It’s amazing the things you can learn in the washrooms of the offices of The Old Farmer’s Almanac. For example, did you know that Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, both Presidents of the United States, died on the same day in 1826? And, what’s more, that this day was July 4, 1826, 50 years to the day after the founding of the country. Amazing.

This is my travelling shirt. It was christened such when we went to Thailand in the spring of 2002. Because we three were travelling very light — one bag for the family, with Oliver’s diapers taking up a disproportionate amount of room — I took two only shirts. One just didn’t work at all. The other, the one here, worked like a charm.

Looking at it here, I can see it’s a bit rough around the edges. It’s also sized to 40-pounds-heavier Pete, so it looks more like it’s hanging off me than fitting me when I’m wearing it.

For travelling purposes it has several excellent qualities:

The two button-up breast pockets are exactly the right size for a passport. Or three. Or a small notebook. Or a hotel key. Or even my wallet. The buttons keep things from falling out.

The arms are the perfect length. If you’ve ever spent any time in hot, sweaty, equatorial heat, you know that a short-sleeved shirt with arms that are a titch too long is really uncomfortable because the ends of the sleeves get caught on your stickey elbows when you’re moving around. It can start to feel like a straitjacket (that was the problem with the other shirt I took to Thailand).

It’s 100% cotton. There is great debate in the traveller set (a set we’re only on the remotest periphery of) about natural fibres vs. hyper-modern chemical blends. I’ve tried both. I like cotton.

The fabric is heavy enough to take a beating. Sending laundry out to be done by the hotel often means subjecting it to the kind of abuse it would never get in a home washer. This shirt has held up well — faded a little, but no signs of decay.

The colour and style are good for most anything. It’s not too “touristy” to prevent formal use in a pinch (not proper formal use, but I could wear it to the opera in Prague and not feel too out of place, although Catherine might find me so). It’s not too formal to wear to the beach.

It’s long. When you’re as tall as I am — not a giant, but a healthy 6 foot, one and a quarter inches — having a long shirt — one that doesn’t come untucked every time you sit down — is important. This shirt is about 3 inches longer than the average, and that’s nice.

It’s got a button-down collar. Catherine, a seamstress in another life, tells me button-down collars are a relic of tie-wearing. She’ll also tell you that I won’t wear anything else, as there’s nothing worse, in my mind, than a fly-away, non-button-down collar.

I bought the shirt, probably for about $12, at Filene’s Basement in downtown Boston. I’ve worn it to Thailand, to Spain, across North America and back. And, probably too much, around Charlottetown. And I’ve got it on today, ready to wear to Boston, passport in the front pocket.

After spending last week in the wilds of Rimouski, I’m heading south to Boston, then north to Dublin tomorrow for a short visit with my colleagues at Yankee Publishing. Back Sunday morning, as my entire family converges from across the country to the Island for a week of Maximum Fun. There will be more Rukavinas on Prince Edward Island at one time next week, I dare say, than ever before in history. Watch out.

Some delightful salacious blowback from Cynthia. Alas I’m not a dotcom, I’m a dotnet. Hardly as now, I realize. But I’ve always liked being then more than now anyway.

Ashley MacIsaac writes in to my brother Johnny’s guest book, in response to a post from December 2000:

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend Jodi said to me, “Hey Johnny, do you want to go see Ashley MacIsaac at the Commodore?”  I said, “I guess so” and she said, “Good, because I already bought the tickets”.  

The element of choice being removed, I started to get excited about going to the show.  We had seen Ashley a few weeks before performing with the Chieftains and he had stolen the show.  But to be honest, I was most excited about going to the Commodore Ballroom.  Basically, I would go and watch my own ass perform at the Commodore.  Its that kind of place.  

As fate would have it, Ashley MacIsaac turned out to be a far better performer than my ass and a good time was had by all.  In fact, Ashley MacIsaac turned out to be brilliant.  Poor old Ashley seems to have fallen on hard times of late.  He’s had highly publicized drug problems and earned a reputation as a difficult badboy, having walked out in the middle of several concerts and, apparently, urinating on an audience at some point.  Despite his early success, apparently MacIsaac is broke and his most recent album has sold only 20000 copies, just slightly more than Glass Tiger’s latest effort.  Furthermore, MacIsaac has gained about fifty pounds in the past few years and to put things charitably, he looks like Hell.  This made the whole experience of seeing him something like watching David Wells pitch a perfect game.  For about two and a half hours, he played the fiddle and danced and stomped around as though possessed by the devil, and he was fantastic!  Accompanied by a piano player and guitarist, he played a nice repertoire a traditional Cape Breton fiddle tunes and even a medley of Christmas songs that reminded me of the Christmas album by Don Messer and his Islanders that my Dad still plays every year.  Except that it was like Don Messer and his Islanders were on acid.  We stood about a foot from the stage and jigged like wee leprechauns for the whole show and generally had a grand old time.  It was a sublime experience to witness that level of dizzying technical skill and profound artistic sensitivity totally unaccompanied by pretension or arrogance.  It made us totally forget that, given our proximity to the stage, there was a real risk of beeing peed on.  I went from being a semi-curious observer of MacIsaac’s to a real fan of someone who takes obvious joy in playing music that is culturally and historically important to our country, and is lots of fun to boot.

Small world. Weird world.

I remember the night, and the feeling, more than almost any night of my life. Sometimes I forget all about it for a month or two, or maybe even a couple of years, and then suddenly I’ll be waiting for a traffic light, or standing over the sink, or putting on my shoes, and it will all flood back.

I was 12, I think. Maybe 13. The event was an experiment by our leaders at the Hamilton YMCA — all-male at the time — to hold a dance, with girls imported from the Burlington YMCA, which was a “Family Y” and thus co-ed. Amazingly, the girls came.

Most of us, boys and girls both, had never been to a dance before. We weren’t really sure what to do. And we were shy.

We were all gathered in the large first floor space in the Y known as the “Youth Department.” The ping-pong tables and the crokinole boards were cleared away to the side for the evening. The services of a local DJ were secured. The lights were lowered a bit. There were cheesies. And orange pop.

I don’t remember much about the music. I’m pretty certain Three Times a Lady was played. Probably Saturday Night by the Bay City Rollers. Probably Stairway to Heaven at the end, as that was the custom of the day. Maybe Even in the Quietest Moments by Supertramp. After that, my memory has faded too much.

If we were shy as a group, I was extra-especially shy. Girls and dancing and low lights all conspired my make me nervous. The only salvation was that it wasn’t school, so I didn’t have to see anyone in the morning, or maybe even ever again.

Towards the end of the night, after lots of standing in the corner, eating cheesies, talking to my friends, and generally trying to avoid making an ass of myself, out of the blue one of the Burlington girls came over and asked me to dance. Inexplicable.

In my minds eye, over 25 years, I’ve built this brave girl up into a vision of beauty, bravery, intelligence, moxy. She was probably just a girl from Burlington like I was a boy from Carlisle.

But it was a slow dance, and, strangely, that meant dancing in a clutch that was more like a really warm hug than a polite foxtrot.

I remember her fuzzy white sweater the most. I can evoke the feeling of it on my face — she was, predictably, taller than me, given our age — simply by closing my eyes. The whole thing was, well, very warm — the kind of thing that makes you happy to be alive. And wanting more of whatever that was.

It was over in 3, maybe 4 minutes. I think I said thank you. Or something like that. I don’t think I had another dance that night. It didn’t matter.

Just to prove that I’m an equal opportunity malcontent, I will relate the story of the past 5 hours.

There I was, happily working away on my iMac. I needed to print a document from AppleWorks out as a PDF — a usually-very-simple prospect of File, Print, Save as PDF. Except that AppleWorks crashed when doing so in some great and amazing way that ground everything else on my Mac to a halt.

So much so that I actually had to power it off and power it back on again. And when the lights came back on, woe betide, my mouse wasn’t working. I tried all the usual voodoo: unplug and replug, plug into a different port, try a different mouse, reboot, etc. Nothing doing.

So I called the friendly folks at Apple.

It used to be, in the good old days, that, warranty or not, Apple would help you solve your problem on the phone. No longer. Now, unless you have purchased an extended warranty (for $299!), you have to pay them $69 to solve “an issue.” Reasoning that I would expend more than $69 of my own sweat by thrashing around for an answer myself, I took out my credit card and paid my dues.

And then I spent 2 hours on the phone with various Apple people, spending most of the time waiting for various rebootings to reboot, and decanting various mystical key combinations during said reboots in a very Twister sort of way (things like Control+Option+O+F).

The Apple experts eventually concluded that my problem was related to “third-party software conflicts” and said my only solution was to reinstall the operating system. They promised this wouldn’t screw anything up, and would take about 20 minutes.

That was only partially true.

The installation of the operating system took about 20 minutes. And now I’ve spent the last hour loading all the various security and application updates down through Software Update to get things back to where they were before.

The whole experience has been almost (but not quite) as frustrating as a Windows Debacle. Proof that maybe technology has become just too darned complicated for us to keep it floating all the time.

Some days I pine for the simplicity of doing a brake job on a 1978 Ford F-100 pickup truck, where everything is obvious, and all frustrations can be solved with a hammer.

This story from CBC North concerns the problem of a pile of 15 musk-ox hides in Cambridge Bay, Nunavut that are rotting away. The story says the “pelts are purchased annual by a Prince Edward Island company that uses them to make high-end winter clothes.” What is this company?

The following letter arrived in our mail this morning from Aviva Insurance Company of Canada, which insures our house:

Recent events have demonstrated that terrorism and the threat of terrorism, not unlike war, have become uninsurable events. Therefore, we are now excluding coverage resulting from acts of terrorism. Fire following a terrorist act will continue to be covered.

The attached endorsement defines terrorism as:

…an idealogically motivated unlawful act or acts, including but not limited to the use of violence or force or threat of violence or force committed by or on behalf of any group(s), organization(s) or government(s) for the purpose of influencing any government and/or instilling fear in the public or a section of the public.

Oddly, it later goes on to explain that we are no longer insured for:

…any activitiy or decision of a government agency or other entity to prevent, respond or terminate Terrorism.

So if someone tries to blow up our house, and the government tries to stop them, and, say, breaks down our door in the process, we’re on the hook for a replacement door, I guess.

From the New York Times, via my mother: An Architect’s World Turned Upside Down [PDF].