Catherine flew off to New York City this morning, leaving Oliver and I to fend for ourselves for the first time in a long time. So far we have managed to keep care of each other, and are eating, washing, etc. as required. We even brushed our teeth this morning!

Catherine just phoned and said the weather in New York is beautiful.

Must go and read Bear on a Bike.

A reminder that Taken, the digital exhibition that knocked my socks off, closes on Sunday at the Confederation Centre. You should really try to get over and see it today or Saturday.

Back in the mid- to late-1980s, I was a member of a graphic design movement I will call “Times + Helvetica.” It’s not really proper to call this a movement, of course, but I will anyway. This movement turned out a lot of logos, ads, posters and magazine pages the chief design effect of which was the cunning mixture of Times and Helvetica. Like this:

The latest example of my own work that uses this technique is the logo I designed for ISN in the mid-1990s, a perverted-by-ISN, badly-kerned version of which you can see here.

This morning in the mail there was a piece from Conservative candidate Darren Peters that rather effectively uses this same technique. Everything old is new again, I guess.

Policies and personalities aside, Darren has established a strong presence in the political graphic design horse race. We’ll have to see what his opponents come up with.

The Brackley Drive-in is opening for the season on June 4 with Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban. We can’t wait.

Here’s a map showing the county lines in the United States:

It’s a weird alien skin.

That’s my mouse pointer coming up from the south, not a giant cruise ship or undiscovered island.

The PEI Climate Change Hub has published a magazine called Blowing in the Wind: Answers to Climate Change with a stated purpose to “educate and encourage people to take action on climate change.”

This is a laudable goal, and the newsletter does, indeed, contain many useful bits of information, pointers to websites, and practical steps we can all take to lower our personal climate change profile.

That said, the newsletter also brings to light a marketing issue that often afflicts “change” movements, and that is the implication that to achiece practical change requires cultural change.

Here’s an example: David Daughton has a poem called Missing Olympia published in the newsletter, to which he has attached an author’s note that says, in part:

Climate change causation has its roots in human attitudes and actions that are lacking in respect and love for natural balance. As we concede a gap between the personal and planetary states of being, much of the magic/science of the healing power of love and care for our surroundings lapses.

Now I have a lot of respect for David and the work he does. And I don’t want to deride the thought process that has led him to work in the climate change movement. But reading tracts like that makes me feel the same way I feel when I read hardcore evangelical religious rants telling me that Harry Potter is the devil.

I’m ready to turn down my thermostat, insulate my attic, ride my bike to work, and buy wind power. But if it seems like I have to embrace the “magic/science of the healing power of love and care for our surroundings,” to be able to do this, well all of a sudden we’re back in 1973 and you’re that guy on the steps of Carlisle United Church trying to convince me to come to Sunday School instead of riding my bike to the playground.

I don’t mean to suggest that Blowing in the Wind is full of this sort of “change as religion” material, because it’s not: the balance of the material is practical and commonsensical. I merely wish to communicate that to sell me on climate change, you simply have to tell me what to do, and make a case for why. If the power of love leads you to do that, fine; I just don’t need to know that.

If you frequent the area of Queen and Fitzroy in Charlottetown, you are well aware that our brothers and sisters at Aliant have been on strike for several weeks now. And if you’ve been paying really close attention, you will have seen the Aliant security force hiding out in a white Chevy Cavalier coupe across the street, presumably poised to shoot any strikers that get out of line or try to say, secretly switch 411 and 911.

In a very sneaky move this morning, Aliant switched the white Chevy Cavalier coupe to a red Chevy Cavalier coupe. As a result, it’s almost like the security force isn’t even there.

I joined my landlords, and various of their religious followers, in York tonight for many rounds of exciting paintball action, phase three of Dan’s extended bachelor party.

This was my first paintball experience. Indeed it was my first “men doing manly things together” outing in perhaps twenty years. Here’s what I learned:

• Their is an odd allure in being led. Conventional wisdom is that a web hermit iconoclast like me would buck at the notion of being told what to do. But when one of my Team Red mates took up the leadership mantle and sent me down, left and forward, it was great: sometimes being told what to do isn’t such a bad thing.
• Their is an odd allure in men doing manly things together. This goes against 20 years of hard-edged feminist training my by various consorts. Or rather more honestly, 20 years of hard-edged pseudo-feminist posturing by me as a sort of awkward mating technique. But it’s true: running through the forest and then drinking beer and talking about it fun. Who knew?
• Wearing glasses when playing paintball is awkward. Wearing the mandatory super-goggles over my glasses — which I need to see, I’ve only recently realized — meant that I had two layers of fog and grime to see through. When the wee glasses-free dynamo brother of the bride lunged from out of nowhere and shot me point blank, and I only vaguely knew what was happening, the true nature of my disadvantage became obvious. Please note that the “squirt some dish soap” advice that the paintball master offers as a solution to this problem only results in an extra layer of gunk to see through. By the way, as a sign of my extra-special geekliness, I kept reading the “Goggles Mandatory” sign as “Google Mandatory.”
• Rarely engaging in physical activity makes running through the forest harder. Given that my comrades spend a roughly equal amount of time engaging in physical activity as I do, this wasn’t a huge disadvantage. But then again, they are all 10 to 20 years younger than I am, so their bodies have had less time to atrophy. I made it through the night, and even rolled down a couple of hills and leaped up into a tower once or twice under heavy fire. But I will be very, very sore in the morning.
  
• Holding and firing a gun isn’t that weird. Indeed it felt strangely comfortable. I find this equally disturbing and encouraging. And for the same reasons. It’s good to realize that people who do bad things with guns aren’t a species apart: they’re just like me. That makes me hopeful because it suggests that rationality can prevail given the right environment. It also makes soldiers seem less abnormal — it’s hard to demonize a population when you’ve felt the initial tentative roots of their predilections in yourself. But for the same reasons, I’m disturbed: I would have liked to have thought that there was a stronger firewall between everyday regular rational people and the ability to comfortably wield weapons. I don’t want to make this into more than it was — essentially a video game played outdoors with more sweat — but there’s at least something to be learned here.
• Not working sometimes is probably a good idea. Short of dating my lady-love and outings with my small family, I mostly work and sleep and eat and drink lemon iced teas and watch Survivor All-Stars. And procrastinate. It’s a good idea to do something that has nothing to do with work and family at least once in a while. I’m not going to take up paintball as a regular avocation. But doing something else has a new attraction.

The lads were very kind to let me come along for the night tonight, and, what’s more, to refrain completely from “how’s it going old fart?” or “hey, you’re the new Alan!” allusions. A good time was had by all.