Amazing just how nerve-wracking an intermittent Net connection can be, if you’re hooked on throughput. Separate me from the World Wide Stash, and I’m jonesing something fierce within minutes.

Not because I actually need something out there… but because I can’t get it right now. So maybe the active ingredient is — what else is new? — instant gratification.

Addicts often develop a love-hate relationship with their dealers, and that’s just as true for byte junkies. The object right now of both my scorn and affection is Telus, AKA The Company Formerly Known As BC Tel.

The service used to be known (maybe the more precise term is “branded”) as Sympatico, the Internet service offered by the Stentor group of companies — that is, the telecos like Bell so familiar to the Rest of Canada. (Question: If telecommunications is a federally regulated industry, how come every province seems to have its own phone company?) “Sympatico” is a friendly name, conjuring up notions of a pal who instinctively grasps your every need. “Telus,” on the other hand, is the kind of market-speak name that sounds like the result of a six-month-long focus group.

But once Telus swallowed BC Tel, it expelled the Sympatico DNA (mostly — I still get e-mails addressed to my old Sympatico ID) and rebranded.

The practical impact is minimal. When I curse at our stalled connection, the third word (right after the comma, and, for fans of sentence parsing, the antecedent of the pronoun “you” that forms the object of the sentence) now has two syllables instead of three. (Not a huge change, but a measurable increase in efficiency nonetheless.)

And that brings me to the love-hate relationship, which lately has tilted heavily to the right of that particular dyad.

Since Tuesday, we’ve had sporadic outages, lasting an hour or two each time, separated by wildly varying periods when we could get back online — sometimes a few hours, sometimes a few minutes, never long enough. It’s like talking on a cell phone while driving through the Rockies: “Yeah, we saw some marmots and bighorn sheep. By the way, I left the baby in the – ” PSSSSHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHT “- day in Hell before I give him the – ” PSSSSSSSHHHHHHHHHHT “– a little coriander, and you’re set.”

It’s been stressful, with the outages always seeming to be timed with devastating precision to coincide with online emergencies. (“You need the speech immediately? I’ll send it right n-… aw, fudge.”) But, hey, it’s the digital frontier. Bit happens. You want to ride the cutting edge, you’re gonna get some spray in your face. And I accept that.

What’s a lot harder to take is not knowing what’s happening. Call up technical support, and you’ll hear a recorded message from the Network Administrator. (That’s how he describes himself: no name, just an ominous title. I hear that and I flash on Number Two on The Prisoner.) You’ll learn that the cause of your trouble is the delightfully imprecise “network difficulties.” (Someday I’m going to tape that message, sample it, play it over an electronica soundtrack mixed with Bjork screaming “Not being able to connect is a network difficulty!” and sell a bazillion copies.)

Continue on to a human being (hint: call them at 310-4NET, then dial 3,2,4) and ask for the inside scoop, and you’ll realize the horrible truth: they’re just as in the dark as you are. Nobody’s told them a damn thing, either.

And this may be the nub of that love-hate thing. Dependency — which is, let’s face it, what you’re going to have with your high-speed Internet provider until some real competition opens up — is an unhealthy situation for any couple. We can’t work through that problem unless we communicate.

And ISPs, in my experience, just don’t want to talk about the relationship.

Every once in a while you say something that just strikes you as so friggin’ clever, you need to immortalize it. And then there are the things that are just barely clever enough to post to your blog…

I was with a group of people tonight talking about, well, livestock. The locus of conversation went something like:

• You catch those pictures of the mass animal burials in Europe?
• It’s weird how this comes so soon after mad cow disease.
• It just isn’t natural to feed cows to each other. They’re herbivores.
• True. That’s why nobody ever holds cow fights.
• Bull fights, yes, but not cow fights.
• Actually, no. In Switzerland, in the Alps, there’s this time in the spring called transhumence, when the cows are moved from the valleys into the alpine meadows. And to celebrate, there are cow fights that culminate in one cow being crowned Queen of the Alps.
• How do you get cows to fight each other?
• You hide behind them and say rude things to provoke the other cow.
• Like what?
• “Your mother is army boots.”

he hearings around the Web Log Eradication Act of 2002…

News item:

iCulture: York University Fine Arts receives $3.75-million donation

TORONTO – York University in Toronto has received a gift worth a total of $3.75 million for its Faculty of Fine Arts. The donation by philanthropists Martin and Joan Goldfarb is in the form of cash and a collection of 67 works of art.

CBC News has yet to confirm reports that the Goldfarbs, well-known dog lovers, were moved to make the donation after seeing a York University vice-president spend a full hour trying to coax her golden retriever to pee in a nearby park.

It’s quarter to nine on the eve — judging by the media coverage — of a provincial election, in which I’ll be working flat out to craft the kind of deft prose that will wend its way past the gatekeepers of journalism and into the eyes and ears of BC voters. (Rule one: that’s my last run-on sentence for the next 29 days.)

So what better time for an invasion of carpenter ants?

Fans of Formicidae Camponotus will be delighted to hear of the emergence of a copious swarm of winged queens, signalling the colony has reached maturity — and the future of every member, from the creakiest old worker to the tiniest pasty larva, has been genetically secured. And in our bedroom, no less. Lucky us.

While Premier Dosanjh is gazing out the window of his office, pondering the battle to come, and Garde Gardom’s people are scrambling to hide the nice china, we’ll be welcoming the nice man from the Ant Removal Bureau and his funny little machine that pumps the nice green dust into our walls.

I’m hoping that it won’t be too persistent. Handing over speeches that include references to giant macaroni-breathing iguanas doesn’t strike me as a confidence-inspiring move. (Although maybe it’s a metaphor for the Gordon Campbell tax cut. Hmmm… I can do something with that…)

Maybe I wouldn’t be the only one in an altered state of consciousness. Here’s the word from Net Pulse, an e-politics newsletter from Phil Noble:

“If you’re frugal, you can read a newspaper [online] without paying for it.”

- – Freshman U.S. Sen. George Allen, R-Va., on how he personally uses the Internet. A recent Scripps-Howard News Service story said Allen was being groomed as a high-tech spokesman for Republicans.

Oh, God… next he’s going to explain how you can also store recipes on your computer and use it to write your term paper. “And you can store it all on these cool little floppy disks!”

George, if you’re really frugal, I can show you how to observe the miracle of insect life without paying for an ant farm. C’mon by some time.