Pam’s Photos, March Flowers and Disturbing Radio News

After many hours culling through the over 1,000 photos that she took on her trip to Antarctica, Pam has put together just under 200 of them in a slide show on Flickr. Many are very impressive, and she went to some pains to annotate them as well. If you want to read the descriptions, you can access the individual photos as well. I’m glad that she can share her trip with so many friends and family.

Spring has Sprung Forward
One of the things I do love about the climate here is the fact that our winters, while being plenty wet, dark and dreary, are not very long. During our walk last weekend, Pam and I spied many clusters of crocuses, and I expect that we’ll be seeing daffodils and tulips either this week or next. This is very different from the winters I remember in Boston, which seemed to stretch on and on. Groundhog Day, as Garrison Keillor used to say about Minnesota’s Winter, was for us, ’some sort of cruel joke’.

This weekend is also the starting gun that seems to set off a rush toward Spring, with the switch to Daylight Savings time (which the Province suggests might be more aptly called ‘Daylight-Saving Time’, following the pattern of ‘man-eating’ tiger or ‘mind-expanding book’). At any rate, I’ll now leave work in full sun, and we’ll be getting up before dawn for just a little while longer.

CBC Radio Two to Change Programming Again?
I’ve learned that in September, CBC Radio 2 will once again be changing their programming, and unfortunately for people like me, it will no longer include Classical music before 9AM, and will no longer have any Classical music after 3PM. As they slowly whittle away at the programming that I would like to listen to, I’m going to be eventually forced to turn to the Internet (and, if I take the plunge, XM Satellite radio) for music that’s not in my collection (and my collection is huge!). That’s a shame, since I’ve found that Tom Allen’s wonderful ‘Music and Company’ to be the only morning radio show that has consistently made my day better. I fear I will be writing him a fan letter as they cancel his program in September.

It was bad enough when the CBC banned news longer than 3 minutes from Radio 2. Now they are going to be banning Classical programming from much of their schedule. Not much left for me to listen to, I guess. I keep telling myself that with the growth of the Internet to wireless devices, it won’t be long before the WiMax (or other) cloud will make standard analog radio a quaint memory. Still, I foresee a bumpy road before small constituencies like the one I’m a member of are squeezed off the dial, at least until we find our new broadcast medium. Too bad you blew it, CBC.