Early Viking

 

The Viking Octantis just went past going upriver to Toronto - from the Viking website it looks like it has no passengers but will start a cruise from Toronto through the Great Lakes finishing at Silver Islet, the submerged former silver mine, near Thunder Bay.

Vote Early!

DEV Hotel & Conference Centre. Voting places are well marked!

I voted in an advanced poll yesterday. I voted Liberal since Mark Carney is the best candidate to lead Canada through a tricky economic time. He's been able to get Trump to stop talking  about a 51st State and "Governor" Trudeau.

 

Crocus pistils

 

Cleaners outside of Grizzly's Records, Brockville

 

Cleaners outside of Grizzly's Record, Brockville, Ontario. Gentleman with beard asked me to take picture!

Eastern Grey Squirrel with red tail eating a pine cone

Eastern Grey Squirrel with red tail eating a pine cone. Had a nice red tail

 

Elbows Up, Witches!

Shops on 121 King St W, Prescott, Ontario. Olde Magick and  Amayszing Photography. "Elbows Up Witches" and "Canada is not for sale" sign in Magick shop window. I bought my "Elbows Up Canada" button there. I liked the old signs that were exposed by renovation work.

 

Pink moon rising, April 13, 2025

 

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, which 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