Halifax and, from there, flew Air Canada to Montreal. Other than an hour’s delay for the flight (we were frequently updated by the ground staff), the trip was uneventful. We arrived in Montreal at about 11:00 p.m., and faced with a complicated bus-metro-bus trip to brother (aka uncle) Steve’s (on the Plateau), we took a cab.

Oliver is at a difficult age for getting around without a car: we’ve stopped traveling with his car seat for the airplane, so when we take cabs, he gets belted into the middle seat at the back, which isn’t exactly the safest thing, but is better than nothing. I’d be curious to know how other parents traveling with small children handle this problem. Of course anything is safer than scooting around the streets of Bangkok in a Tuk-Tuk with Oliver clutching me for dear life. Everything is relative.

We were all happy to see Steve, especially Oliver, who obviously remembered our trip there in December (he may not be able to talk in complete sentences, but Oliver remembers everything detail of every place he has ever been). Oliver slept like a rock in his makeshift bed, made from the leftover cushions on Steve’s pull-out couch.

Saturday morning we woke up to a nice steady snowfall, which made our trip to the Fête des Neiges all the more snow-themed. We walked to the Metro (Steve’s house is about a 30 minute walk east of the Mont-Royal station), and then took the Metro to Parc Jean-Drapeau. When we emerged, we found the weather just on the cusp of bitterly cold, which we reacted to by trying to maintain constant activity: we took a ride in a horse-drawn sleigh (horse was Bella, driven by Danny), ate boiled maple syrup poured onto snow, and walked through the various displays of ice and snow carvings. There was a most pleasant warming hall set up, which included a baby changing area complete with free diapers, wipes, cream, and francophone grandmother to assist with operations.

Saturday night Steve cooked up a pasta feast (it’s so nice to shop along Mont-Royal at various specialized shops rather than slurping up everything at the super-giant grocery store), and we watched Secondhand Lions which was actually quite good, despite the presence of the robotic crying machine Haley Joel Osment.

Sunday we diddled and doddled, and then headed to Bill, Laurence, Jimmy and Juliette’s house for dinner near the Côte Vertu Metro stop. Oliver had a wonderful time wearing their Bear in a Big Blue House bear costume around and playing with their seemingly infinite collection of toys. We had a great meal, listened to some great music, and then headed off back into the night.

Monday and Tuesday I spent working with Bill and Laurence on secret modern dance projects (the nominal purpose of our trip) while Catherine and Oliver explored Montreal and Steve was at work at the CBC. Monday night we had an excellent Jamaican meal called Mango Bay on Bishop Street, just south of Ste. Catherine.

On Wednesday, Catherine went off on her own, and Oliver and I went out to lunch with Steve at a Japanese noodle bar near the CBC and then went magazine shopping downtown. Wednesday evening we took a taxi back to the airport and were in Halifax about 11:30 p.m.

Rather than a long late slog back to Charlottetown, we decided to head into Halifax for the night. With some Internet research assistance from Johnny and Jodi, we reserved a room for $99 at The Lord Nelson. I thought that by staying at The Lord Nelson we were going to have a comfortable, well-appointed room in the heart of the city. Instead we got a rather grotty room, with avacado bathroom fixtures, overlooking a noisy construction site. The hotel did, however, have a nice lobby.

Thursday morning we sped around Halifax grocery shopping, including the purchase of a rice cooker, which is something we’ve wanted to add to our kitchen for a long time. Given that rice is an almost daily part of our diet, it seemed logical to make the jump from the cheap, ineffective $45 Black and Decker model we’ve have for 5 years to something more substantial, so we now own a $210 Japanese-made rice cooker that claims to use fuzzy logic to obtain maximum quality rice cooking. The rice is cooking now, and we’ll know whether it worked out in about 25 minutes.

On the way out of town we stopped at Pete’s Frootique in Bedford (and spooted Pete himself getting white wine for his wife’s birthday dinner; note for future reference that she is allergic to shellfish) and stocked up on Ting, ginger beer, and exotic fruits. Then it was a quick dash back to the Island.

All in all a nice almost-week away. Steve is an excellent host, it was nice to see Bill and Laurence and Jimmy again (and Juliette for the first time). It was Catherine’s first trip to Montreal lasting more than 2 hours, and only my second since the long, cold winter of lonely unemployment back in the late 1980s, so we’re still in that nascent phase of our relationship with the city, but all signs are positive.

Oh, and I think I may have committed to driving to Murmansk next summer. Stay tuned for details.

To put this $7.5 million loss into context: that’s about $75 per elector on Prince Edward Island. Question: if, by some direct mechanism, you had been asked “can I take $75 of your money and invest it in a fish processing company?” would you have said yes?

Because I’m involved in local elections administration work here and, before that, was contracted to the Province of PEI, I’ve made a point of refraining from political commentary here in the weblog and in public otherwise, so as to avoid problems of real or perceived bias.

But there’s another half of me, the half born in the USA that remains a dual citizen, that can freely participate, without problems of perception or bias, in the American political process.

And today, for the first time, that half of me donated to a Presidential campaign: I made a $50 donation to Howard Dean’s campaign.

Why?

Well, the immediate impetus was this email from Gov. Dean this morning (which I received because I’d subscribed to the Dean for America mailing list before heading down to New Hampshire last week):

The entire race has come down to this: we must win Wisconsin. We must launch our new television advertisement on Monday in the major markets in Wisconsin. To do that, I need your help to raise $700,000 by Sunday…

…We will get a boost this weekend in Washington, Michigan and Maine, but our true test will be the Wisconsin primary. A win there will carry us to the big states of March 2-and narrow the field to two candidates. Anything less will put us out of this race.

I was impressed with the directness of that request: give us money and we’ll try to win Wisconsin; if we don’t, it’s over.

I wasn’t prepared to see Dean lose in Wisconsin without contributing at least something myself.

More generally, after a week in the eye of the New Hampshire Primary storm, I came away actually believing that Dean’s approach to the Presidency is different than Kerry, Edwards and Clark.

Not because of the Internet, or blogs, or bringing new electors into the process (although those are all impressive).

But because he has convinced me that he’s not a bullshit artist.

I watched John Edwards’ victory speech on Tuesday night in South Carolina: it was brilliantly executed, and should go down in the annals of speechcraft as one of the best.

I spent a week in and around the Kerry campaign, and came away having absolutely no grasp of the man or his ideas, save the fact that he can skate.

I sat in the 5th row in Nashua while Wes Clark tried to convince me of his humble beginnings, his military service, his three religions, checking off a demographic scorecard as he proceeded.

But what America needs is not a motivational coach.

We need a doer.

And when you strip away the talking points, and the position papers and the TV ads, Howard Dean has convinced me that’s the primary skill he brings to the job: focused, deliberate, results-oriented leadership with an eye on achievable goals.

I wouldn’t mind working for a company where Howard Dean was the boss.

Combine that with his approach to the issues, most of which I agree with, and you get my vote.

I don’t think Dean’s a revolutionary.

I don’t think the Dean campaign is a quantum leap foward, and that politics has been “changed forever.”

I simply think that, of the candidates in the field that have a chance of beating George W. Bush in November, Dean will do the best job. Both for America and, ultimately, for the world.

If that’s not worth $50, I don’t know what is.

Much to my surprise, I realized this afternoon that I have never been to France. I would have thought that somehow in the last 37 (going on 38) years I would have ended up in France, if only by accident. By no, I have never been to France.

I came to this realization after following the link to world66.com’s tools for traveller page on Scripting.com.

Here’s a map showing the countries I have visited:

I’ve got a lot of countries left to visit, and not many years left!

I do better with the US states:

A couple of trips on Southwest Airlines and I could complete my game card.

I had always considered Nature’s Harvest, the “health food” store in the Confederation Court Mall, to be a place best avoided. Most of what they sell is pills of various sorts, not unlike the new “improved” Root Cellar. And I’m not a big pill guy.

Recently, though, I’ve been stopping by several mornings a week at their juice bar, and this has given be a chance to wander around the store a little. There are still lots and lots of pills, and weirdo products with names like “Fat Burner” and “Nutrobooster.” But there’s also good whole-wheat bread — the same bread you can otherwise buy at the Farmers Market — and, in the cooler, some low-fat snacks (vegetables and dip, yoghurt and granola parfait). And they do make a mean juice.

The staff are very friendly too.

So while I’m not converted over to the pilly dark side, I have become a regular customer.