I went along to the big CBC “bootlegger forum” this evening at the Basilica Rec Centre. Taking a page from the Wesley Clark for President playbook, the forum was held in the smallest room possible, and therefor bristled with packed excitment.

To be honest, I have no opinion on the issue: I don’t live next to a bootlegger, and so I’m not in the “bothered” constituency; I don’t give a tinker’s damn about articles in the National Post making fun of Charlottetown, so I’m not in the “ashamed” camp; I’m not a customer, so I wasn’t one of the vocal majority at the meeting; and I’m not a big “the law is the law” believer, so I’m not in the Bruce Garrity-led “enforcement” camp.

But here’s what I do know, mostly as a result of tonight’s meeting: this is a class issue, and until it’s framed as such, the various protagonists will neither understand the positions of the other, nor be able to come to a solution that works for all.

I’ve just finished reading The Other Half of Half-Safe, the sequel to Half-Safe: Across the Atlantic by Jeep. While I’ll review the second book soon, this passage from author Ben Carlin, in the book’s epilogue, bears immediate posting:

Travel is a trap that most men insist on entering if they can. As a boy I had felt that Hungarian soil must differ significantly from Australian. Instead of satisfying curiousity, reading merely stimulates it. One goes abroad to peek around the corner; mainly he sees more corners. He looks round another — to see another — and another to realize evemtually that he has done little but chase his own tail.

A paragraph later, he continues:

Always people have interested me more than places. From a photograph one can grasp the size and beauty of the Grand Canyon but he cannot savour a Spaniard. Even in the search for people there is tail-chasing. It was in a Persian teahouse that I realized that men are basically the same the world over: the funny man, the serious man, the weak man, the strong man…

A question for Robert: when you were working for large multinational corporations, did you have any inkling, deep within your heart of hearts, that the corporate model you were a part of might be broken, or at the very least harmful to you and the planet?

My reaction to seeing The Corporation was “tell me something I don’t know” while yours appears to have been rather more profound. I’m trying to figure out why this is.

I was struck by an odd thought while putting on my shoes to come home this afternoon: it may very well be that watching television is actually not very satisfying.

I can count on one hand the number of television shows I’ve watched where, at the end, I’ve felt a better person, or that I’ve learned something. Or, indeed, that anything has actually happened at all inside my head.

And yet, as ever, I will absolutely, positively watch any episode of Seinfeld or The Simpsons that presents itself to me as though if to not watch would be to turn down some special, unique, never-to-be-repeated opportunity.

It has been over a year since I was a regular, serious consumer of fast food. It no longer has any appeal to me, and I’m amazed that it ever did. Forced aversion by gallbladder meltdown is what let me break free.

I’m wondering if some calamity befell me that made watching televsion intensely painful, perhaps after two or three months I would have the same reaction to it as to fast food?

I stuck my card in the ATM machine today at the National Bank. “Enter your PIN number, and press ENTER,” it said on the screen.

There is no ENTER key, however.

Not only is there no ENTER key on the keypad (its label is “OK”), but the graphic on the screen that illustrates the process has a depiction of the keypad. And that graphic is also missing an ENTER key.

The Advice of the Day at Almanac.com is:

“Cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education.” —Mark Twain

Which reminded me of this: when I was working in the composing room of the Peterborough Examiner, I was assigned the weekly task of pasting up the ad for the Farm Boy produce market. The Farm Boy ad consisted of a 4-inch wide column the entire length of a newspaper page that listed off the prices of whatever fruits or vegetables were on special that week, along with a tiny photo of each.

On the shelf above one of my coworker’s stations was a collection of various pictures of various fruits and vegetables, and from that collection I drew whatever I needed to compose the ad.

Except I could never find a picture of brussels sprouts.

So every time that brussels sprouts were on special, I needed to find a picture of a cabbage, mount it on the large-format camera, set the camera to reduce to about 15% of the original size, and then shoot four or five copies. I then arranged the little cabbages together to form a rather realistic looking set of brussels sprouts.

I’ve spent the later part of this afternoon upgrading this server from RedHat 9 to RedHat Enterprise Linux. Expect possible breakage until the upgrade bumps are ironed out. Update: all systems appear to be operating well.

In a controversial drive to centralize operations of Trent University at its suburban campus, the administration closed Peter Robinson College and sold its buildings, including historic Sadleir House, one of the original university buildings.

Now Trent students have bought the building back. Amazing.

I took a lot of my meals at Peter Robinson’s dining hall during my one year at Trent, once I figured out that the food was better and the people more interesting. The following summer I had decided to switch colleges to Peter Robinson; abandoning the university entirely meant I never followed through, but my heart was and always has been there.

Sometime in the late 1980s — it was probably 1987 — I traveled cross-country from Peterborough to Vancouver in my little Datsun 510 with my friend Joanna.

Joanna and I had that kind of friendship bred from having “connective tissue friends” between us. In other words, a lot of my friends knew Joanna. And a lot of her friends knew me.

Which is not to say we were strangers: when I showed up at Trent, she was managing Trent Radio and I thought her unbelievably cool and aloof (or rather “caloof,” for they were inextricably linked qualities). I used to write for her zine. And I was her sister’s roommate for a time.

Joanna was best friends with my girlfriend of the day, and somehow it came to be that we both needed to go to Vancouver. I think we both needed to escape from complicated affairs of the heart.

In the case of Joanna, this involved an intertwingling with Louis Fagan.

I met Louis the day he arrived in Peterborough. He showed up in a huge American car with Northwest Territories license plates. He was cooler than hot shit.

I never really became friend with Louis, although because our girlfriends were best friends, we inevitably orbitted each other to some degree. I always found him quiet and imposing, although as I got to know him, some of the veneer rubbed off, which was both good and bad.

Before Joanna and I set off for the west, Louis made her a mix tape. It had a lot of Penguin Cafe Orchestra on it. And many other songs of the same ilk. As it was the only tape we had in the car, we listened to it over and over and over, up through the Sault, down into Minessota, and across the upper mid-west to Washington before punching back up into Canada.

The songs on the tape became welded to our DNA.

Joanna and I traveled remarkably well together, and I only have fond memories of the trip.

I headed back to Peterborough (in a marathon 4-day dash) soon after arrival on the coast; Joanna stayed much longer, then came back, then settled in Vancouver for good, where she remains.

Louis formed a rock band, called Born Again Pagans, that played to some critical acclaim in and around the Peterborough-Toronto musical axis. One of my later girlfriends used to sing with them. Eventually Louis migrated west himself. And in 1997 he died from an overdose.

I hadn’t thought of Louis for a long time. Today, though, I stumbled across this Born Again Pagans MP3 on Foog’s website. It brought back a lot of memories, and suddenly I was standing on the balcony at Peter Robinson College in 1986 as Louis walked into the room for the first time.

Rest in peace.

Here’s a paragraph from an email I received from CIRA this evening:

You are requested to confirm the Registrant merger of Reinvented Inc. with Reinvented Inc..

The email is valid — I’m consolidating several CIRA registrants with the same name into one. Webnames.ca has been quite helpful in this regard: so far they’re batting almost 1000 in customer service.