Here’s today’s concise quote from the Island Peace Movement^TM. Jane Dunphy, commenting on Colin Powell’s speech to the Security Council, is quoted by CBC Prince Edward Island as saying:

“What I saw of the dialogue, I really couldn’t understand. As far as the pictures were concerned, there was a whole lot of interpretation there… and it was straight interpretation.”

Can someone explain to me what this actually means?

Here, as an antidote, is a well worded commentary in the Times of London.

Some families pray to God. In our family, we prayed to Mongo Santamaria.

When you grow up in a religiously and politically agnostic household like we did, you take your icons where you can get them. And the biggest of ours was Santamaria. Every Christmas morning my father would wake up before any of us, go to the living room, and put the 1965 Columbia album El Pussy Cat on the turntable, crank up the volume to “full blast” and the house would rock with the latin rhythms of the title track, a song the AMG calls “delightfully absurd”. I can think of no better way to start Christmas Day, and this is a tradition we’ll keep alive for generations.

Mongo Santamaria died Saturday at age 85 of a stroke. Rolling Stone says he was considered”one of the most influential percussionists of his generation.” PopMatters calls him “Cuba’s conguero extraordinaire.” On Christmas mornings we didn’t know any of that, of course; we just knew that our eccentric father with broad musical tastes was up to his hijinks again. And we revelled in it.

Mongo Santamaria will be missed.

More highlights from the search keywords that bring people to this website:

• information on clay
• anti war hippies
• how to steal cable
• kids with bad tempers have no friends
• sex with dogs

On our www.gov.pe.ca website, we have a system in place that reports on keywords searches that produce no results: we take this information, and, where it makes sense, use it to supplement the content on the site.

If I was to do the same thing here, I’d have an interesting task ahead of me.

The New York Times reports that the name “Yugoslavia” has been “consigned… to the history books.” The new name for what was left of the country is to be called “Serbia and Montenegro.”

Here is Ian Williams’ list of thing “I think I’m looking for… out of a town:”

• you can walk everywhere, including to the mall
• 2 separate independent record stores with a rivalry
• three coffee shops, all equipped with wifi internet, each different according to mood
• at least two arthouse movie theaters
• tons of gays and lesbians who are allowed to hold hands
• a fantastic underpriced thrift store
• a place to dance, 3 places to see bands
• an all-night diner with fresh donuts
• a garden shop
• a hardware store manned by a Guy Who Knows Everything
• at least one business owned by one family since 1799

If you can call Froggie’s a “a fantastic underpriced thrift store” (and I think that’s a stretch), then Charlottetown probably qualifies for that, for the garden shop (we have many), and for the hardware store (many of those too). We fail to meet the other criteria.

By the way, if you have some spare cash, and are looking for a worthy place to spend it, I can think of no better investment than The Pink House, the film that Williams wrote and co-directed that’s currently in post-production and in need of cash. You can read about the cash needs here. If you’re kicking yourself for not having given $1000 to your roommate’s friend’s cousin Quentin Tarantino 10 years ago, now’s your chance to redeem yourself.

Dave Winer says it better than I ever could:

The Shuttle astronauts were so lucky! They had amazing lives. They went to space. They were scientists so they knew it was risky. And they were lucky because they died quickly without much time for pain and long goodbyes. Yes it’s sad they died. Yes. But it’s also great that they lived.

In the past month I have been to Wal-Mart here in Charlottetown three times. This is almost more times than I have been to Wal-Mart, ever. And after a decade of deep “Wal-Mart is evil” feeling, I’ve come around. I understand Wal-Mart and, while I can’t say I like it, I’ve become a contented Wal-Mart customer, and I’ll be back.

Here is what Wal-Mart understands that others do not: shopping in this century is like going to the gas station. We go, we fill up, we leave. We don’t need an “event.” We don’t need coupons or sales or loyalty programs. We don’t want to dress up. We don’t want to make a night of it. Shopping is refueling. That’s it.

Much of the rest of the retail world still treats shopping as some sort of entertainment activity, as if we consumers take great pride in hitching up the wagon, getting dressed up, and making a day of it in the city. That’s simply not the way things work anymore, and Wal-Mart understands that.

In this way, Wal-Mart is in the same class as airlines like JetBlue, JetsGo and Southwest, airlines that understand that we now treat flying more like taking the bus than taking an ocean liner. Old-line airlines like Air Canada and American seem to still feel that air travel needs to “have a production made out of it.” And what’s really sad is that even as they think this, they’ve pared back their service to the point where the new independents actually offer more service.

Compare Wal-Mart to an old-line retailer like Zellers. Wal-Mart offers excellent selection, good service, clean, well-lit stores, and quick checkout. Zellers, despite years of trying, is still held back by less selection, non-existent service, stores with products tumbling into the aisles, and a checkout that seems to take at least 15 minutes no matter the time of day. Imagine if you had to wait 15 minutes to pay for gas.

Many complain that Wal-Mart has ripped the hell out of downtowns across North America. And they are right. But perhaps if the small, local retailers that tumbled in Wal-Mart’s wake had seen this new retail reality, and reacted to it, they wouldn’t had disappeared as they did. It’s not pleasant, but it’s true.

In the early 1960s, my parents moved to Rochester, New York, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario. I was born there in 1966. I stumbled across Rochester: A City of Quality in the Prelinger Archives this evening — watch it, and get an introduction to the fertile ground that spawned me. To quote from the notes in the archive:

Beyond this, all Rochester seems to offer is “stable people” and “plenty of convenient parking”.

While I have no memory of my early days in Rochester (we lived there for only 3 months after I was born before moving to Ottawa, another city with plenty of convenient parking). But I do remember return visits over the years.

I remember a large discount store that had bowling alleys in the back, eating ice cream at Carvel, brother Mike peeing in front of thousands at an outdoor amphitheatre, going to eat at The Copper Kettle, going to visit the airport, and staying at a Holiday Inn that had a “games room” that I remember as being quite thrilling.

The weirdest visit was when, by sheer coincidence, my grade 13 end of year field trip took us to Rochester, to tour the various pillars of industry there (Kodak, Xerox, RIT). As is usual on such trips, various beer smuggling shenanigans took place, tempers flared, discipline threatened, etc. The highlight of the trip was taking the entire class to eat at the Copper Kettle; I don’t think they know what hit them.

Someday I’ll have to take Oliver back to see the old home place, such as it is.

I’m a registered voter in Rochester to this day — I voted for Ralph Nader for President! — and so will be connected to the city for as long as my franchise extends.

I wrote earlier about a challenge with Eastlink, my cable provider, and getting extra cable outlets installed.

I sent an email off to Eastlink on Tuesday. On Wednesday I got a telephone call from Eastlink, and a very nice woman offered to have an installer come out and install an additional outlet, at no charge. This morning the installer showed up and did exactly that. As I type this, I’m watching Compass in a little window on the screen as a result.

My only criticism: the appointment was an “all day” appointment, meaning that we had to be prepared for the installer from 9:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. I thought these days were over: even doctors, who have arguably more complicated lives than cable installers, can schedule in a narrower window than that. One would think that after the endless parody of this system on repeats of Seinfeld would have sunk in by now.

That all said, Eastlink came through, and that’s laudable.

Let me simply note for the record that the designers of Windows NT have now wasted another 5 hours of my life. Today I spent the afternoon — from noon to 5 p.m. — reinstalling Windows NT and the MapGuide server that drives the mapping functions on www.gov.pe.ca. By my count, I had to wait for Windows NT to restart sixteen times in total.

Windows NT needs to be reinstalled every time you blink. Change the computer name, restart. Change the IP address, restart. Install some software, restart. Uninstall some software, restart.

It’s as if the designers assumed users would buy their computer, install the operating system once, and then use the computer in that state forever. At least I hope that’s what they assumed, because if it was somehow considered okay to have users wait 5 minutes every so often for Windows NT to get its bearings, well, that’s a sad reflection on their design goals.

In any case, install went off generally without a hitch (which is unusual) and we should be back in the MapGuide business shortly.