I will note, only for completeness sake, that it seems odd to me that there has been no news for a week on Prince Edward Island, at least as far as the CBC is concerned.

If you click deeper, you find “Prince Edward Island news will return on Jan. 2.” Lord help us if anything actually does happen in the interim.

Presumably this is simply a resource issue: the web maestros need time off too. It’s a shame the CBC still doesn’t consider web news important enough to cover over the holidays; it’s still the bastard offspring of television and radio in their world, I guess.

December 31 is Hogmanay in Scotland. While I don’t begrudge the Scottish their fun, it does seem odd to celebrate “the traditional present of an oatmeal cake” with its own day.

I am not one of those “movie people” who can expound at length about the genius of Kinji Fukasaku.

But I do note with some surprise that Charles Crichton, who directed The Lavender Hill Mob in 1951 also directed, with John Cleese, A Fish Called Wanda in 1988.

Inexplicably, he also directed several episodes of Space: 1999, arguably the worst science fiction television series ever produced.

But perhaps I write that from the perspective of a disappointed 9 year old (which is how old I was when the series first aired); one website, in discussing the series, says:

In retrospect the series seems to a great extent to reflect the contemporary development of continental philosophy, illustrating in a fascinating manner central ideas and dictums elaborated by Adorno, Arendt, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Lyotard and so on.

Who am I to argue with that?

In any case, if you’ve never seen The Lavender Hill Mob, you should: it’s an excellent picture with a great cast.

While you’re at it, you can’t go wrong with the new three-DVD Audrey Hepburn set; it contains Roman Holiday, Sabrina and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

Hepburn is in The Lavender Hill Mob too, although it’s only for a few seconds, right at the very beginning.

Must go now, before I do begin to sing the praises of Fukasaku.

One of the amazing things I’ve learned from watching Oliver grow is how children are so adept at recognizing and embracing other children. It’s like there’s a secret society of children, and all children are members, and there are certain things — burbles, nuances, little pieces of body language — that can only be understood by members.

When Oliver and I are out in public, he can spot someone else under 5 years old from across a room, and will give a secret wave; often they’ll wave back.

While all of this is endearing, and interesting to watch, I wonder what evolutionary advantage this behaviour offers? Perhaps children bonded to other children in a world of strange self-involved warring adults have a better chance of survival?

I placed my first order from the Chapters.ca website on May 16, 2000, and my most recent order on August 12, 2002.

The order number for the first order was OR1848357 and the order number for the most recent was OR8231302. Assuming that the order number is simply a sequential number, that means 6,382,945 orders in 27 months, or roughly 236,205 orders per month and about 7800 order per day on average.

This is all just a guess, of course.

Every weeknight from midnight to 1:00 a.m. you can watch The Charlie Rose Show on WGBH Boston (and, I’m sure, other PBS stations at other times).

Charlie Rose is the consumate interviewer. This week I’ve watched him interview Martin Scorsese and Daniel Day Lewis, Denzel Washington, and Nicole Kidman. Each of the interviews were interesting and insightful — much less “so I hear your kids did something wacky on the weekend” than Letterman and Leno and less “what is the heart of your oeuvre” than James Lipton.

If midnight is too late for you, I can’t imagine a better use of a VCR or Tivo.

From the iFolk website:

House concerts are a wonderful grassroots phenomenon where world class musicians and developing local talent alike perform in the comfortable intimacy of private homes and similar nontraditional spaces. They’re fun to attend, fun to present, and fun to play. This page is dedicated to spreading the word!

This strikes me as a wonderful idea.

On a related topic, The Nields are playing at Grassy Hill on Sunday, March 16. They had a cut included on the New Music Made in New England CD that was included with YANKEE in summer 2001. Well worth a visit if you’ll be in Connecticut in March.

And, on the same folk topic, Edie Carey is worth a listen.

The Library Lookup project has received a lot of weblog buzz over the past month. With the introduction of an iPac beta-test by the PEI Provincial Library, we Islanders can now take advantage of it.

Here’s how it works: drag the bookmarklet below (see more about bookmarklets) to your browser’s toolbar. Then, the next time you’re browsing a website like Amazon.ca and looking at a specific book (like The Stone Angel), click on the bookmarklet, and a pop-up window will show you information about that book if it’s in the collection of the PEI Provincial Library.

Neato.

Note that, as far as I’ve been able to determine, the bookmarklet doesn’t work with Chapters’ website, because they don’t use the ISBN as part of the URL for a specific book. It does work with Northwest Passages [Stone Angel], another Canadian bookseller.

Here’s the bookmarklet you can drag to your toolbar: PEI Provincial Library.

Continuing the dance of procrastination this week, this website sports a new, lean look today.

Fringe benefits: site loads faster, site can be viewed on anything from a modern web browser, to a cell phone, to a 1978 Ford F100 pickup truck. And there’s a lot less to distract the eye from the body copy. A lot less.

There are still some rough edges around the periphery; these should be addressed by the end of the day.

In June of 1991, I moved into a house on George Street in Peterborough, Ontario. Catherine, my consort to this day, was my next door neighbour, and her roommate was a man named Mike Johnston.

Mike — or Mikey, as Catherine called him — was a really nice guy, and a pleasure to have as a neighbour. He was the kind of person you could equally as well engage in conversation about the finer points of Canadian poetry in the 20th century as you could share a platter of Labatt’s 50 on tap.

At the time, I was driving a 1980 Toyota Tercel; it was a good car that had taken me to El Paso and back, and between Ontario and Quebec innumerable times. One day I lent the car to my friend Stephen, who took our friend Karen out for a drive. At an intersection, Karen, for some reason, opened her passenger side door, and someone in the lane beside her pulled up beside and drove right through it. Karen was fine, but the door, well, it fell off.

Because I didn’t really need a car at the time, I opted to junk it rather than repair it. When I mentioned this to Mikey, he said “I’ll give you $50 for it.” I said “I won’t take more than $35.” We shook hands, and I signed the car over to him.

Mikey’s father was a mechanic, and the door situation was quickly rectified and he drove the car for another year until some larger calamity befell it. He then drove the Tercel to his father’s farm where, at last report, it was serving duty as a part of a complicated electric fence charging system.

We’d lost track of Mikey since moving from Peterborough, but when my friend John was here last week, he mentioned that Mikey was directing a film about his student loan.

Photo from Arthur, January 14, 2001.