Happy Canada Day..

FWIW, Neil and Joni did a glorious cover of "Four Strong Winds" with The Band at The Last Waltz. It's on one of those "special added material" versions of the CD set, I believe.

 

Yeah, the old version wasn't a big hit in Quebec.

Song is reminiscent of old Orange Toronto.

 

Went to Niagara Falls yesterday for the first time in 15 years.... Oh. My. God.

When I was here 15 years ago, driving from Toronto to Cooperstown, me and a college buddy stopped to see the Falls. Went to the top of Skylon Tower, snapped some shots along the river and proceeded on our merry way, unhindered by the 65 or so people joining us.

I almost didn't recognize the place since the casinos came in. Hotels popping up everywhere, which is no big deal. But Clifton Hill????? Reminiscent of the worst elements of the Vegas Strip and Pier 39 in San Francisco thrown together on a narrow strip barely wide enough to accommodate traffic and the hordes that were mobbing the place yesterday.

Not to belabor a deteriorating city's efforts to reinvent itself economically and I'm the last person to rip on bringing in gambling gaming to help out a rust-belt city, but wow. Is it possible to throttle back some of the tourist-traps?

 

Went there for a weekend wioth my wife a couple of summers back and it was brutal.

 

I've always said that it looks like somebody ate Las Vegas and threw up on Niagara Falls. :-X

 

My wife and I honeymooned in Niagara Falls (both sides) and we thought it'd be neat to take the kids there for a weekend getaway last summer, completely unaware of what we were getting ourselves into.

At the end of the weekend, I told everyone to take a good look around, because I didn't care if I ever returned unless it was to cross the border bound for upstate New York or New England. Something tells me, with the money rolling in there now, they won't be missing us anyway.

Well, not necessarily. The second last line of the first verse spells out clearly the contributions of the Scots and Irish -- "the thistle, shamrock, rose entwined."

If they wanted to rewrite the lyrics, they should've just fit fleur-de-lis in there somewhere and been done with it. The same four elements make up our national coat of arms and there's nothing wrong with it.

 

The first four lines of Maple Leaf Forever are pretty jingoistic. And they planted the Union Jack (literally or figuratively) on the Plains of Abraham. The song has been pretty much irrelevant from the moment we got our new flag.

 

Well, I still like it. But my grandparents on both sides were staunch Anglicans and/or Orangemen, so I get it honestly.