[BRIEF NOTE] "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"

Via Facebook, I've learned that the University of Prince Edward Island's English 101 Academic Writing course might be dropped by the university administration. English 101, "a course designed to help you acquire the writing skills you will need in your academic career," these skills including the development of a good writing style and the "fundamentals of writing a research paper," is a mandatory course for UPEI students. A recent request from the English Department that the load of teaching the course be distributed more evenly across the university's departments has been met by a proposal to replace English 101 with a world studies course taught by students.

See these two articles from Charlottetown's The Guardian and CBC Prince Edward Island for more information.

[REVIEW] Winston Hayden Chang Jr., The Legacy of the Hakka Shopkeepers of the West Indies

Winston Hayden Chang. Jr.'s The Legacy of the Hakka Shopkeepers of the West Indies (Wanatqa Enterprises: St. Catherines ON, 2004) provides an entertaining personal perspective on the diaspora beginning in the mid-19th century of the Hakka people of China to the Caribbean, describing the travails of his father Chang Sin Ming as he set up shop as a storekeeper in late colonial Trinidad. While not a professional ethnography by any means, it is a very readable biography of Chang senior, as he tried to make a good life for himself despite the trauma of separation from his home and his family, the difficulties of running a general store, and the too-typical prejudice directed towards members of mercantile minorities. Interesting companion reading can be found in Shirley S. Chiu's graduate thesis on Caribbean and Indian Hakka identity formation in Toronto.

[URBAN NOTE] Earth Echoes, 975 Dovercourt Road

I had passed by Earth Echoesn (975 Dovercourt Road) before as I wound my way northwards to home and noted the elaborately carved walking sticks in the windows. It wasn't until last Thursday that I stopped, and looked, and aaw a neatly written paper list advertising the precises of reptiles, and next to that list caged lizards.

When I entered the former home of the Casino Variety convenience store, I was quite surprised to find myself in the middle of the largest captive-bred reptile population in Toronto. The owner, Paul Collier, was more than polite to this unexpected customer as he showed me the different reptiles available: the chameleons turning green in their leafy cages, the lizards taking a bath, and others. The way that these animals' muscles flowed under their pebbly skins was uncanny.

By the time that I headed out back into the cold and the wet, I felt refreshed. The things one never knows about in one's own neighbourhood, eh?

(See this post at Reptile Planet Australia for another, rather similar, experience at Earth Echoes.)