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.

I stumbled across this post from 2002 about soju tents this morning. I realized that bootleggers in Charlottetown are akin to soju tents in Pusan: both are a socially necessary “third space.”

I just balance the company cheque book for the months August 2003 until today. Everything balance to the penny. Some days you get lucky.

It is income tax season, and thus I am in heavy procrastination mode, avoiding the gathering of relevant papers, forms, etc.

Which gives rise to the new Good Music Recently Heard feature here. Look over on the right. Down there under Discussion since your Last Visit. You’ll see a new section titled, appropriately enough, Good Music Recently Heard.

What you’ll find there is a simply list of artists and tracks that have passed through my iTunes that caught my ear and prompted me to say to myself “more people should hear this.”

Click on the track and you’ll jump to a Google search for the track name and artist.

There’s an RSS feed to go with this, which shows the same information, but with a couple more links to other web searches.

Enjoy.

Three Minutes and Six Seconds in Terminal C [2.9 MB MP3]. Licensed under a Creative Commons License. One in a series.

While we’re talking about exposed body parts here, witness the following comments, part of a speech by FCC Chair Michael Powell to the National Association of Broadcasters:

It is not Janet’s nudity that is decried. It is the fact that “by god it was the Superbowl!” the largest prime television event of the year. An event for friends and family. People do not want to feel that they can be struck by lightning, or hit by a truck at any moment. Similarly, they do not like the sense they have no safe expectation of what they might see or hear during a given program—precisely the formula some are using to grab headlines.

In that one well-worded paragraph, Mr. Powell has summarized the reason for the general banality of North American popular culture.

The Hollywood Reporter sets out an even more bizarre tableau:

Democratic FCC commissioner Michael Copps has been the leading champion on the indecency front for years. If the Bono decision was intended to clarify the indecency regulations, it didn’t help. While the commission’s top mass media advisors at first told conventioneers that the “fuck” ruling was radioactive, they backed off when asked for specifics.

“They shouldn’t be saying the F-word. They should be taking precautions. If it’s a slip-up, I’m not sure that means it isn’t a violation,” said Catherine Bohigian, legal adviser to Commissioner Kevin Martin. “Do you really need to say the F-word before 10 o’ clock?”

But when asked if airing “Schindler’s List,” “Saving Private Ryan,” an interview with mobster John Gotti or the airing of a French documentary that followed New York City firefighters during 9/11, where the word “fuck” was used extensively, would merit a fine, they wavered.

“The answer is, we don’t know. These are case specific,” said Jon Cody, a legal adviser to Powell. “I just think in this climate you need to make some decisions.”

It’s this kind of talk that wants me to shout “fuck” from the rooftops, and to rename my company “Reinvented Fuck Inc.”

My familiars will tell you that I’m not prone to swearing at the drop of a hat — to the point that when I do, people take notice. But I can’t believe that people would waste energy and resources on debating the merits of certain words appearing, or not appearing, on the airwaves. Maybe this is important in some Venutian bizarro futureworld when we have nothing else to worry about. Actually, probably not even then.

I’m all for preventing for keeping people from killing each other, for making the air and water clean, and for keeping the buses running on time. Otherwise, I’d rather be free to say whatever I want, whenever I want, and to use my own intelligent discretion to figure out what, when, where.

At the risk of offending my gentle-minded readers, I will relate an observation that I just had here at the [newly WiFi-equipped] Cedar’s Restaurant: it’s very difficult to eat a chicken shawarma without, at some point in the exercise, appearing to be holding a penis in your hand (either your own, or anothers’, as your preferences dictate).

They do make an amazing chicken shawarma here, by the way, which in almost every other way is totally un-penis-like.

Now please return to your regular pious lives.

Perhaps you have been curious about the cost of the modern looking lobby chairs at the Atlantic Technology Centre? These are Turnstone Guest Sweeper chairs. My contact at Steelcase tells me they list for $352, but are available in bulk for around $199 each.

You would be a rare North American to have not seen at least one interview with Bob Woodward this week, out promoting his book Plan of Attack about how the decision to invade Iraq was made.

I’ve seen full interviews by Charlie Rose and Peter Mansbridge, and snippets of more than half a dozen others.

My initial feeling, and the apparent conventional wisdom, was that Woodward’s book would be bad for Bush because it makes him look like a religious zealot and a bad leader who went to war on a conviction-based whim.

You would think that Americans would see this as a “smoking gun.”

But, after some reflection, I don’t think they will. And I’ve come to think that Bush, or at least Bush’s minders, have scored a brilliant public relations coup, with Woodward as the star.

Here’s why.

Woodward has the best credentials in North America as a reporter; I think most people consider him as unimpeachable as Walter Cronkite.

While much of what Woodward reveals in his book makes it look, to the informed eye, like Bush is an idiot, none of this will come as a real revelation to his critics: they already knew he was an idiot, and this only confirms what they thought.

The power in Woodward’s book is what it doesn’t reveal about the war plan. While Woodward details the personal intrigue, the lack of consultation, how Powell was left out, or at least ignored, and so on, the broad strokes of what he reports are in sync with what the Administration paints.

In other words, Bush gave uncommon access to the toughest reporter in Washington, and the result was some tough reporting about process.

It’s as if a bank robber hired Superman to review the process that led up to robbing the bank; Superman reports that things were chaotic. Full stop.

This is good for Bush because, in the end, it comes off looking like a vindication, not a condemnation. And even Woodward’s critique of the process distracts from the war itself, which is good for Bush (the chat shows are filling with debates over when Bush briefed Bandar; nobody’s talking dead bodies these days).

Of course this is good for Woodward too: on one hand he looks like a tough reporter, dragging Bush through the mud; on the other hand, he looks like a tough reporter who showed that the “smoking gun” amounted to some procedural jealousy.