Back in January of 2001, I wrote about a review I’d done of a Ron Sexsmith cassette for a zine called Ear Meat. This morning I found that issue in the archives, and I present it here:

Ron Sexsmith - There’s A Way - I was hit with this image of dead cows mired in thick, gelatinous mud trying their hardest to play like Corey Hart but, with their limited lounge-lizard past, only able to come up with Cousteau-sounding bubble-rock. One exception is the drumming, obviously programmed, which overpowers everything with an annoying military beat: that’s okay, though, because what it overpowers isn’t all that better, anyway. Good music to listen to while scuba-diving or mowing your dog.

As you can see, I presaged Ron Sexsmith’s meteoric rise to fame rather well.

The review comes from Ear Meat 6, edited and published by Joanna Rogers. The issue is undated, but if memory serves it was published in or around 1986.

Here are some pictures from the 1978 Carlisle Bluegrass Festival. I wrote about the festival last year. I was 12 years old in 1978, which means I was probably selling newspapers somewhere in the background of those pictures.

And here’s some Carlisle village history. The two schools in Carlisle, Victoria built in 1922 and Balaclava built in 1958, are both gone now. Victoria was torn down, and sits as a vacant lot; I went there for grades 4, 5 and 5. Balaclava, where I did grades 2 and 3, was replaced by a sleek modern school sometime in the last 20 years.

I used to deliver the paper to Mrs. Howard Green (mentioned in the section on Progreston), and also did some yard work for her. She used to give me orange pop and cookies when we took a break.

She lived across the street from what we used to call “the dam,” which is pictured here. There’s a railway bridge over the dam, and Len Taylor climbed up there in 1978 and spray-painted his name in white paint. It’s still there.

I like James Taylor’s music as much as the next guy, but I was suddenly struck by the thought tonight, while watching Everwood, that for popular culture to make any significant leaps forward it may be required that James Taylor’s music stops being played or interpreted completely. Yes it will be hard. But all growth requires sacrifice.

By a quirk of travel-planning fate, I am flying to Ottawa, via Montreal, on Wednesday, returning, via Montreal, late Friday night. I’m then getting back on a plane (presumably the same one) and flying back to Montreal first thing Saturday morning, to visit brother Steve with Oliver, returning Tuesday night. By my counting, I will be at Dorval airport four times in the next 9 days. It’s my 15 seconds of jet-setting fame, without the cameras.

Back last week, I mentioned that, by using an anonymous cookie hooked up to a counter, I was going to try and get a sense of how many people were reading this website on a daily basis.

People as opposed to Google robots and other automated traffic.

The counter has been counting away for the last six days, and what it has found is that this site has approximately 260 real people readers on weekdays and 170 real people readers on the weekend.

This is still a rough measurement: I’m probably not counting some people (for example, people with cookies turned off), and I’m probably double-counting some people (like people who read from home and from work both).

I’m also not counting people who only read the site through an RSS reader, which is an increasing number of you.

And because of the nature of the cookie — I hand it out on one visit, and don’t count it until your next visit, or at least your next page view — I’m not counting people who come and read the front page and never come back.

And so, at the very least, there are 260 of you out there. Hello, and welcome to my world.

Finally people are starting to speak about the heretofore unspeakable: Islanders can produce cultural crap with the best of them.

Read RIFF: Rather Intolerable Films Festival from Rob and Crap-ola from Cynthia to see the early leaves on this tree.

Until such point as there is a vibrant and active artistic criticism movement on Prince Edward Island (i.e. one that is more than a cheering section which treats all artistic production on the Island as an amazing miracle simply for existing), we are doing a disservice to our artists. And, ultimately, a disservice to ourselves, because we’ll just keep getting served more of the same.

I think the important break that has to happen here is the ability, at least on some level, to separate art from self. Which is not to say that art and self aren’t inextricably linked. But there is a difference between saying “your art stinks” and “you stink,” however difficult that may be to imagine if you are the “you” in question.

As Reinvented slowly becomes a tenant and officemate of silverorange, the “you guys are so young” and “you guys are so old” comparisons are in danger of getting tired (who wants to feel young or old enough to have it be worthy of special mention every day anyway?). To the extent that we might have to ban all such discussion shortly.

However please beg my indulgence on a related matter, and that is that I have found the pop cultural grafting point that separates my world from theirs, and it is Remington Steele.

This program aired on ABC from 1982 to 1987. Which were my prime teenage television watching years. My new colleagues were, by my calculations, in early elementary school at the time, presumably well early of the Remingston Steele demographic.

I know all this because at the big blogger orgy on Thursday, I made a sarcastic suggestion that I would simply hang a sign and maintain an office at 84 Fitzroy St., but never actually go there. “Sort of like Remingston Steele,” I said.

The reaction to which was some combination of blank stares and empty looks.

The conceit of Remingston Steele was that Laura Holt, played by Stephanie Zimbalist, was a female detective who found herself in need of a male “front” to attract business. So she hired a British gadabout, played by Pierce Brosnan (revently of James Bond fame) to play the role of her boss, Remington Steele.

Not deep drama, I admit. Somewhere south of Hill St. Blues and north of Wonder Woman. But I was a fan. To the extent that my friend Chris Nicolson and I used to watch episodes again that he had taped on his VCR (he had a rather complete collection).

Two or three years later, the young lads would be 11 or 12, and our demographic would sync up a little more, and after that our pop culture Venn diagrams intersect more fully. Though never completely, as I discovered when I revealed my amazement that all video games in arcades are now killer death games and recalled fondly the days of Tron; that revelation was revealed more with disdain than bewilderment.

Tron… those were the days.

Irony night. We headed to the show, with love actually and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World on the radar. I was leaning Russell Crowe, Catherine leaned Hugh Grant.

But the timing worked out better for love actually, so that’s what we saw. The irony: Catherine found it complicated and slow and ultimately unsatisfying. Me? I cried three or four times, and thought it an almost perfectly constructed romantic comedy.

Who knows what this bodes for next week.

I’m in the process of upgrading the servers here, in anticipation of their move to the new silverorange/reinvented data centre.

The server that powers this website is far, far less powerful than you might imagine it to be: it’s a generic 233 MGHz Pentium II with a 4GB hard drive. Not greased lightning, in other words.

I’m preparing to replace it with the machine that used to be my Windows 2000 desktop, which is a 500 MGhz Pentium III bona fide IBM machine. It’s a trusty piece of iron that has served me well, and has a lot of life left in it. Although it isn’t a greased lightning server either, it’s more than up to the task of running the operation here.

But it only had a 4GB hard drive, which isn’t really enough space to store everything that I’d like to store.

So I went out to Future Shop today and bought a 160GB Western Digital hard drive. With rebate (the standard Future Shop “price is lower than you think” trick), the price was $169 before taxes. Or about a dollar a gigabyte. And it came with a free UltraATA controller card.

The irony is that this price makes it both cheaper than the generic “Cicero” brand 160GB drive, and cheaper than the 80GB Western Digital drive of the same series.

It installed in the old IBM machine easily, and RedHat Linux is chugging away at its installation right now.

I can’t actually conceive of a drive that’s 160GB — my first IBM machine had a 20MB drive, and I thought that was basically infinite.

I’m sure, however, that I’ll fill it up in short order.

The $169/160GB drive is on sale this week at Future Shop. Be prepared for the usual “would you like an extended warranty with that?” routine.

Although I’m on the record as being oppposed to the lights-o-rama that afflicts our neighbourhood every November, I’ve got to say that the recent flap over the “geese pecking down the Empire State Building” is completely overblown.

I suppose, if you squint your eyes, it does look like the animated geese in front of Province House are pecking down the upper reaches of that grand New York building. But suggestions that this somehow represents a slight by Prince Edward Island against our neighbours to the south are absurd.

Yes, the lights are ugly. But I can’t imagine that their designers intentionally included anti-New York imagery, especially in the post-9/11 climate.

How can we put this public relations debacle to rest?