Wither Canada Day

A belated Happy Canada/Dominion Day to our fellow North Americans. For foreign readers, there's not much different between a Yank and a Canuck. They have a slightly funny accent with words like abooout and such. They like hockey more than we do. But Canada has a baseball and NBA team and could support an NFL franchise if it really wanted to. It snows a lot more up there. 

Politically speaking Ontario is more or less like California. The Atlantic Provinces are kind of like our own New England and Appalachia combined. Out west, well, they're the Texans. British Columbia seems nice. The less said about Quebec the better. 

Like many Yanks we never used to think about Canada much. During the 1992 World Series between the Atlanta Braves and the Toronto Blue Jays we were like, 'Oh yeah....Toronto's in Canada.' During a pivotal series between the Blue Jays and the New York Yankees in August of 1993, Yankee fans booed Oh Canada. Mayor Giuliani apologized profusely. They split four games and the Blue Jays went on to win the World Series. Mrs. Stroock is a lifelong Philadelphia Phillies fan, so we won't talk about the 1993 World Series. 

Post 9/11 Mark Steyn was our window on Canada. We subscribed to MacCleans during the Sectiion-13 wars. It was a fine news magazine. Sometime in the mid-2000s we started reading Kathy Shaidle's Five Feet of Fury. We corresponded and eventually became FB friends, exchanging a message now and then. Sadly Kathy died from ovarian cancer this year.  We'll take some words of advice from her to the grave. 

There's some Canada in The Great Nuclear War of 1975, and we went to a hell of  a lot of effort to write about Canadian forces in World War 1990: Polish Storm. In fact, there's an entire Canadian division slugging it out with the Soviets. That was fun to do. Below, A Canada Day Friday Flag of sorts:

That Canada is long gone. We're not optimistic about Canada's future. A moron, man-boy prime minister whose real dad is Fidel Castro is up against a boring and irrelevant Tory leader. Don't get us started on Doug Ford and Jason Kenney. Bunch of tossers. Useless. Were we a Canadian conservative we'd stay home and let the party implode. Justin is on his way to a majority. Quebec Independence is a gigantic bluff. Why would the Qs* leave a nation over which they have veto power? No, out west there are some real rumblings. Those people are pissed. Ontario genuinely hates them and wants them to die.

As it happens, Donald Rumsfeld was President Ford's chief of staff and later secretary of defense. He is a mid-level character in The Great Nuclear War of 1975. There's plenty of political gamesmanship between Rumy and Rockefeller's own men, James Cannon (who wrote a history of the Ford Administration and whom we met a few times as he was a family friend) and Bob Parker. The spate of memorials brought on by Rumsfeld's death yesterday gives us plenty of fodder for adding depth and detail to the man.

*That is deliberate and calculated disrespect. Screw them.