Olympic autopsy (part one)

Well, it's only been over for 24 hours and I miss it already, and I don't mean my pancakes and syrup.

It's been strange switching on the TV and finding no Olympics, but a remarkable final day ensured that the Games went out with a bang. First of all there was Canada's nail-biting overtime win in the hockey - Sidney Crosby's winning goal will now surely enshrine him as Canada's Geoff Hurst - but the real highlight had to be what was undoubtedly the most surreal closing ceremony ever.

It began with the prerequisite formalities: the entrance of the athletes, the speeches, the anthems, the lowering of the flag and the extinguishing of the flame. However, from that point on reality seemed to melt away as we were plunged into a Pythonesque array of stereotypical Canadian iconography.

William Shatner - whose mere presence should have set the surreality alarms going - set the tone by proclaiming that Canadians were the only race who knew how to make love in canoe, a group of camp, dancing mounties (think of the dance troupe at the end of Blazing Saddles, only dressed as RCMPs) upped the ante still further, and then a series of giant, It's A Knockout-style mounties, lumberjacks, beavers, moose, maple leaves and table hockey players paraded around the arena in an ever-growing display of Canadiana that Terry Gilliam would have been hard pushed to better.

Finally, Michael Bublé was wheeled into the stadium atop a giant Mountie hat which then proceeded to rise majestically into the air as he sang the final few bars of The Maple Leaf Forever. Had he then burst into I'm a Lumberjack and I'm OK the evening would have been truly complete, but as it was it was still good enough. The whole event was completely tongue-in-cheek (I think!) and personally I loved it, but the reaction at work the next day was very mixed. Some were amused, some were perplexed, some were embarrassed; how the rest of the world viewed it all remains to be seen.

I can't imagine the Americans indulging in such self-mockery, but I guess that's one of the reasons that I'm glad I live here rather than south of the border. Canada's ability to laugh at itself is one of its most endearing characteristics and one that I hope it never loses - a theme we shall return to in the next post - and the closing ceremony was a fitting end to what turned out to be a pretty good Games.

To be continued...

Connection Interrupted

"The network link was interrupted while negotiating a connection. Please try again."

The above phrase is rapidly becoming a mantra that I could do without having to read on a daily basis. I have now acquired a modem from Tamaani, the ISP here, but I think my re-christening of the service as 'Shatner-net' was premature. At...least...Bill...finishes...his...sentences. Getting online with Tamaani, at least at a reasonable hour, is next to impossible at the moment.

The problem is that the satellite signal that provides the internet connection has to be 'split' amongst all the users in town; the more people online at the same time, the further that signal has to be split up. Consequently, at peak times when everyone is online, the system simply grinds to a halt. Now, I realise that we are fortunate to have internet at all up here and yes, I fully appreciate the irony of using a blog to complain about my connection, but you would think that if we have the capability of faking a moon landing we would be able to provide a usable internet service in the North.

We have to pay a minimum of $70 a month for a service that is slow at the best of times, but at the moment that service is not fit for purpose. The number of users has now outstripped the available bandwidth, so Tamaani either needs to lower its prices or to invest its profits into improving the service. Problem is that Tamaani hold a monopoly in the North, so one wonders whether the incentive is there.

Finally, back to the modems themselves. For those of you unfamiliar with them, they look like the black monolith from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but on a vastly smaller scale (like Spinal Tap's Stonehenge). Now, whilst I was still in Kingston I visited the Bell outlet in the mall to see if they sold such modems and whether they would be compatible with Tamaani's service. The guy I spoke to didn't really know what type of modem I meant, so I used the 2001 description.

"2001? Never heard of it," was his reply.

I gave up.

Casting the net

Sunday 7^th September

I am now online, sort of, thanks to someone else's wireless network which is unsecured and cunningly named 'wireless'. The connection is of Shatneresque quality (see my first post), but I have been able to send and receive a few emails and catch up with the outside world. Andy Murray has made it to the US Open final, Lewis Hamilton has won a thrilling Grand Prix only to be demoted to third and England have snuck past the mighty Andorra by a couple of goals. Oh, and Stephen Harper has called a snap election for October, which should serve as the B-Movie to the one in the US in November (although as this is Canada, perhaps that ought to be an 'Eh-Movie'). I haven't missed much, then.

Still no cargo, so had to hand wash smalls and socks. It's a rock 'n' roll lifestyle up here.

Went down to the river with Dominick and Celine this afternoon, and enjoyed a fine couple of hours fishing, skimming stones and eating berries which Celine assured me weren't poisonous. If my blog entries end abruptly in the next day or so, I will know that she was wrong. The landscape by the river is truly beautiful, a fact that one forgets once the snow has come.

No fish were harmed during the writing of this post.

And so it begins...

Wednesday 3^rd September

Well, with all the decision making ability of Brett Favre I'm back in the North again, and after three years I thought it was about time I recorded my thoughts on paper, or the virtual paper of this blog at least. The regularity of updates will depend very much on the reliability of the internet which, at the moment, seems to be at its lowest in the time I've been here. I think rather than Tamaani, the service needs to be re-christened 'Shatner net' as downloading...even the...smallest file...is time consuming...and disjointed, much in the way that every word that comes out of dear Bill Shatner's mouth seems like...its...very...own...sentence.

So, it is with great anticipation that I await the arrival of both my cargo and my students as I cannot really function up here without either, although at this stage I would hesitate to place any bet on which might appear first. Maybe my next post will bring more news!