Last Thursday was the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River. Over 1,000 souls perished when the liner collided with a Norwegian coal ship. The story reminds me of the Eastland Disaster where a passenger ship flipped over in the Chicago river in 1915. Both disasters have been overshadowed by the Titanic and World War I, but are worth remembering.
Canada doesn’t celebrate Memorial Day like the US, but it is the 71st anniversary of the invasion campaigns in Sicily and Italy. The Italian campaigns have largely been over looked with the better known Normandy invasion in 1944. The Italian invasions were important in their own right (and led to Mussolini’s overthrow), but also were hard-fought opportunities to learn strategies and to battle-train troops. Canada had fewer troops in Sicily and Italy than other allies, but they frequently took on some of the most difficult assaults. The CBC Radio recently posted a live recording from the May 23rd battle to break the “Hitler” line, one of the last positions defending Rome. The 4:27-long audio clip is not overly gripping, but it is interesting to hear the nearby artillery fire and imagine the correspondent huddled in the half-damaged farmhouse to make the recording.
Saturday marked the 50th anniversary of the opening of the first Tim Hortons in Hamilton, Ontario. If you’re interested, just about any Canadian news source or website will have plenty of stories, highlights, anecdotes, tall tales, outright lies, and much much more (e.g., CBC, Globe & Mail, Toronto Sun). Instead of just linking to those, here’s a Curated Anthology of Tim Hortons. It was made a few months ago by Pilot Interactive as a self-promotional vanity site, but it still has some useful information. Foremost is the double-double:
Angry beaver delays traffic, roams around Miramichi. I don’t know if I can add much when the article title pretty well says it all.
FYI, Miramichi, New Brunswick is located about 250 km (150 mi) east of the Canadian border with Maine and 600 km (375 mi) from Quebec.
This has been brewing for a few years, but it has a great back story. In Nov 2012, Victor Briestensky stole the existing park district sign for Guelph Park and erected his own duplicate sign. As I recall, he initially kept quiet about it until “Dude Chilling Park” showed up on Google Maps. The Parks Board wasn’t amused and pulled down the original sign. There was a fair amount of publicity and notoriety after this, with even some talk of officially renaming the park. In Mar 2014, the Parks Board compromised and kept Guelph Park, but installed a new, donated, sign as a piece of public art.
So, why Dude Chilling Park? I think this picture should make that clear:
Reclining Figure by Michael Dennis
The Parks Board has a good summary and includes several interesting background documents. Inside Vancouver has pretty much the same story, but written a bit more colorfully.
I can’t say this will be the next Friday Cat Blogging, but I’m going to try.
The CBC reported on a runaway beer blimp in NB. From the article, this actually happened Saturday, but the inter-tubes are just now blowing up over it. The original tweet was re-tweeted only 5 times, but she just was featured on Deadspin.
Budweiser blimp #hockeystreet pic.twitter.com/ymzLeox1yh
— Erin Tarantino (@erincandy) April 26, 2014
UPDATE: The “Red Zeppelin” has been found!
