First we had the war in Iraq, then the ever-nearer spectre of SARS, and now Philip Brown is advocating for voodoo crows. We live in fragile times.

Island Tel has a brand has finally given way completely to Aliant.

CBC Television is playing classic movies on Monday afternoons. Today was The Man in the White Suit (one of my all-time favourite movies). Next week is Charade, on April 14 it’s Ruggles of Red Gap and on April 21 it’s Easter Parade. The shows start at 1:00 in the afternoon and run for two hours. Set your PVRs now.

Although it’s hard to get really accurate information, the logs suggest that some two or three hundred people stop by here every day. Sometimes you are return visitors, sometimes you are looking for information on Tim Horton’s coffee secrets.

As I’ve spent much of the past week developing online reader survey systems for a client, I’ve become curious about you the readership. Some of you I know because I’m related to you, others are friends from Charlottetown and beyond. Still others I “know” only through what you’ve written here.

A year ago, I had a sort of “reader survey poll” here, but the results, in their anonymous numericalness, were unsatisfying.

So a humble request, dear readers: would you mind taking a minute to tell me some brief snippet about yourselves? Just click on the DISCUSS link at the bottom of this note, scroll down to the bottom of the page, and type me a few words. Nothing complex or involved required — just give me an idea of who and where you are.

Here’s the fundamental problem with the war stance of both George Kells and Leo Broderick: each is of the opinion that the world view of the other is invalid, and each, if they had their way, wishes for a world (perhaps even believes in a world) where everyone believes as they do.

In other words, both Broderick and Kells are members of systems with “conquer” rather than “cooperate” as their central driving force, and neither system can, over the long term, reasonably accommodate a world in which the other exists.

Until they both recognize this, and reconfigure their systems to include and embrace a plurality of world views, the inevitable consequence is the kind of violence — be it verbal or physical — that both, at their core, seek to eradicate.

Mostly Flash is evil. Or so I thought. Perhaps it’s just that in the hands of evil people (or, more generously, people who are not creative, which is sort of like being evil, isn’t it?). Perhaps, as this site shows, Flash, in the hands of a creative soul, isn’t so bad after all. [thanks to Ben Hammersley for the pointer]

A couple of days ago, I changed the <TITLE> tags for all pages on this site to have “Reinvented” at the end rather than the beginning. Today I was following some of the Google links (see over on the right under “Recent Google”), and found that Google had already re-indexed most of the pages here using that new format.

Google says “each time we update our database of web page [sic] (about once a month), our index shifts: we find new sites, we lose some sites, and site rankings change.” It appears that in my case — and perhaps in the case of all “weblog”-like sites where content changes frequently — Google comes on through much more often.

In other Google news, this site is now the first search result for a search for Mishal Husain. Will wonders never cease? Of course we’re also the first search result for “IBM”+”old MS-DOS Database”.

Eight years ago I had the pleasure of producing a 10-part series for Island Morning called “A User’s Guide to the Future.” Every week we covered some aspect of “new technology” — the Internet, privacy, banking and so on.

Across the desk from me, running the show for every episode, was Island Morning anchor Wayne Collins.

Wayne announced his retirement today.

When you’re in the guest seat on radio, there’s nothing like having someone naturally curious doing the interviewing, and that’s what Wayne is. I could always walk into the studio knowing that Wayne would be interested in what I was going to be talking about, simply because he is a guy who’s interested in the world around him and how it works.

I’m going to miss Wayne in that chair.

Weblog journalism. Here’s “the pitch:”

I’m Christopher Allbritton, former AP and New York Daily News reporter. This summer I went stumbling around Iraqi Kurdistan, the northern part of Iraq outside Saddam’s direct control, looking for stories. (Some might call it “looking for trouble.”) Well, now I want to go back in time for the war. So I’m asking your help in supporting independent journalism! Send me back to Iraq to report on what’s happening.

He’s on his way.

Another item from the American war front from my trusty correspondent Maggie: American students abroad told to pretend to be Canadians.