I’ve said it many times, many ways, but I’ll take a brief moment to remind the readership of the general excellentness of the Metro Credit Union in Charlottetown.

There are two primary reasons that the Credit Union is attractive to me.

First, they have, without exception, the friendliest, most helpful staff of any financial institution in town. While staff at the mainline banks always make me feel that they are doing me a favour by letting me lend them my money, Credit Union staff never make me feel this way. Today I showed up at 4:59 p.m. (with a closing time of 5:00 p.m.) and engaged a teller in a complicated U.S.-dollar cheque deposit, followed by a cheque certification. This ran us well past 5:10 p.m., and she never gave me a hint that I was inconveniencing her. You can’t train or cajole people to be this way: you simply start with good, honest, friendly people, and back them up with systems and policies that support and encourage this.

Second, my money is staying on Prince Edward Island. The money I have on deposit can be loaned out to local businesses, used to develop the credit union, and so on. It’s not going to build large skyscrapers in downtown Vancouver.

The Credit Union is not without its drawbacks: their local website is ugly and useless; their online banking site is, as I’ve mentioned here before, only getting worse. And though you might think that the credit unions of Canada are a happy cross-pollinating bunch, this turns out not to be the case: walking into Charlottetown and trying to deposit money into a VanCity account is just as onerous as depositing the same money into a major bank account.

None of these, save perhaps the local drech-site, is really under local control. And none detracts from the general wonderfulness of the institution and its staff.

If you’re currently dissatisified with your major bank’s services, you cannot go wrong switching to the credit union.

You can watch could have watched the Steve Jobs MacWorld Keynote starting in about 12 minutes (1:00 p.m. AST).

The conference is being held in the Moscone Centre in San Francisco. The conference centre is named after former San Francisco Mayor George Moscone. Moscone was murdered, along with Harvey Milk, on November 27, 1978, a part of history brilliantly captured in the 1984 film The Times of Harvey Milk.

The incidental music playing before the keynote is by Joni Mitchell.

IAEA = International Atomic Energy Agency. “Serves as the world’s foremost intergovernmental forum for scientific and technical co-operation in the peaceful use of nuclear technology.” [from here].

IKEA = Ingvar Kamprad Elmtaryd Agunnaryd. “A unique concept offering quality home furnishings at a low price at numerous stores around the world.” [from here].

It’s important to keep these things clear.

I headed over to the Confederation Court Mall this afternoon about 3:30 p.m. to do some shopping. The city was like a ghost town, with the snow storm seemingly keeping everyone at home. Just as I arrived at the mall, all of the merchants decided to close (it was freaky watching this happen: there was no controlling legal authority, the decision to close simply passed through the mall like a virus).

Thankfully, Tweel’s, source of important storm-stay magazines, was oblivious to all of this and remained open (their position outside the mall afforded them immunity to the virus, although I did mentioned that the mall was closing, which infected them).

Of all the people I know, the one least likely to have become a “cat person” is Kevin O’Brien. Kevin’s persona is approximately 33% Rex Murphy, 33% Irish dockworker and 33% Truman Capote; these are not personae that one tends to equate with satisfied cat ownership, to say nothing of devoted cat obsession.

But it has happened: Kevin is a bona fide cat guy. At first it was the “hey, did you hear what my cat did last night?” witty anecdotes; now he’s graduated to full-fledged “hey, here’s a picture of my cat doing something funny!” Witness:

Pictured is a cat named Supernews (nickname “Dooder”), brother of a cat named Snack; Kevin describes Dooder as “engaging in one of his favourite pasttimes.”

It can’t be too long now before we see cats appearing in ISN ads. And after that, it’s clear sailing through to the personalized cat-themed license plates.

I remain, faithfully yours, a dog person, through and through.

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.