The work of the “Newington Green Action Group”:http://ngag.org/ (which I helped to run for several years) is the cover story of today’s Guardian Society section. To her credit, the journalist attempted to get at both the benefits and the drawbacks of the regeneration of the Green which I and my colleagues pushed for. Some of the criticisms levelled at the changes are justified but I also find it depressing to see how many people seem determined to see the dark side of any change.

1) I have been on holiday with my parents (to the “Ring of Kerry in Ireland”:http://flickr.com/photos/derb/ - v nice if a little unpredictable weather-wise).
2) Since my return I have been working on my thesis and occaisionally posting to my “academic groupblog”:http://groupblog.workasone.net/ - it’s hard to justify ‘recreational’ blogging these days…
3) I’m planning to move this blog from Moveable Type to “Wordpress”:http://wordpress.org/ and shift it to another server. Until I get the “template right”:http://blog.org/mt/ however I can’t make the change and rather than maintain both the MT and WP sites each time I post I will probably not post for a while until I get the template sorted out.

Any help would be welcome.

A “fellow ex-pat Canadian”:http://www.claritycp.com/exec_profile_jb.html lent me a book - “Mondo Canuck”:http://www.amazon.ca/exec/obidos/ASIN/0132630885/qid%3D1112610903/702-9110123-7216867 which made me feel more Canadian than I had in years. It’s a compendium of Canadian popular culture which sparked many memories. I found myself indulging in a favourite Canadian recreation - looking for famous people and organizations I didn’t realise were Canadian and I was also reminded that I am (loosely) connected to several Canadian phenomena.

• My parents live in Oakville for example so I knew all about the importance of nearby “Sheridan College”:http://www1.sheridaninstitute.ca/ for Hollywood’s animation industry but I also know several people who worked at “Alias”:http://www.alias.com/ - animation software giant - including “Reid Ellis”:http://rae.tnir.org/ who used to host this blog.
• Another friend of mine - “Harald”:http://blog.cfrq.net/chk/ - (present host of this blog) knows several of the people from the bizarre Canadian comedy sensation “Kids in the Hall”:http://www.kithfan.org/ (I met them once).
• I serialised “Douglas Coupland”:http://www.coupland.com/’s excellent early novel “Microserfs”:http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/2.01/microserfs.html in a computer magazine I worked on and my mother knows his aunt.
• Now that I am a media studies academic I feel as if I have some connection to “Marshall McLuhan”:http://archives.cbc.ca/IDD-1-69-342/life_society/mcluhan/ as well - if only because a friend of mine has studied him extensively and I recently attended two lectures on his work.
• I went to the “same college at university”:http://www.trinity.utoronto.ca/ as “Atom Egoyan”:http://www.egofilmarts.com/ and “Michael Ignatieff”:http://ksgfaculty.harvard.edu/Michael_Ignatieff (though not at the same time).

  Mondo Canuck is a fascinating book for Canadians of all ages to thumb through but, despite being endorsed by Citizenship Canada, is out of print.