Dragfin!

 Just going to the hardware store - huge SUV with California plates and something weird mounted on the roof. It looked like the camera Google uses in its Street View but only with a small pod. Had to ask - the passenger explained that it was to see how the local air conditions would affect drag. Their company, makes fins that break up the vortex that forms at the back of a truck increasing air drag, is called Drag Fin .

No, Mark Carney isn't recycling Seinfeld or buying hydro plants.

Mark Carney has used the phrase "We are masters in our own home." in the current tariff war with the United States, and people have thought he's either copying Seinfeld's "Master of my domain" from an episode about who could go the longest without masturbating, or Quebec Premier Jean Lesage's campaign slogan, Maîtres chez nous, for his successful 1962 election bid that had to do with buying more hydro plants for Hydro-Quebec. It's not. It's really from the poem 'Our Lady of the Snow', which had the unique subtitle "(Canadian Preferential Tariff, 1897)", probably one of the few poems that do refer to tariffs, written by this guy:

Rudyard Kipling, 1895, via Wikimedia

Kipling was an Imperialist and white supremacist, and he admired Canada for setting its own tariffs. After a long trade war with the USA (One that was amped up by hefty tariffs imposed on Canadian goods by Trump idol President William McKinley) the 1897 National Policy gave reduced tariffs to UK imports.

The poem repeats "Daughter am I in my mother’s house,/ But mistress in my own."  , something that Sir Wilfrid Laurier quoted when talking about Canada's place in the British Empire, and follows with "Soberly under the White Man’s law/My white men go their ways.", something Laurier omitted!

Crocuses 2025

 

Ice storm

https://youtube.com/shorts/Ans7Db9guhA?feature=share

Ice storm, south eastern Ontario,  March 30, 2025, not that much ice on trees as of 12 noon, temperature is rising and it's changing to rain

 

Geneva Convention

"Likewise, prisoners of war must at all times be protected, particularly against acts of violence or intimidation and against insults and public curiosity." - Article 13, Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War

Adopted 12 August 1949

 I had a nightmare about that prison in El Salvador, When I woke up I thought it was a bad dream until I remember it really is happening. I've visited a few prisons in Canada - at least the prisoners were issued proper clothing.

Dramatic clouds and contrails

 

First crocus