Ashley to Johnny

Ashley MacIsaac writes in to my brother Johnny’s guest book, in response to a post from December 2000:

A few weeks ago, my girlfriend Jodi said to me, “Hey Johnny, do you want to go see Ashley MacIsaac at the Commodore?”  I said, “I guess so” and she said, “Good, because I already bought the tickets”.  

The element of choice being removed, I started to get excited about going to the show.  We had seen Ashley a few weeks before performing with the Chieftains and he had stolen the show.  But to be honest, I was most excited about going to the Commodore Ballroom.  Basically, I would go and watch my own ass perform at the Commodore.  Its that kind of place.  

As fate would have it, Ashley MacIsaac turned out to be a far better performer than my ass and a good time was had by all.  In fact, Ashley MacIsaac turned out to be brilliant.  Poor old Ashley seems to have fallen on hard times of late.  He’s had highly publicized drug problems and earned a reputation as a difficult badboy, having walked out in the middle of several concerts and, apparently, urinating on an audience at some point.  Despite his early success, apparently MacIsaac is broke and his most recent album has sold only 20000 copies, just slightly more than Glass Tiger’s latest effort.  Furthermore, MacIsaac has gained about fifty pounds in the past few years and to put things charitably, he looks like Hell.  This made the whole experience of seeing him something like watching David Wells pitch a perfect game.  For about two and a half hours, he played the fiddle and danced and stomped around as though possessed by the devil, and he was fantastic!  Accompanied by a piano player and guitarist, he played a nice repertoire a traditional Cape Breton fiddle tunes and even a medley of Christmas songs that reminded me of the Christmas album by Don Messer and his Islanders that my Dad still plays every year.  Except that it was like Don Messer and his Islanders were on acid.  We stood about a foot from the stage and jigged like wee leprechauns for the whole show and generally had a grand old time.  It was a sublime experience to witness that level of dizzying technical skill and profound artistic sensitivity totally unaccompanied by pretension or arrogance.  It made us totally forget that, given our proximity to the stage, there was a real risk of beeing peed on.  I went from being a semi-curious observer of MacIsaac’s to a real fan of someone who takes obvious joy in playing music that is culturally and historically important to our country, and is lots of fun to boot.

Small world. Weird world.

The Girl in the Fuzzy White Sweater

I remember the night, and the feeling, more than almost any night of my life. Sometimes I forget all about it for a month or two, or maybe even a couple of years, and then suddenly I’ll be waiting for a traffic light, or standing over the sink, or putting on my shoes, and it will all flood back.

I was 12, I think. Maybe 13. The event was an experiment by our leaders at the Hamilton YMCA — all-male at the time — to hold a dance, with girls imported from the Burlington YMCA, which was a “Family Y” and thus co-ed. Amazingly, the girls came.

Most of us, boys and girls both, had never been to a dance before. We weren’t really sure what to do. And we were shy.

We were all gathered in the large first floor space in the Y known as the “Youth Department.” The ping-pong tables and the crokinole boards were cleared away to the side for the evening. The services of a local DJ were secured. The lights were lowered a bit. There were cheesies. And orange pop.

I don’t remember much about the music. I’m pretty certain Three Times a Lady was played. Probably Saturday Night by the Bay City Rollers. Probably Stairway to Heaven at the end, as that was the custom of the day. Maybe Even in the Quietest Moments by Supertramp. After that, my memory has faded too much.

If we were shy as a group, I was extra-especially shy. Girls and dancing and low lights all conspired my make me nervous. The only salvation was that it wasn’t school, so I didn’t have to see anyone in the morning, or maybe even ever again.

Towards the end of the night, after lots of standing in the corner, eating cheesies, talking to my friends, and generally trying to avoid making an ass of myself, out of the blue one of the Burlington girls came over and asked me to dance. Inexplicable.

In my minds eye, over 25 years, I’ve built this brave girl up into a vision of beauty, bravery, intelligence, moxy. She was probably just a girl from Burlington like I was a boy from Carlisle.

But it was a slow dance, and, strangely, that meant dancing in a clutch that was more like a really warm hug than a polite foxtrot.

I remember her fuzzy white sweater the most. I can evoke the feeling of it on my face — she was, predictably, taller than me, given our age — simply by closing my eyes. The whole thing was, well, very warm — the kind of thing that makes you happy to be alive. And wanting more of whatever that was.

It was over in 3, maybe 4 minutes. I think I said thank you. Or something like that. I don’t think I had another dance that night. It didn’t matter.

Mac, Mac, Mac, Blech

Just to prove that I’m an equal opportunity malcontent, I will relate the story of the past 5 hours.

There I was, happily working away on my iMac. I needed to print a document from AppleWorks out as a PDF — a usually-very-simple prospect of File, Print, Save as PDF. Except that AppleWorks crashed when doing so in some great and amazing way that ground everything else on my Mac to a halt.

So much so that I actually had to power it off and power it back on again. And when the lights came back on, woe betide, my mouse wasn’t working. I tried all the usual voodoo: unplug and replug, plug into a different port, try a different mouse, reboot, etc. Nothing doing.

So I called the friendly folks at Apple.

It used to be, in the good old days, that, warranty or not, Apple would help you solve your problem on the phone. No longer. Now, unless you have purchased an extended warranty (for $299!), you have to pay them $69 to solve “an issue.” Reasoning that I would expend more than $69 of my own sweat by thrashing around for an answer myself, I took out my credit card and paid my dues.

And then I spent 2 hours on the phone with various Apple people, spending most of the time waiting for various rebootings to reboot, and decanting various mystical key combinations during said reboots in a very Twister sort of way (things like Control+Option+O+F).

The Apple experts eventually concluded that my problem was related to “third-party software conflicts” and said my only solution was to reinstall the operating system. They promised this wouldn’t screw anything up, and would take about 20 minutes.

That was only partially true.

The installation of the operating system took about 20 minutes. And now I’ve spent the last hour loading all the various security and application updates down through Software Update to get things back to where they were before.

The whole experience has been almost (but not quite) as frustrating as a Windows Debacle. Proof that maybe technology has become just too darned complicated for us to keep it floating all the time.

Some days I pine for the simplicity of doing a brake job on a 1978 Ford F-100 pickup truck, where everything is obvious, and all frustrations can be solved with a hammer.

Terrorism: Too Bad, So Sad

The following letter arrived in our mail this morning from Aviva Insurance Company of Canada, which insures our house:

Recent events have demonstrated that terrorism and the threat of terrorism, not unlike war, have become uninsurable events. Therefore, we are now excluding coverage resulting from acts of terrorism. Fire following a terrorist act will continue to be covered.

The attached endorsement defines terrorism as:

…an idealogically motivated unlawful act or acts, including but not limited to the use of violence or force or threat of violence or force committed by or on behalf of any group(s), organization(s) or government(s) for the purpose of influencing any government and/or instilling fear in the public or a section of the public.

Oddly, it later goes on to explain that we are no longer insured for:

…any activitiy or decision of a government agency or other entity to prevent, respond or terminate Terrorism.

So if someone tries to blow up our house, and the government tries to stop them, and, say, breaks down our door in the process, we’re on the hook for a replacement door, I guess.

Easier Inter-Library Loans on PEI

The Inter-Library Loan — wherein your local library obtains for you, usually at no cost, a book not in their local collection from another library, often one very far away — is the great secret of the book world. I have many friends — mostly librarians, I must admit — who are diehard borrowers of books using this system. And many more friends who have never ordered a book by Inter-Library Loan, never even considered it.

I’ve always found the online form for Inter-Library Loan on Prince Edward Island to be needlessly complex, and I’ve never got my library card handy to enter its number when required.

So I created a my own Inter-Library Loan Request Form. The form is simpler, and smarter — it will remember your personal details (using cookies) so that once you’ve entered them once, you don’t need to do it every time. Otherwise, it simply submits the information to the Provincial Library Service using the same mechanisms, and then the helpful library folks take over.

I’ve got two ILL books on the go right now. The first, About Town: The New Yorker and the World It Made, came from Halifax. I picked up the second, Reporting Back: Notes on Journalism today; it came from British Columbia.

If you’ve never used the ILL system before, and you’re a reader, I encourage you to try the system out. I welcome comments on the design and function of the form, and on the books you read as a result.

If you’re interested in taking things one step further, read about the follow-up project, ISBN to Inter-Library Loan on the Reinvented Labs website.

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