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.