Hey TSC! Happy Canada Day!

[Parrothead]

Have a good one, eh!

I think I'll make myself a back bacon on a bun and crack open my first beer of the day.

Cheers!

[Thumper]

Take off, ya hosers.

[cid]

Up in da UP of Michigan, when I was young/bulletproof/full of p!$$'n'vinegar, I'd go to the dirt track races on Saturday night down to the fairgrounds about an hour's drive away (up there, that's LOCAL).

The parade lap always consisted of the fast qualifiers in Late Model and Hobby Stock making a slow lap, one flying Old Glory and the other flying the Maple Leaf, to the strains of the respective national anthems.

You know how hard you have to ride the brakes in a stock car to stay out for a two minute lap on a half mile track?

[FZR1KG]

Do any other US states have a day like this?

[The Supreme Canuck]

Same to you, Parrothead!

Had a good day downtown yesterday. Met a nice young lady from Korea here to learn English and another from Mexico - had to explain just what the hell a Governor General was. Also got to see Chris Hadfield sing Space Oddity (I've never seen anyone cheered so loudly at Canada Day, not even the Queen) and do a Q&A with NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn. Nice weather, good music, everyone smiling; yep, good day.

[Thumper]

Had a good day downtown yesterday. Met a nice young lady from Korea here to learn English and another from Mexico

When we visited last year it became obvious how whitebread boring our town is compared to Toronto.

Also got to see Chris Hadfield sing Space Oddity (I've never seen anyone cheered so loudly at Canada Day, not even the Queen) and do a Q&A with NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn.

That's awesome. I think he was a fabulous ambassador for science and the space program. Bowie apparently loved the version of the song Hadfield recorded from the ISS.

Nice weather, good music, everyone smiling; yep, good day.

Great when it all comes together isn't it?

[Rommie]

Also got to see Chris Hadfield sing Space Oddity (I've never seen anyone cheered so loudly at Canada Day, not even the Queen) and do a Q&A with NASA astronaut Tom Marshburn.

That's awesome. I think he was a fabulous ambassador for science and the space program. Bowie apparently loved the version of the song Hadfield recorded from the ISS.

Hadfield definitely was. Last year my sister organized the "Science Days" in Vancouver for the AAAS meeting (where they invite in members of the public) and he was seriously involved, and she's in a video about the day with him.

She never got me an autograph though.

[The Supreme Canuck]

Thumper:

Whitebread, eh? Funny, talking to my new Korean friend, she said that the people on the Hill for Canada Day were very diverse, but that the part of Ottawa that I'm from is very "Canadian." I was confused, and she explained that by "Canadian" she meant "white." Didn't even occur to me that that's what she meant, since "Canadian" means people of all races and cultures to me, but apparently that's not the perception abroad - we're just as whitebread to non-white foreigners, I guess. (To be fair, my area of Ottawa is very white - historically it's French Canadian - but using the word "Canadian" to mean "white" is still very strange to me)

Rommie:

That's very cool. I actually got to meet him when I was a kid - it was right after his Mir flight. He was just a fantastic guy, and he's been my favourite astronaut ever since. When the whole world blew up about him, I got to do the hipster "I liked him before he was cool" thing.