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 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, or from the anti-semite Lionel Groulx who used the phrase to encourage boycotts of Jewish businesses in 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 and Carney omitted!

The title of the poem likely comes from Notre-Dame-des-Neiges (Our Lady of the Snows), which is the largest cemetery in Canada, which shares the summit of Mount Royal in Montreal with Mount Royal Cemetery, largely Protestant, and two Jewish cemeteries. 

It is named after the legend that a wealthy couple in 4th century Rome asked the Virgin Mary for a sign for what to do with their wealth and there was a snow fall in August on  Esquiline Hill, where the couple built Saint Mary Major, now a Papal basilica where Pope Francis has been laid to rest.  The title of the poem might have been an allusion to Laurier being only the second Catholic Prime Minister of Canada and the first French-Canadian to hold the position.

Crocuses 2025