Although I gave myself over to the Camper religion last fall, I still have a soft spot in my heart for Simple shoes. They unveiled a new website today and that’s a Good Thing because their old website was more like a television commercial than a website.

Simple has realized that the role of a website is to tell people about their products, not to sell them on the lifestyle that they want to tie their products to. The new site is, err, simple, quick to load, and makes it easy to buy their shoes.

My favourite sentence on the site is in the description for their Deco Thong: “Masculine thong available in earthy leathers.” I don’t know what that means, but it sounds awfully alluring.

Catherine turned me on to this Johnny Cash video [streaming Quicktime]. It’s very good.

For obvious reasons it’s in my best interests, personally and corporately, to offer little or no comment in this space about matters directly relating to matters of Island politics.

What I wonder is: how come nobody else does?

For a place where politics seems to infuse everything from the flowers to the trees, where are Islanders writing online about things Island and political?

Otherwise known as “Norman’s,” Brighton Clover Farm is a small, well-stocked grocery store tucked in the Brighton, the patrician residential area of Charlottetown.

My patrician friends have been waxing eloquent about Norman’s for as long as I can remember, but until Sunday I’d never done anything more than purchase a Globe and Mail there.

On Sunday, in preparation for Catherine Hennessey’s “Grocery Crisis Downtown” meeting (Coles Building, 7:00 p.m. on Thursday, March 6, everyone welcome), Don the Dentist, Catherine and I took a short tour of the grocery stores downtown, and one of our stops was Norman’s.

The most important thing to know about the place is that they sell six varieties of Montreal bagels, direct from the Fairmont Bagel. This fact immediately sets them ahead of any grocery store on the Island. Add to this a decent selection of Haagen Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream, a credible assortment of Lebanese ingredients (including an good assortment of olive oils, always important in our slightly eponymous family), fresh produce, a meat counter, Lebanese coffee, magazines, video rentals, and an assortment of useful things like confetti, can openers, playing cards and shampoo, and I can’t see a reason for shopping anywhere else.

Norman himself is a very nice man, in my limited experience. Makes shopping at the “Super” Store feel all icky and impersonal.

Only downside: it’s just far enough out of our neighbourhood to be too far to walk, especially in the frigid cold we’ve had here recently.

The latest debacle to ooze from the CBC is something called CBC Home Delivery, which uses technology from BackWeb to push audio and video content to Windows desktops in the background.

Setting aside that this is a web metaphor that others explored and abandoned several Internet eons ago, the project represents another instance where the CBC is determined to showcase the “new” in “new media.” And so rather than presenting text, audio and video content in an open, standards-based way that would allow the content to “participate in the web,” it’s all hidden behind multimedia-drenched locked doors.

Go to this page for example. After you skip over the masturbatory opening sequence, you’ll see several paragraphs of text explaining the new project. Try and copy and paste this text. You can’t. Because it’s not really text, it’s a Flash presentation. Yes it’s hot and sexy and a gyrational. But say you’re blind and want the text read to you by your computer: no dice. Or say you want to quote from the text. Or link to it. Nope.

What’s the rationale for this? This page says:

Home Delivery is finally here and offering you a way to cut through the overflow of information out there and take media to a new level. It’s taking storytelling to a whole new level by offering smart, rich content — no waiting, no downloading, and no searching.

Even if you ignore the separatist approach to technology the project embodies, I have to question who exactly the market for “news as Depeche Mode videos” crossed with “news as slideshow-enhanced radio clips” is. The multimedia layer adds nothing to the content. Short of employing a gaggle of Flash designers and programmers, I can’t see why the CBC would bother heading in this direction. Where are they getting their advice? Who is it that’s telling them that the accidents that are CBC Radio Three and ArtsCanada are something we need more?

This is not to say that the CBC isn’t doing some good things with “new media.”

The “View Traffic Now” feature of the CBC Toronto Metro Morning program is an excellent use of multimedia to make a complex set of information clear, concise and easy to access (I’d link right to it, but alas I can’t do that either: go to the main Metro Morning page and click on the “View Traffic Now” link on the left-hand side of the page).

The science show Quirks & Quarks has streaming audio of all of their programmes available in a variety of formats (which a pleasant departure from the CBC’s tendency to use RealAudio, which is slow, unreliable and often over-subscribed).

These examples use multimedia where it’s useful, rather than as a sort of virtual mayonaise to slather over content to make the young ones think it’s not their father’s CBC.

Stop the insanity.