When I was submerged about a month ago I heard the guitar from Martha and the Muffins "Swimming". We have a pool in this place no one uses but us. With goggles, it's all flailing kiddie ankles up there, me holding at the bottom thinking of out by the church at North River where you could dive down to loll about with trout or the double falls at Greenwood if you knew the half-mile path through the spruce to find it. My man in Portland has taught me to body surf at 59 F in the real sea where nothing stands between you and the Azores, your arse facing at Maine. [I also learned being called a big fat sissy apparently works with me as an educational strategy.]

The CD Then Again - A Retrospective arrived in the mail today, 16.98 CND all in direct from Martha and the Muffins / M+M headquarters. I also got the M+M "The World Is A Ball" tour badge 1986, tin pin type. Like the Spoons and Doug and the Slugs, these were songs between the Duran Duran at Cabbagetown, the basement dance bar on Spring Garden at South Park in the brief time of my life when wearing what looked like fishing tackle from your ears was OK, when people dressed like characters in Lexx. Did Martha write my address on the envelope?

I had an interesting set of exchanges today on the topic of the ISSN. I noted a few days ago that Steve's site had an ISSN or international standard serial number - scroll down lower left to see it. Wanting all that Steve has, I applied for my own. This morning I received a nice email which stated:

Thank you for your application. At the moment, we are no longer assigning ISSN to weblogs, but the situation is under review. The question of whether weblogs will be able to be assigned ISSN is under discussion in the international ISSN Network. The question hinges on the scope of the ISSN but also on the very real consideration of the limited staff resources of ISSN centres worldwide.

The person with whom I was having this conversation then went to the effort of called me at work after tracking me to my house. Apparently there are only two staff at the National Library of Canada who administer the ISSN system in the country and they have been overwhelmed by requests for blog registrations particularly - but apparently inadvertantly - after this posting by a Joe Clark who Steve (of the now coveted ISSN) knows as an web accessability writer.  I suggested that I might help the National Library of Canada and its application crunch by way of a post to this old 'osphere.

There is an answer, however, to the nerd who want another registration number in their life. While my helpful friend in the National Library of Canada ISSN office, who will go unnamed (even though there is a 50% chance of you guessing which one it was) indicated that ISSNs for web blogs get you little but are a real headache, the good folk at CIPO will take 50 bucks on line for a one-time registration of Canadian personal web sites under the Copyright Act. While copyright is inherent in that it arises with the act of writing, registration provides proof of the fact of your writing as of the time registered. This still allows you to grant Creative Commons licenses at all that as they are licenses granted under copyright interest to your own works.   Plus you are paying so can expect you are providing for the resources you are using. 

Consider the lot of the poor ISSN registration worker. The ISSN has now registered over 755,000 serial titles worldwide and grows at an annual rate of about 50,000 new listings.  As a reult,  even though the Guardian recently pointed out that of the 4 million things called blogs, only 50,000 are updated daily, the scale of blogs to periodic serials is clearly daunting and, for two librarians kind enought to pick up the phone, overwhelming.    Let them be, oh bloggers, let them be!    Then lobby Paul Martin for more funding for the National Library.

While at Watertown, I was looking for a good book to explain the neighbouring zone of New York State, the North Country. Lucky man that I am, I hit upon the right book first go. Twenty-five or so essays called Living North Country: Essays on Life and Landscapes in Northern New York edited by Singer and Burdick. The collection was a collaborative effort to define the place by both old-timers and newcomers, academics and the little published. Nice coming from the Maritimes to read a book about an economically depressed area that neither mentions a government arts grant or advocates a tourism oriented point of view:

To demographers, the region leads the state in unemployment, incest and illiteracy. It is cold, springless, hobbled by it's inhabitants sense of defeat, stubbornly conservative. But it's home and I embrace it with an affinity I cannot embrace well.

Another view from the Thousand Islands Bridge

The upper part of a perpetual motion thingie

The view that disappeared last August

Steve gave me a heads up by instant message and I spent two hours at the end of yesterday listening to the landing on Mars live from NASA. I tagged Mel, too. Here is the site for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Get some Tang and food in tubes and follow along.

The photo right is the rear view mirror shot or as NASA describes it

This image taken by the hazard avoidance camera on the Mars Exploration Rover Spirit shows the rover's rear lander petal and, in the background, the Martian horizon. Spirit took the picture right after successfully landing on the surface of Mars.

New Year. New varieties. Bought this afternoon in Northern New York - Pink Lady. From an apple flogging site:

Yet another import from the land "down under" this variety was originally named Cripp's Pink. Developed and bred by the agriculture department of Western Australia in 1973, Pink Lady apples are a cross between Golden Delicious and Lady Williams. Introduced to the United States by way of New Zealand in the late eighties, the fruit is medium in size and conical in shape, with a distinctive pink blush over a yellow background. The fine-grained flesh of this apple is crisp and crunchy and, because it does not brown easily after being cut, Pink Lady is a desirable (blah, blah, blah)... When eaten out-of-hand, the first bite tastes pleasantly tart and is followed by a delicious (blah, blah, blah)...