I had lunch last week with a friend, and took away a valuable lesson. This friend, let’s call him “Ernie,” had been thinking about leaving Prince Edward Island for work off the Island. He’s got a good job here, and lots of friends, but the job away offered career development promise, and he seriously entertained the idea.

In the end, he and his family stayed here on the Island.

Why?

Because they realized they had it pretty good here: good job, good friends, nice, small, close-knit community. Just enough diversions to keep their minds occupied — movies, theatre, restaurants, and so on — without all the downsides of a larger city (crime, noise, crazy busy atmosphere).

When you haven’t grown up on the Island (and even if you have), it can seem sometimes like a remote northeastern outpost, devoid of the fun and exciting trappings of the Big City. And sometimes, career-wise, it seems like the only option for playing in The Bigs is to sacrifice quality of life for opportunity.

Ernie and his family didn’t do this, and their example, in a small way, opened my eyes to how good we’ve got it here too.

Thanks, Ernie. Enjoy the ride.

Saturday morning bright and early brothers Mike and Steve and I headed east from Carlisle by U-Haul truck and VW Golf for Montreal to deliver Steve’s life to his new home.

The day started poorly when a bizarre transmission problem with the U-Haul caused a disconcerting clunk at random speeds between 90 and 100 km/h. With the pedal to the floor, Steve could hardly keep the truck over 100 km/h; this slowed our trip somewhat, and caused brother Mike no end of frustration, as he was driving the chase car behind (and more often in front).

We arrived in Montreal around 4:00 p.m., and found that Steve’s new apartment is on the fourth rather than third floor, a grand total of 53 elevator-less steps from ground floor to his front door. With Steve working at about 140% of capacity, Mike at about 100%, and me at about 60%, we managed to lug, push and carry Steve’s life up those 53 stairs. At the end of this, 2 hours later, we were all dead to the world.

After a brief time for recovery, we returned to U-Haul, and found a good Thai restaurant on St. Laurent for dinner. We were back home and fast asleep before midnight.

Sunday morning we were off to Home Depot to buy Steve some blinds, and to the grocery store to get him stocked up on Diet Coke and Kraft Dinner. After a hearty Quebecois lunch at the deli around the corner from Steve’s, Mike and I loaded up the Golf and headed back down the 401 to Carlisle, where we arrived around 8:00 p.m.

Of the 36 hours between 8:00 a.m. Saturday morning and 8:00 p.m. Sunday night, we spent about 16 hours driving, 3 hours moving, 5 hours eating, 3 hours shopping, and 9 hours sleeping. I got a good chance to spend time with Steve on the way up and Mike on the way back, and although it was a little crazy and swift, it was a good weekend.

Wee Oliver, meanwhile, enjoyed the rapt attention of his grandparents for the weekend: went swimming, twice to Tim Horton’s, walks in the woods, etc. As far as I know, he was not called upon to move any boxes.

Tomorrow, weather-willing, we’re back on JetsGo to Halifax, then a drive to Charlottetown. Wish us luck.

Oliver and I decided to fly to Ontario for the weekend (actually, I decided, and forced Oliver to come with me; he happily complied).

We made the decision to take this trip last Sunday, which meant reserving tickets 5 days in advance. The Air Canada round-trip fare from Charlottetown to Toronto was approximately $700 per person, for a total of $1400. A lot of money for a weekend trip.

I surveyed the alternatives: WestJet from Moncton to Hamilton, and CanJet and JetsGo, both from Halifax to Toronto. I left out Tango because I figure Air Canada itself is bad enough — do I really want to see how they act when they admit they’re being cut rate?

By far and away the best website, with the best price, and the best flights, time-wise, was JetsGo. Total fare for Oliver and I together, return, was $560, a saving of almost $900 over the Air Canada fare from Charlottetown, and certainly enough to get us to go to the trouble of driving to Halifax.

The JetsGo experience was great: no lineups at check-in, very friendly and helpful staff, on-time departure, friendly flight crew (very snappily dressed in custom tailored leather jackets), lots of room between the seats, and a clean airplane (most Air Canada flights are missing at least two of these items these days). We arrived at the relatively uncrowded and modern Terminal 3 about 15 minutes late due, the captain told us, to a fierce head wind.

The downside? Well, no free drinks or food. But that’s not really a downside: on Air Canada you get either tasteless pretzels or a uninspired boxed lunch and 1/2 a can of soda. On JetsGo, Oliver and I shared a Montreal bagel with cream cheese, a fruit cup, an iced tea and an orange juice (both with the full can) for $5. Given that I was saving $900, I had no problem paying this, and I could have just as easily brought my own food.

JetsGo is coming to Charlottetown early in the new year, and I, as a new and satisfied customer, welcome them with open arms. Based on our experiences today, I’d have no hesitation recommending the airline.

Five or six years ago, the CBC Prince Edward Island afternoon programme Main Street — I think it was during the Nils Ling dynasty — ran a contest where listeners were invited to come up with lyrics to the theme song to the morning radio programme Island Morning.

That theme song had a timeless quality about it: it was a cross between a space ballad and the music you might expect to hear in Tootsie when Dustin Hoffman is hitting his stride as a cross-dressing soap opera star. I expect many Islanders heard that theme song hundreds, if not thousands of times; certainly the hosts must have it drilled into their heads.

This morning I awoke to a new Island Morning theme song. Because I use “awoke” only as a general description of my activity, I cannot say for sure how it sounds, but my vague recollection is that it was more “Broadcast News” than “Tootsie.”

Now, for all I know, this new theme has been playing for weeks or months, as the pre-9:00 a.m. hours are not ones during which I tend to be awake.

I hope they gave the old theme song a good send-off. Perhaps it can find new life in, say, the former Soviet Union where a new radio station, operating in the fragile shell of burgeoning democracy, can use it to introduce their own morning show. Don’t be surprised if, when on your next trip to any of the “-anias” or “-istans,” you hear those familiar rhythms.

Good-bye old theme song; you will be missed.

The Croatian city of Zadar is located on the shore of the Adriatic about half way up the country from the southern tip.

When you read tourism guidebooks about Croatia — and there are not many of these around these days — and you want to find the area my paternal ancestors hail from, you usually end up reading the section that starts with Zadar, as Perusic is inland from Zadar. While the coastal part of this region of Croatia is beautiful and scenic, the area inland is mentioned by one guidebook as “the Croatian Siberia.”

Zadar made the news this morning: a story on Ananova titled “Radio listeners stunned by ‘sex demand’ threat” reads, in part:

The 35-year-old woman, named only as Vesna G, from the Croatian port town of Zadar, walked into presenter Josip Portada’s studio at local Radio Pag. She pulled out a gun and told him he would have to have sex with her or die.

The story has a happy ending (depending on your perspective, I suppose):

Portada managed to talk the woman out of her demands and eventually called the police. She is being questioned but police have not released further details on the case.

For more Croat fun, read this page about the Pag triangle.

I welcome opinions from The Readership on the best way, in your considered opinion, of driving from downtown Charlottetown to the Charlottetown Airport.

I usually take a taxi to the airport, or get a drive from a friend, and I find there are very strong opinions about the proper route to take: some prefer the “Grafton to Riverside Drive out past the QEH” route, others the “Grafton to Kent to Longworth to Mount Edward Road and out past the Do-it Centre” route and still others the “University Avenue to the Charlottetown Mall, on to Rte. 2 and past Sherwood Volkwagen” route.

Something tells me you readers will not hesitate to set me straight.

Recent demonstrations of “why it’s good to be Canadian:”

In Windsor in late October I ended up at dinner in an Italian Restaurant with a three library types, two of whom were from America and one from Toronto. My fellow Canadian and I had to first explain why a $1 Canadian coin is called a “loonie,” and then, further, why a $2 Canadian coin is called a “toonie.”

I’m sure other countries have their nicknames for coinage; I’m fairly confident that only in Canada could we have a naming scheme like this, where the name of one coin ($2) only makes sense if you know the name of the other (Note to non-Canadians: the $1 coin in Canada has a loon on the back). In Canada, as nowhere else, everything truly is relative. (By the way, I’ve noticed an increasing tendency in the U.S. to call $1 bills “singles.” Perhaps this has always been the case and I’ve just missed this until now?)

On another front entirely: you really can sent a letter to Santa Clause, North Pole, Canada, HOH OHO. And it really will get answered, if not by Santa herself, at least by her colleagues at the post office. Only in Canada, I think, can we have the combination of (a) witty postal code usage, (b) public servants donating their time to a novel project and (c) their employers and the community supporting their efforts.

When I was working in the Composing Room of the Examiner in Peterborough, one of our tasks during late November and early December was to work on a related (but more commercial) project, which was a “Santa Letter page” surrounded by advertising. While in other months when the work was done and we were sitting around waiting for the presses to start we could browse the classified ads or clean out the film developer, during Christmas all hands on deck were dedicated to the seemingly endless task of typing in the seemingly endless pile of letters to Santa that arrived at the paper. I never want to type “Dear Santa” again.

Has anyway else noticed that the Tim Horton’s Iced Cappucinno has changed flavour in the last month or so; maybe I’ve just been the victim of a couple of bum Ice Caps, but it seems that there may be a new formulation that’s sweeter and more chocolatey in a way that’s not at all positive.

Those of you in the readership who have had cause to click on the Statistics link to the left may be wondering about the source of the freakish traffic increase in mid-November.

This “traffic” was actually almost entirely from a set of six IP addresses (all starting with 216.144.230.) in California controlled by a company ironically called EWAN. From the appearance of the traffic logs, it looks like either some person or robot thought that our server was an open proxy server (it wasn’t, and isn’t), and so they hit us with an HTTP request every second or two for a sustained period of time.

After fruitless attempts to contact this company about the traffic, I finally just cut off the offending IPs from access to the machine at all, which made the traffic go away, eventually.

So, in the end, I wasn’t suddenly uber-popular, except in an annoying computerish way.

There’s a commercial right now running on various Canadian cable channels for EdgeTV that compares watching the channel to “lifting your middle finger to the forces of conformity.”

The Edge takes its identity from the Toronto radio station formerly known as CFNY.

The irony of all of this is that the history of CFNY has seen it grow from being a tiny Brampton-based, independent progressive rock station to being merely the “alternative” brand in the portfolio of Corus Entertainment.

Among other things, Corus controls YTV, Treehouse, and Kids Can Press. The company is the “largest radio operator in terms of revenue and audience tuning,” with 52 radio stations in its portfolio. It owns 19.9% of Food Network Canada.

The company reports a yearly operating revenue is $652,800,000.

In its 2000 Annual Report, the Message to Shareholders finishes with:

Our commitment to increasing shareholder value is unwavering. Our promise is twofold. First, we will continue to entertain, enlighten and inform our audiences through our diverse portfolio of assets, and second, we will delight our shareholders with our commitment to deliver superior operating results across all of our divisions.

In short, I don’t think it’s stretching the truth to suggest that Corus Entertainment is one of the primary “forces of conformity” in the country and that if one subscribes to their EdgeTV service, one is bolstering the forces of conformity rather than raising a finger to them.