I lived and worked on the east coast of Nova Scotia which is going to get whalloped with Hurricane Juan today.

I was on a ferry out of Bar Harbour Maine, heading to the province when the tale end of a hurricane hit. Waves were so high they washed over the ferry….crew and the few passengers huddled in the lounge with barf bags. We went under a few times and didn’t think we were coming back up. I haven’t been on a boat since. Even hardened travelled truckers who took that route regularly hadn’t been through something that bad.

I’ll never forget lurching to the radio room to contact the station I was headed to. The handrails were useful when the movement of the ferry struggling through the storm lifted you off your feet.
I’d been on the road in the US for the week, and hadn’t been paying attention to the news. The radio operator got me through to the station, and I discovered the ferry was the news. So I did a report. We had, among other things been blown off course and were being monitored by the Canadian and US coast guards.

There were a few more hurricanes that hit while I was in the province, but at least I was on land.

To all my friends in Nova Scotia……stay safe.

Italy
A massive blackout hit 57 million people in Italy overnight. The Italians are blaming the French, not unlike the US and Canada blaming each other when 50 million experienced a blackout last month. Britian also went through one this month and didn’t blame anyone.
Denmark and Sweden experienced a massive blackout last week.
The French are blaming Switzerland, and Switzerland is blaming the weather.
It took four seconds for the power to go down. Water supplies are affected, and most of Italy is still without electricity.

Canada is cautiously ‘cool’
You need a premium account to find out why an article in The Economist says Canada is cool. We are so not used to being seen this way, the CBC picked it up.

The United States takes 88 per cent of Canada’s exports, the article said. There was no mention of how a lower American dollar and a rising Canadian currency is now helping the U.S. find export markets.

“A decade ago, as you well know, the public finances were a mess,” Mike Reid of The Ecomomist told the CBC. “The debt was spiralling out of control. The economy was in something of a slump. The mood is entirely different today,”

On the social front, the magazine said Canadians are more confident these days, and Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government has shown a kind of “boldness” by trying to decriminalize marijuana and legalize same-sex marriages.

“Today’s Canada is neither boring nor so exciting that it is on the brink of disintegration,” the magazine said. “Indeed, a cautious case can be made that Canada is now rather cool.”

Colby Cosh makes a good case for Americans and Canadians to stop seeing any ‘anti-Americanism’ in Canada as nothing more or less than an historical reality when each country chose it’s destiny.

Strictly hypothetical case for you: two neighbouring colonies, largely alike in ethnic makeup, split off from a great empire and adopt separate political systems. Now wouldn’t you expect the smaller of the pair to insist on, and even occasionally to reinforce, its behavioral and cultural differences from the larger? The Americans, let us recall, are the schismatics in this historic arrangement–the ones who broke off from British North America in the name of republican principles. Since these principles were formulated against a background of resistance to monarchy, and remain quintessential to the American character today, whose “identity” is really defined by whom here? Observe how American foreign-policy framers sometimes behave as though they’re allergic to monarchies the way some kids are to peanuts.

I’ve had the anti-american label stuck on me by American pundits. It says way more about what media American bloggers consume and believe than it does about Canada and Canadians.