Blessed by the Potato

London, for being a relatively medium-sized city, has a relatively decent bus system. If you want to go to a lot of places on major streets then you can do pretty well for yourself. While there are a few blind spots in the coverage, and some strange route choices, for the most part they even come often enough to be useful. And once they arrive, they’re pretty quick to get to where they’re going! However, I just can’t figure out a lot of the weird burst scheduling they do. For example, today we were at the hospital waiting for the bus to come to take us up to campus. One of my office mates said “oh, it’ll be nice and fast, the #6 comes every 5 minutes or so” and I said “well, it averages out to every 5 minutes, but we usually get 2 every 10.” And that’s actually the way the London Transit system works. In the summer, when there are fewer busses running due to the lack of students, there are two busses running down Richmond (or to put it in a way that’s more relevant, two busses that would take me from my old apartment to work). They each ran on 20-minute intervals outside of rush hour, and of course, they always came back-to-back, rather than being one every 10 minutes.

So there we are in the bus shelter, and 15 minutes after I made my quip about it averaging out with two busses every ten minutes, sure enough, three busses show up. Not just any three busses, but two #6’s and a #13 (which does a very similar route to the #6). Now, during rush hour that makes a bit of sense: when you can see that there’s another bus right there, you don’t try to kamikaze the doors of the already-full bus. But at the same time, the masses of people at the bus stops wouldn’t form quite so much if a bus actually came every 5 minutes instead of getting swarms of them every 15-20.

It got worse as the day went on, though. After seminars were over, it was time to head back to the hospital from campus. On campus there’s a spot in front of the Natural Sciences building where the busses stop for a bit to “get back on schedule” or let the drivers get a coffee and a break, etc. So in front of Natural Sciences are 4 idling busses: 3 #10’s and an “out of service” one. There were a bunch of people queuing up for the #6, which was nowhere in sight. Then, the driver for the “out of service” bus came back from break and started flipping, oh so slowly, through the route signs, keeping us in suspense. So, what did he reactivate his bus as? Not a #6, which a bunch of people were waiting for, and not a #2, which just had two busses come through but didn’t actually have any sitting right there at the moment. No, he came back into service as a fourth #10. That was just ridiculous. Then, a bit later, two #6’s came through, and within 3 stops we had completely filled the first one.

I’m not usually a concert-going guy: I typically figure that the added experience of seeing a band live, once, along with the between-song banter and special live-only covers/ditties/version is usually not worth the hassle of sitting in a packed hall/stadium with lots of screaming people and the very high admission. I’d rather have the CD and listen to it a number of times all by myself in the car, thanks. Nonetheless, I’ve heard that the Barenaked Ladies are a fun band to see live (and I like almost every song out of their catalog, so there won’t be embarrassing moments like when Robert Smith tried to pass off his newest song list as worthy of playing in front of people) so I decided to go. Plus it made for an awesome you-know-what-day present for Wayfare. (No modesty needed).

Now, we had tried to see BNL in concert once before, a few summers ago at the Molson Ampitheatre for their day-long “Barenaked circus” concert. That, my friends, was not a very good concert. It was basically Mama Page going up and smacking Stephen over the head and forcing him to let his whiney kid brother do an opening set for the now wildly popular BNL (though to be fair, his kid brother was one of the best of the acts). And of course, once that happened everyone wanted to let their cousins, friends, or people who play in the subway station on their morning commute do a set. It could have worked, if they had tightened up the set changes a bit lot more — it was pretty ridiculous, since we could see the stage hands wheel everything out pretty much preassembled on the rolling platforms, then take 40-45 minutes connecting stuff up and doing sound checks. I really thought a professional group of stage hands sould have been able to do that in less than say, 10 minutes. I think they did too, since Sean Cullen, who was entertaining us between groups, only had about 10 minutes of material at a time, then lots of dead air. It was also a little unfair that they didn’t really tell anyone that was the way the concert was going to go: we were not prepared to spend nearly 8 hours in our seat in the sun. Also, the actual BNL set (while fairly good) was really short, due in part to the crazy noise restrictions at Molson/Ontario Place (why they don’t just start concerts an hour earlier on a summer saturday afternoon, I don’t know). Of course, that concert did give us “Wood, Cheese, and Children” so not all was lost.

This concert was better. One opening act, as the Flying Spaghetti Monster and the good doctor Funkenstein intended. It wasn’t just that they had a curling song (though, really, that was the highlight of the whole affair, right up there with Lovers in a Dangerous Time for you-know-what day), it just seemed like a better concert. They were a little… cold at first, and there were some issues in getting the volume balanced between the instruments and the vocals. But it was smooth with very little downtime.

It’s much nicer seeing concerts in London. For one thing, the tickets are (a bit) cheaper. We were in the cheap seats, up in the nosebleeds, and we were about as close as the sort of second price tier seats would be in Toronto (for the Molson Ampitheatre, about where the seats turn to grass). It was also a breeze to get there: if the weather had been even remotely decent, we would have walked. Instead, we took a cab for $8, and afterwards walked like 4 blocks to get on a bus to come home — all in all, a much more enjoyable experience IMHO.

The record companies (or more properly, the artists) really haven’t seemed to see some of the strengths of digital music with respect to their concerts. There are almost always unique one-off moments in a concert: a different version of a song (even if it’s just more vibrant with cheering fans), or a new cover, or some little throwaway ditty that didn’t seem worth putting on an album. But there are quite often fans who would like to have that song: the BNL live version of “Brian Wilson” is now the definitive version of that song; personally, I’d love to have a copy of “Canada Curling Stone” that they played tonight, or “Bounce to This“, a really good, catchy song at the George Clinton concert that I’ve never heard before or since. Sometimes, they’ll release a concert CD or DVD, but it’s often of a representative night of a particular tour, and still misses some of the jokes, local flavour, and audience reaction. So, my point is: wouldn’t it be great if bands sold recordings of each stop of their concert tour? Of all their songs, in all their many flavours? It seems like it should be trivially easy to record and sell MP3s once you already have the infrastructure to do so for full studio album versions. Plus it would be a great way to extort more money from the die-hard fan who has to have everything, and cut down on the desire to record performances: if you knew you could go and buy any particular song you really liked live afterwards, why even bring the tape recorder? (And I think I like Pinch Me better when the line is “take a drink right from the hose, and change into my sister’s clothes”). This is the kind of way that digital media scales: it’s just as easy and profitable to sell a thousand different songs/versions as it is to sell 26 off two albums. Shelf space is no longer a concern: the only issue remaining is the customers’ ability to sort through it, find what they want, and absorb it.

There are meter-high stakes pounded into the ground all over the Island here. Along the road, down driveways, and it’s not too hard to figure that they’re there to mark where the road is when the snow comes down too high too fast to really know for sure. What I find really amazing though is that everybody takes those stakes out of the ground in the Spring, because there’s virtually no sign of them during tourist season.

Also, in our nearly hour-long drive in the funeral procession to the gravesite, we saw many instances of cars (coming from the opposite direction) pulling over as the fleet of cars went by. It turns out nearly everyone stops to give room for the procession and give respects to the dead, another strange funeral custom I’ve never seen elsewhere (though there were a few people who didn’t know about it, and you could see them taking advantage of the people in front of them pulling over to whiz past).

Horses, it turns out, are giant scaredy-cats. They’re terrified of deer for some reason, and my cousins leave the lights and a radio on for them in the barn at night.

Nearly everyone out here is at least a little behind the curve when it comes to computers and the like (dial-up access penetrated fairly quickly here in the 90’s, but due to the geography and demographics, high speed is pretty rare and things have stagnated a bit). To print pictures from the funeral right away, my dad picked up a cheap photo printer (just plug the camera directly into it and go!) and I was showing my aunts and uncles how to use it. My uncle Kevin took a particular interest in it, so I started talking about some of the other features, talking down to him a bit as, unfortunately, many of us do with our less-technologically inclined relations. A little later we were talking about laptops because he wanted to get one for my aunt, to make it easier for her to do a bit of writing and what-not. I started talking about how pretty much anything would do for the uses she had in mind, and he said that sure, it starts out that way, but then you get into photo and video editing and you need more power… he just put a 4th hard drive into the server computer he built himself (on a motherboard with 8 RAM slots) and then I felt stupid since he obviously was plenty familiar with computers.

Oh, well.

Most people (out here at least) have more second (and greater degree) cousins than they know what to do with. I met my great aunt and uncle (my grandfather’s brother and sister-in-law of his other deceased brother) and their whole clan for the first time today, a good dozen or so second and third cousins. It was a little strange being in a room full of family yet not really knowing anyone’s name.

One thing about being on PEI in the summer is that there are always a ton of bugs around, especially annoying flies that get inside. While they can be a pain up north, I generally don’t notice any flies around Southern Ontario, and while most people out here have several flyswatters, I know we don’t even own one in Toronto. However, our cottage is pretty new, well-insulated, usually has a stiff breeze coming off the water, and just recently aquired air conditioning as well (so those windows get closed!). So we usually don’t get many (typically 2 or 3 will hang around to be swatted), and they’re hardly ever a major nuisance. By comparison, at my grandparent’s place, or at the cottages we used to rent before we got our own, they were the bane of our existence. A good hour before bed would have to be spent either swatting them or else turning on just one or two lights in the place to lure them away from the bedrooms.

However this time there are dozens of flies around here. Which I thought was really weird because it’s freezing outside. It turns out the stupid things will go dormant for long periods of time, hiding in the vents or the walls or what have you, and as soon as we cranked up the heat coming back, they all woke up at once and started buzzing around.

Today was the visitation for my grandmother. It was very, very long: first an afternoon session, then a dinner break (where more people showed up to the house) then another two hours in the evening. PEI has a strange tradition for the visitation: the family lines up beside the coffin (a big receiving line with nametags, no less) and visitors file through, chatting briefly, shaking hands, and offering condolences. It was exhausting, especially since of the hundreds of people who came through (my grandmother made a lot of friends!) I only knew about a half dozen. So there were a lot of people who came through and were in tears after talking with my grandfather, then got to us grandkids and would say “oh, who’s are you?” or “I think I last saw you when you were just this tall”, etc. It wasn’t a very comforting ritual — half the time just talking to someone who was already crying would set one of us off even if we didn’t know them, plus I find it quite stressful to constantly interact with strangers that way. My aunt says that it’s not usually done that way in the few funerals she’s been to in New Brunswick, and I don’t think they work like that in Ontario, either. There, she says, people tend to mingle a bit and chat up the survivors they actually know, and get some time to say goodbye to the deceased without the next people in line shaking hands and chatting at either end of it. The line got so long at one point that they were bringing people in out of the cold and seating them in the chapel to queue up again after the line thinned a bit.

One odd thing I noticed is that a lot of men on PEI have huge hands. I think that I have fairly average-sized hands; I fit into medium or large sized gloves for the most part, and they’re a good deal bigger than Wayfare’s, etc. But whether it’s use on the farms or just genetics, a lot of the men who came through had hands that just completely dwarfed mine. There were also a lot of people who tried to express their condolences with a nearly comical handshake that tried to crawl right up my arm. First, a regular handshake that went on too long for comfort, then just as you think they’re about to let go they would take their other hand and grab your elbow…

The funeral will be tomorrow, on the far side of the island where my grandmother was born. She’s going to be buried on a hill known as the coldest part of the Island. She said “oh, I know it’s cold, but I won’t really mind when the time comes.” After about 5 hours of visiting today, I’m not sure if I’ll have the energy to get out there (it’s about an hour-long drive away).

One of my aunts is a nurse, my mom was a nurse (she went to nursing school out here), and my grandmother had a lot of nurses out to visit her at home to help take care of her after her last stroke, so at one point there was a big discussion about health care in PEI. It turns out there are 7 hospitals on PEI (for a population of about 150k, half that of London which has 4(?), only two of which have emergency departments), though I only know of two myself. They were talking about how ridiculous it is to have that many small hospitals and how in some other provinces a city with 150k people would be lucky to have one, so they were talking about ways to try to improve the ambulance system here so that they could then start closing and consolidating. A good suggestion was to add a few helicopters to permanenly serve PEI (rather than having to borrow Nova Scotian helicopters in times of need), and then set up one good centralized hospital with lots of modern equipment and stuff. It turns out that a lot of diseases here get missed or mis-diagnosed because no one hospital is large enough to support many specialists, instead the hospitals are more like clinics with surgical facilities, and anything much beyond setting a break requires a patient transfer to Halifax or another large hospital. In fact in my grandmother’s case, she was admitted to the hospital with a stroke, and a common treatment for that is to administer a thrombolytic (“clot buster”) to try to save the brain tissue. She was lucky and managed to get a CT to rule out bleeding in the brain (clot busters make that worse, as you can imagine). However, there are only a few doctors licensed to perscribe a thrombolytic in PEI, and none of them was available at that hospital at the time, so she never received treatment.