It has been a wild two weeks for me. I’ve flown to faraway places, seen friends get married, walked for miles on unfamiliar streets, spent all my money, and had a terrible time and a wonderful time doing it.

Yes, there are pictures to prove it and stories I could tell, but as it stands my bags are all packed for yet another trip early in the morning. This one is considerably more permanent.

I’d like to say, of course, that all these adventures from the past few weeks will be immortalised in blog post form for everybody to enjoy—especially since I was recently accosted by a tipsy friend of mine for infrequent updates—but I think the internet has plenty of “I’ll write about it later” posts followed by obvious silence as it is.

So until next time, when I’ll be reporting from strange new lands in a province far away, goodnight!

I recently took the subway in an unfamiliar city. When coming up from underground, though I could identify the intersection and knew roughly where in the city I was, I couldn’t spot anything to give me a sense of direction. No recognizable buildings in the distance, no mountains, no waterways. I had to walk west about ten blocks, but without knowing the names of any streets in between I didn’t want to risk a guess.

So, I did what any lost tourist eventually has to do, which is ask a local for help. My first local turned out to be British and new only how to get to her hotel, which didn’t help me. The second person was much more help and immediately pointed out east and west for me.

So off I go, trotting westward down the boulevard. This is about 6 pm. Almost immediately I have to put my sunglasses on as I think, “Man, this is annoying, having to walk straight into the sun like this.”

Then I realised immediately what a dunce I was. Hopefully they don’t get wind of this at the Astronomy department and kick me out.

This week Canadian Idol contestant Mitch MacDonald sang a condensed version of Joel Plaskett’s “I Love This Town” on the show. I typically only catch the show in passing and promptly forget it, but this song stuck in my head. Being Joel Plaskett, I assumed it was a love song to Halifax, or some small Nova Scotia town.

Nobody cares how much money you have
If you’ve got enough to get in a cab
There’ll be drinks on the house if your house burns down
There’s a reason that I love this town

I saw your band in the early days
We all understand why you moved away
We’ll hold a grudge anyway

This is one of those frequent times, however, when the song takes on a much different meaning when listened to more carefully. A verse skipped in the Canadian Idol version was

I played a show in Kelowna last year
Said “Pick it up Joel, we’re dying in here”
Picture one hand clapping then picture half that sound
There’s a reason that I hate that town

So not only does the speaker love some still unnamed town, he loves it especially in comparison with Kelowna and their unreceptive audiences. The plot, as they say, thickens. But wait—immediately following the above passage we have the following:

If you saw my band in the early days
Then you understand why we moved away
But you’ll hold a grudge anyway

This mirrors the last three lines of the first passage quoted, but from the opposite point of view. It must be that somewhere between the two, without any change in singer, inflection, key, style, or melody, the narrator has changed. At the beginning of the song, somebody loves a town and holds a grudge against a band for moving away. (The song also suggests the grudge is good natured—as if the town is happy for the band’s success after leaving home, having known they couldn’t survive without leaving.) In the middle, the narration has switched to one of the members of the band, recalling how badly a particular show went, and implying that it was part of (or indicative of) of the reason they left. If you saw the show, you’d understand.

But then again, the bad show in Kelowna might be unrelated to the moving away—it might not even be the same town. It could certainly be argued that “last year” sounds much more recent than “the early days”. Nonetheless I can’t help but think that what happened in Kelowna must be related in some way to the band’s move.

Anyway, then the song finishes off with this:

Davey and me face down in our soup
Some French restaurant outside Riviere-du-Loup
Last night on a tour we burned the place to the ground
There’s a reason that I love this town

Now I just don’t know what to think. We have another more recent time frame, and another town. Is burning the place down metaphoric or literal? At the very least it’s a tad more dramatic than half a hand clapping. And we’re back to loving “this town”, not “that town”, not “Riviere-du-Loup”.

The town is still unnamed or ambiguous. The narrator changes without fanfare—or at least there are two different bands. The motives of anybody are unclear. What is this song about? To really like a song like this, I think you should be able to answer that question.

The Mole ends tomorrow night, and though I suspect most of the internet has already put the pieces together and figured out who the mole is, I’ve avoided the online speculation in favour of figuring it out for myself and gotten nowhere.

If Nicole is the mole, I’ll be very disappointed. She’s the obvious answer, having thrown every mission from the start just for the fun of it. There will be nothing satisfying in the mole’s sabotage if it was so blatant all along.

If Mark is the mole, he’s the best one there’s ever been. Whereas Nicole screws up everything, Mark is often the one that saves the day. He tries hard, he understands the clues, he solves the riddles. He seems to get genuinely upset when things go wrongly and gleeful when they go in his way. You’d think the mole would be more in control of their emotions, and let missions fall apart when they start to collapse more often than jumping in and saving the day. Then again, he does have a habit of refusing to do the missions at all for no good reason…

In the middle is Craig. He hasn’t been terrible, and he hasn’t been great either. Mark’s right when he says that everybody still congratulates Craig on doing missions even when he fails terribly. Nobody seemed to blame him for anything. Strangely, though, Paul said he was targeting Craig two weeks ago ended up failing the quiz. That either means Craig isn’t the mole, or that Paul just didn’t have the right eye for detail that week.

Nicole can’t be the mole because she is so obviously the mole. Mark can’t be the mole because he’s so obviously not the mole. And if Craig’s the mole, it’ll just be disappointing because he’s not a very exciting character. I hope, actually, that he wins the money. We’ll find out tomorrow.