There is dramatic generational movement in the tea situation. It used to be that the only truly reliable cup of tea to be had in Charlottetown was at Catherine Hennessey’s: her combination of special boilings, cup pre-heating, quality tea and other untold secrets resulted in a cup that rendered most restaurant tea, and any tea I might make myself, seem like thin tasteless swill by compare. And, indeed, Catherine still makes an excellent cup of tea.

But she now has competition: I had the favour of having a cup of tea brewed by Karen Mair last night, and it was the equal of Catherine’s. A rare and special discovery indeed.

I never liked David Morse as an actor; I put him into the same “annoying actor in bad roles” category as Sam Neill. But in the same way that The Dish rescued Neill for me, the new CBS television programme Hack has shown me Morse’s true talents as an actor. It’s a great show, and that’s largely due to Morse and his co-star Andre Braugher.

Braugher, best known for his role in the television version of Homicide: Life of the Street, is a great actor, and he’s at his best when he’s having a conversation. In Homicide his conversation was with Kyle Secor’s Bayliss; in the Bruce Paltrow film Duets it was with Paul Giamatti’s disturbed salesman, and in Hack his partner in conversation is Morse.

The interesting thing about Hack is that it departs from the modern trend for hour-long dramas to be completely self-contained, with no spill-over plot from episode to episode. Think of Law & Order, CSI, NYPD Blue: the idea is that each episode is essentially a world unto itself; presumably the thinking is that if you make it easy for viewers to drop in at any point, they’ll be more likely to watch.

Understanding Hack, however, means following the growth and backsteps of the characters from episode to episode. Morse and Braugher play dirty cops; they dipped into a pool of drug money. Morse is off the force, and disgraced, and Braugher, his former partner, is still working as a cop. They have a complex relationship, and the heart of the show is their conversations at a coffee shop. Each week’s plot revolves around Morse’s life as a cab driver, and the characters he encounters eventually lead him, into conflict with the law.

What’s pleasant is that neither Morse nor Braugher nor the situations they find themselves in are morally clear-cut. The show is not “dirty cop trying to make good,” at least not entirely, and there’s enough moral ambiguity to make the viewer actually think, which is rare.

Hack has been picked up for a full season by CBS; it airs Friday nights, and is broadcast in Canada by Global. Check it out.

Dan asks “Peter, could you list and describe the ‘laudable’ things in the townsquare project? Your sleuthing skills must be more refined than mine.”

The Island Libraries project is laudable: using Z39.50 (an open standard for talking to library catalogues) and open source PHP and Apache tools, this is a common web search interface to the Provincial Library and Holland College Library catalogues. It was funded under the aegis of Town Square, and put together by Donny Moses.

The new online ticket sales application on the Confederation Centre website is very nice and, having purchased tickets for Lennie Gallant mid-summer, I can tesify that it works. It was funded by the Town Square project, and put together by a team that includes Lorrie Jollimore, who used to work for us at Okeedokee.

The City of Charlottetown’s parking ticket payment system is a Good Idea. It appears to be constructed in PHP, and while I’ve not been unlucky enough to have to use it yet, from the look of it, it’s well designed. Same goes for the water bill payment application. Both were funded by Town Square.

The live broadcast of council meetings is a good thing for municipal democracy (although it is slightly disconcerting to hear the Mayor ask the councillors to “please login” at the beginning of the meeting). This is funded by Town Square.

There’s no doubting that the Town Square website itself isn’t a model of good design (to say nothing of the Virtual Charlottetown site, a textbook example of how not to design a website). And there are, as several have pointed out some crazy aspects to the Town Square project. But don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater: there’s some neat stuff happening under the Town Square banner.

Where I come from, the town square is the guy wearing plaid pants, but that’s another story. There are many laudable things about the Town Square project here in Charlottetown, but giving businesses the ability to create ugly dreck like this is not one of them.

The aim of this “microsite” part of the Town Sqaure project is to “assist local business owners in utilizing E-business in their day to day operations.” What they have done, in the case of Sherwood Do-it Centre, is to ensure that nobody with any sense of aesthetics, design or style will patronize the business.

Design is hard. It takes smart people to do well. The more this “empowerment through amateur crap distribution” philosophy takes hold, the further we’re going to be from a day where the web actually is useful.

The irony? Sherwood Do-it Centre already has a website (I guess this would be their “macrosite?”) and while it’s not a paragon of design excellence, it considerably more well put together than its micro cousin.

Apparently Hungary is the centre of Europe.

…that’s about all the CBC Newsworld could muster for the coverage of the mid-term elections in the USA last night. We were treated to Don Newman and Henry Champ, two “veteran journalists” with classic “like watching paint dry” style, sitting in a room somewhere in Washington on two desk chairs, with a Canadian and a US flag in the background.

The “trusted. connected. canadian” CBC is obviously of the opinion that the elections in the US don’t matter all that much to Canadians.

The irony is that the election the night before, in Yukon, received wall-to-wall Newsworld coverage. The fact that the elections in Yukon are completely irrelevant to the lives of most anyone outside Yukon doesn’t seem to have factored into the equation.

The results of the Republican sweep last night in the US will have tremendous effects on our day to day lives in Canada. No doubt more so than even the “controversy in Ottawa” that led the National last night.

The thing is I want to know about the mid-term elections from a “Canadian perspective.” I would watch for the entire evening if the CBC applied Yukon-style resources to the US coverage.

Alas, twas not in the cards.

If you can bear to stay up late enough, you should be watching Charlie Rose on PBS. Here in Charlottetown we pick up his show on the Boston PBS station WGBH from Midnight to 1:00 a.m., so you’ve got to be a dedicated fan to watch regularly. Or you have to have wonkly sleep habits, which is how I qualify.

Last night’s guests included Chris Matthews, author and host of the MSNBC programme Hardball, and Carol Channing, actor and singer of much fame.

Both Channing and Matthews confirmed my “the more you think someone will be blathering airhead the more you will be wrong” theory. Matthews, who on his own television programme plays a loud referee was promoting his book on America; he was well spoken, passionate, and obviously incredibly sharp. Channing, who I knew previously only through Rich Little’s well-known impression of her, was saucy, witty, smart, and not the least bit cloying.

Rose is sometimes a little bit too familiar with his guests, but he is mostly just a fantastic interviewer, and what plays out on his show is very different from the “interviews” that happen on Letterman, Leno and their ilk, which are mostly “excuses to get the movie/book/TV special in front of the public for 10 minutes.”

If The New Yorker had a television show — and writers and editors from the magazine are frequent guests — this would be it.

How is it that I live in a city that uses Comic Sans as the signature font on its website? Help! Steven, talk to your father, please!