The Tyranny of Socks

So it's no secret that I'm still a little confused by Canadian TV schedules, but I just saw the first episode of Studio 60, which I thought was being broadcast on Monday evenings. All I really want to know is, did I see it a week late, a day early, or at more or less the right time, given the complicating factor of the Atlantic time zone?

The prairies do not, in fact, go on forever. Nor are they all that dull. What does go on forever are the forests and lakes, forests and then more forests, of the Canadian Shield. Forever. And boy, does that get dull. We had a moment of utter hysteria trying to play I Spy up on the northern leg of the Trans-Canada across Ontario, somewhere short of Cochrane, but we ran out of things after tree, telephone pole, wire, road, gravel, grass, cloud and sky. There weren't even any other cars.

Also, the license plate game is a lot less fun in Canada.

Oh, and a note to all Quebec drivers: Get over your god-damned selves. If I am driving 20 km/hr above the speed limit on a narrow, twisting road, you should not be tailgating me. It will not encourage me to drive faster. It will only piss me off. Don't you know that we Americans are dangerous, violent people? You are not, in fact, Jacques Villeneuve, and anyway, he died in a car crash.

Among the television highlights was a TV movie about the Halifax Explosion (the largest manmade explosion before the atom bomb, and the greatest civilian disaster of WWI--Halifax lost more civilians in that incident than it did soldiers in the entire war). The moral appeared to be: deregulation will lead to cowardly, incompetent French people blowing up your cities. (Vote Liberal.) This is either a great deal funnier if you know something about the recent Canadian election, or not funny at all.

We also saw a little bit of Alias in French. OMG, it was SO MUCH BETTER! Seriously. Sydney and Jack should always converse in French. She called him "papa" and it was so damn cute I can't even describe it.

Oh, and Tim Horton's. What's with that? The drive-through line at a Tim Horton's in Kenora caused an honest-to-god traffic jam on the road out of town.

But here's a more serious question. Canadians are famous among travelers in Europe for the habit of attaching little flag patches and labels to anything that will take a stitch or a tie, so I wasn't really surprised by the number of flags flying on businesses and homes everywhere we went. And because I've never spent a great deal of time in Canada before this trip, I've always seen the use of the Canadian flag as a nationalist statement, directed outward: that is, it indicates "this person/item is not British, Australian or (most important of all) American, but instead Canadian." I don't think Canadians mean to be offensive toward these other nations, so by and large I don't take offense. Anyway, then we got to Quebec, and the Canadian flag almost disappeared, to be replaced by the flag of Quebec, which was everywhere--although this impression was probably intensified by the fact that we were there during the St. Jean Baptiste fete. Now I'm wondering whether the Canadians among you can answer: is the flag-waving also directed inward? That is, is it also, or even primarily, a federalist statement, when used within the country?

The CBC radio was a lifesaver. Excellent and random. The news wasn't quite at the "Today Programme" level--nothing is--but the other programming was just as good as Radio 4. Yay! I have yet to figure out the newspapers, though. I thought that the Globe and Mail was the left-wing broadsheet, but from the editorials I couldn't tell. Although there was a lot of hand-wringing and concern, so probably it was.