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A Lack of Running Etiquette

To my knowledge, there are etiquette rules that apply when males are using urinals in restrooms. (Please bear with me here.) My older brother A is emphatic on this, and I asked IP to confirm it yesterday: when you walk into a bathroom and see one of the urinals occupied, you attempt to put at [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada, The Elegant Runner, To Ann Arbor, With Love

Canadian Humor Is Sublime . . .

But don’t worry if you don’t get the following skit, or any other skit from The Kids in the Hall for that matter. I believe, in order to get it, you have to either grow up 45 minutes from the Canadian border, go to school there, or just be kind of insane. My [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada

Tee-Oh

Having lived in Toronto, I can take in a few frames of a movie and declare: "Oh, that’s Toronto."
"How do you know?" will come the invariable suspicious question.
"Look, that’s Kipling, the end of the Bloor-Danforth line."  Or it’ll be "That’s the Bloor Cinema, I have so been in there!  I saw the Grease Singalong and [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada

Compare and Contrast

I hate to give the University of Toronto anything over the University of Michigan.  It really, really pains me to do so.  After all, the U-M was a bit kinder to me in terms of, oh, academic enlightenment.  That’s not to say I didn’t learn anything at Toronto - I certainly did - but the [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada

Reminiscing on Being Treated Like Shit by Canadians . . .

I read many, many blogs, and some of those are blogs written by expats. When expressing their determination to vote in this upcoming election (more often than not, for Kerry), they usually get trolls proclaiming that, because they moved away to another country, they are no longer American and cannot vote. Their rights [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada

Eat Fresh

Moments from Canada are always going to stay with me. It’s inevitable - I spent a year of my life there. While it’s quite obvious that I didn’t have fun there, there will always be those little moments where I remember exactly what it felt like to be an international student at the [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada

You Know You Hate Toronto When . . .

. . . you look up from your work just in time to see a shot of the lakefront, with the CN Tower shining proudly in the sunlight, and then make a sign of the cross as you exclaim “Ugh!” loud enough for your officemate to turn around curiously.
At least they didn’t show the gradute [...]

Filed under: Back in Old Canada