This and That.
It’s Canada’s 141st birthday today and 41 years since I arrived here right on the 100th birthday, a sort of present to Canada. No, no inflated egos here! It’s changed a lot in 41 years of course. I thought coming to Toronto I was moving to a big city but it was just a big town and a somewhat backward one. Things that surprised me, no mini skirts! They’d been around for at least three years in UK. No pubs, just sparsely furnished taverns with separate entrances and seating areas, one for men and one for ladies and escorts. No bar, you sat at bare plastic tables and a waiter brought you beer. And you couldn’t have an open bottle of beer outdoors, even in your own backyard if I remember rightly. All the telephone wires were above ground strung from poles. Food was plentiful and cheap. Refrigerators were huge.
Nationally Canada was prosperous and optimistic, it was debt free, the debt incurred by the huge effort made by a small population to fight the war had been paid off. Then along came the charismatic Trudeau whose ‘with it’ persona fitted perfectly with the adolescence of the sixties and so we got Trudeaumania and with him came Socialism, massive spending on all kinds of feel good schemes and much meddling with business.
Fans of Obama take note, these inexperienced, sweet talking, think they know all the answers dilletantes are bad news.
As I’ve heard, Canada could have had English government, American know-how and French culture. Instead it got French government, English know-how and American culture.
The good news is that with Stephen Harper, the current PM, we seem to have reverted somewhat to the good qualities of the more staid fifties before the spoilt brats of the sixties screwed everything up.
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The Navy Invented Sex
A Marine and a sailor were sitting in a bar one day arguing over which was the superior service.
After a swig of beer the Marine says, ‘Well, we had Iwo Jima.’
Arching his eyebrows, the sailor replies, ‘We had the Battle of Midway.
‘Not entirely true’, responded the Marine. ‘Some of those pilots were Marines, in fact, Henderson Field on Guadalcanal was named after a Marine pilot killed at the Battle of Midway.’
The sailor responds, ‘Point taken.’
The Marine then says, ‘We Marines were born at Tunn Tavern!’
The sailor, nodding agreement, says, ‘But we had John Paul Jones.’
The argument continued until the sailor comes up with what he thinks will end the discussion. With a flourish of finality he says…… ‘The Navy invented sex!’
The Marine replies, ‘That is true, but it was the Marines who introduced it to women.’
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Check out The Eleven Best Foods You Aren’t Eating.
The raw beetroot sounds interesting, I never thought of eating it raw before. The leaves and stems of beetroot make excellent greens, steam them and dribble olive oil and vinegar on, add pepper and a bit of salt. Delicious!
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It’s good to see a major newspaper, albeit a British one, The Times, giving an optimistic report on the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
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Alan Sullivan with his sailor’s knowledge of climate, geology and astronomy has done a sterling job over the last few years in debunking the Global Warmists’ warnings of apocalyptic disaster. In this post he quotes in full an article from today’s WSJ entitled ‘Global Warming as Mass Neurosis’. Great stuff.
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