What with the Aubergine Alert flickering, and the drums of war beating ever closer, you might expect that air travel through Boston would have the security sphincter ever more tightened this week than most. And you would be right.

Terminal E at Logan, the terminal through which all international arrivals and departures are handled, has been under construction for as long as anyone can remember. While the light at the end of the tunnel is nearer now than ever before — you can actually see evidence of new construction now, while previously it was shrouded behind drywall curtains — it’s still a chaotic place to travel through. Indeed having been through more airports than I can count in the last year, I’d have to say that Terminal E is about as bad as it gets.

So you start with a chaotic terminal, apply considerably increased paranoia, triple the number of security personnel while cutting in half the number of security gates and doubling the amount of going-over we’re all subjected to, add in a gaggle of excited students taking Lufthansa to Frankfurt for the February break, and the result is a melee.

As an added bonus, you have the Air Canada standard practice of telling passengers to be ready to board at, say 3:10 p.m. while not actually boarding the plane until 3:35 p.m.

There is no more a stark contrast from my experiences in Boston to the mood here in the Air Canada departure lounge in Halifax as I type this. While the Halifax Airport has also been under constant renovation for as long as anyone can remember, the worst is now over, and slow times like this (8:30 on a Saturday night), you could shoot a cannon through the place and not do any damage (although this action would no doubt be considered an egregious infraction of several federal laws). The flight to Charlottetown is the last one of the day, leaving at 9:40 p.m., and having landed here at 6:10 p.m., I get to experience this humming calm for almost four hours.

Which means that in addition to answering my backlog of email, and seeking to entertain or at least distract the readership, I also have had ample opportunity to enjoy the offerings of the oddly named “Brisket,” the new food concession in the departures areas (brisket: “a cut of meat from the breast or lower chest especially of beef”; in other words “no vegetarian options”).

If you set aside the scheduling quirk that leaves me here for a four hour wait (which is roughly enough time to be back and forth to Boston again), service from Air Canada on this trip has been less abysmal that usual. The planes still shake and rattle. There’s still no food to speak of. But the folks seem friendlier and less stressed out, and things seem to be flowing a little more smoothly. Maybe I’m just becoming used to the abyss.

Only 70 more minutes until my plane leaves…

Postscript at 8:51 p.m.: some sort of loud cult of 14 year old girls, some 40 of them, has descended on the departure lounge. Calm has deparated; tittering ensues.

Another postscript at 8:54 p.m.: as near as I can tell, this cultic gaggle is comprised of British youth en route to Deer Lake or Gander. And there is one young male in their midst. Which if I recall correctly from my own teenaged years, means this young chap is either in heaven or in hell, depending on his disposition.

Followup at 9:00 p.m.: they all appear to be going skiing or snowboarding.

Observation at 9:01 pm.: is it an consequence of our colonial past that people with a British accent, at least a British accent of a particular sort, sound far more intelligent than we could all ever hope to manage here in Canada, even if they’re only 14 and on their way to ski in Newfoundland?

Seeing as brother Johnny and I were in New England this week, we took the opportunity to drive south into Cambridge to attend the Dave Winer-sponsored “weblog event” at Harvard last night.

The gathering was primarily of people “in the blogosphere” — in other words people with weblogs, with an interest in weblogs, who circulate, to some extent in orbit around Dave and the software that his company, UserLand, creates for assisting people to create weblogs.

I took the effort to attend because I am a longtime reader of Dave’s weblog, Scripting.com, and a casual user of UserLand’s Frontier system (we used it to build an early e-commerce system for Cows). I was also curious, to be honest, to see what ‘webloggers’ look like.

Given the nature of the medium, the event itself was well-blogged: Donna Wentworth, Bob Frankston, Frank Field, Derek Slater; Dan Bricklin took lots of photos.

I quite enjoyed the evening: the people were interesting, the conversations novel. Dave Winer is a good showman, and a capable discussion wrangler: he managed to keep things rolling along for two hours, and when things got too tangential, or too repetitive, he instantly steered the boat in a new direction.

I made a comment about writing for Oliver more than for a amorphous audience of unknown netizens and in making the comment realized it was true (Oliver, hello, it’s me, your father, thinking of you here in the past). I also mentioned that, as far as I knew, I’d never actually been “linked to” in the big and important validating way that weblogs “build flow.” This was immediately rectified when Dave asked Donna, who was liveblogging the event, to link to me. Which she did (thanks!).

We took off after the session so as to be back at a reasonable hour in southern New Hampshire; many of those attending went off to eat spicy food afterwards.

Dave promises there will be other similar events as his time at Harvard continues; if you’re in the area, and are interested in weblogging, you can’t go wrong by attending.

There is a lot of snow where we are.

The first time my late grandmother Nettie Rukavina visited us on Prince Edward Island — I think it was in 1997 — we took her to North Rustico for a lobster supper.

At the entrance to Fisherman’s Wharf Lobster Suppers in North Rustico you select three or four entree options — lobsters of several sizes, scallops, steak and so on — and pay for your supper in advance, as most everything else is included in one price.

When Nettie saw that I was about to hand over $20.00 a person to eat supper, she was shocked: “$20.00 each for supper,” she exclaimed. And then she told us the story about how when she was a waitress at the Hoito in 1937 you could get a complete meal for 25 cents.

Once we got inside and seated, Nettie ate like a wolf, especially when it came to the desserts. If memory serves, she had a rum ball, a piece of pie, some squares and some ice cream. And perhaps a piece of black forest cake. There was no way, with $20.00 already spent and an “open bar,” so to speak, that she was going to leave food left uneaten.

There are many theories for why we North Americans are, as a group, so overweight. You hear talk of the transition from nomadic hunter-gather to sedentary suburbanite and how it’s changed our digestive system. You hear about the rice diet of our foreign cousins. Or the how the french drink so much wine.

But what seldom gets mentioned is the affect that the Great Depression of the 1930s had on our food consciousness.

Nettie wasn’t packing away the desserts at the Lobster Supper because she was hungry; she was eating because there was food on the table, and when there’s food on the table, you don’t walk away. Like squirrels in the fall, you gorge in times of plenty so that, in theory, you’ll be carried through times of scarcity.

This doesn’t play out in nutritional reality, I don’t think. But some lessons are very hard to unlearn. And those same lessons do pretty well at leaping through the generation gaps too.

This morning, having half a day to kill while waiting for brother Johnny to arrive and having lots of work to do, I ordered breakfast in at the hotel. As is the case at most hotels anywhere, the breakfast was horribly over-priced — $15 for some granola, a fresh fruit plate, a couple of sticky buns, and a glass of apple juice.

I’ve been eating very conservatively for the past month, battling a gastric ulcer in a toe to toe death match every day. So I knew enough to know that eating a sticky bun would probably be a Bad Thing on several fronts. Besides which, after fruit and granola and juice, I wasn’t actually hungry.

Nonetheless, it took considerable effort to leave the five dollar sticky buns on the plate. This wasn’t about sugar craving, or a need for carbohydrates. It was about feeling bad about food “going to waste.”

The irony in this is that as part a family that has, due in no small part to the sacrifices of my grandmother, achieved the sort of wealth that allows one to order over-priced sticky buns in the first place, could there be any greater statement that “the depression is over” than simply walking away?

Which is what I did.

I’m sending that sticky bun up to heaven, Nettie. Enjoy it.

The bagel business is crowded, so to stand out you need to either make better bagels, or you need a gimic. Finagle a Bagle has both. When you order a bagel, it’s placed on a conveyor belt that carries it towards a table saw blade spinning at high speed where it is cut in half and then hurtled towards the opposite end of the room where it’s toasted, buttered and dressed. It’s the bagel equivalent of the Krispy Kreme donut system. And the bagels are pretty good too.

By quirk of fate, brother Johnny is flying from Vancouver to Boston today on Alaska Airlines. While I’ll have to wait until Johnny lands to see what the service was like, there are several neat things about Alaska Airlines.

First is that in addition to looking up flight status on their website, you can also see the actual position of the plane. This is not only nifty, but also helps to prevent that Air Canada trick of “oh, we just learned the incoming flight will be delayed” when the plane actually hasn’t left the originating city yet. Here’s Johnny’s plane at 37,000 feet over Montana this afternoon:

Second is that you can print your own boarding pass from their website, up to 24 hours in advance of your flight. Of course you need a printer, which is something Johnny lacks, so he had to revert to old-style check-in.

More news when Johnny arrives at Logan.

Proof that the web is stickier than we think: this page on CBC.ca is almost 8 years old. For eight years, it’s contained the misinformation that I am “Peter Rukavina, owner of Island Media.” I have no idea where they got that. This was one of the first pages on CBC’s website to include RealAudio content.

I’ve always known that airplanes are noisy places. No more so, perhaps, than the trusty Dash 8’s that ferry we eastern Canadians around. And I’d read about how it’s the noise of flying that’s one of the bigger contributors to the stress of flying.

But I didn’t realize how true this was until we flew to Thailand a year ago this week. By chance, I bought a pair of disposable earplugs at the airport gift shop at Chicago O’Hare. I used them, on and off, for the seemingly endless flight to Tokyo, and then had them in for the entire flight from Tokyo to Bangkok, during which I was exhausted to a degree I’d never experienced before.

They helped. A lot. And if you’re flying somewhere, I heartily recommend that you invest a couple of dollars in a pair; you can get them at Shopper’s Drug Mart if you can’t find them elsewhere.

For the flight to Boston today, I moved things up a notch, and invested in a pair of Shure “in ear” earphones. These are earphones that you literally “stick in your ear,” and they come with a variety of sizes of foamy sleeves to allow you to find the size right for your ears.

Wow!

The flight from Halifax to Boston was unlike any flight I’d ever experienced. The earphones cut out, I’d hazard a guess, about 85% of the annoying sound in the airplane, and that’s even before you press “play” on whatever you’ve got them plugged into.

Unlike “noise cancelling” headphones, which I’d experimented with before, these earphones prevent sound from reaching your ears by simply blocking the way. Noise cancelling headphones, which try to achieve the same effect by generating a sound wave “opposite” to the ambient noise around you, are, in my experience, bulkier and more cumbersome.

The earphones I bought — they’re Shure’s e2c model — are not cheap. But they come highly recommended. You can order them in Canada from SFM Marketing in Montreal. I ordered a pair on Thursday afternoon and they were in my hands on Friday morning.

All of the propoganda for the Confederation Bridge talks about how it has a “unique S-shaped design.” This design, it is said, helps to prevent drivers from falling asleep. I’ve never heard anyone question this logic, but doesn’t it seem somewhat absurd? If straight roads cause fatigue, then why don’t we build our highways shaped like S’s too?

In this same vein, I find the following fact (from this story) about the Big Dig seems a little bit too much like “a marketing answer to a design question:”

Motorists might also notice the accent tiles are terra cotta, rather than blue, signifying that the tunnel goes underground, rather than underwater.

I can just imagine some future tunnel accident — crazy masses of people rushing around, worrying about drowning in an impending onrush of Boston Harbor water. “But wait,” cries one plucky fellow, “the tiles are terra cotta, signifying that the tunnel goes underground, rather than underwater.” The panic subsides, order returns, and terra cotta tiles save the day.

I propose that we mark the next 10 years as a “bullshit free decade” — no S-shaped bridges or terra cotta tiles, just unvarnished truth. I am so naive.

Enter KING HENRY, EXETER, BEDFORD, GLOUCESTER, and Soldiers, with scaling ladders.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our English dead! In peace there ‘s nothing so becomes a man As modest stillness and humility; But when the blast of war blows in our ears, Then imitate the action of the tiger: Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood.

And so off I go into the dead of the New England winter to rendezvous with brother Johnny and make assault upon the house of Yankee.

To Boston today, Jaffrey Center tomorrow, Dublin on Monday. We’ll be at Yankee until Friday, with a brief sojourn into Harvard for DaveNet Live on Tuesday. It’s 18 degrees F in Boston this morning, and 10 degrees F in Dublin. So we’re not going for the weather.

More reports from the road as the week progresses.