There is that...

Yes, I am catching up on the whole blogging thing again... it's kind of like when you tape (or PVR or TiVo depending on your level of technological advancement) a TV show and then don't have time to watch it for, oh, say, two weeks or so.  Anyway, all that pent-up blogging is about to be released, buckle up:

1) Thanksgiving only comes twice a year - OK, I promised the Thanksgiving story, teased you even, and then.. silence.  So, here it goes.  Brett, Courtney, Ashley and I decided to make an American Thanksgiving dinner (seemed like the appropriate thing to do... when in Rome and all) and, as the household with the dishwasher and the kitchen which can comfortably fit more than one person, I volunteered my place as the preparation venue.  First the good news (1) I won (with Courtney) in Trivial Pursuit, although it was perilously close (it took us TEN (yes, that's one-zero) attempts to get our arts and entertainment pie... very sad... all I can do in that category is just wait patiently for the inevitable CBC question) (2) The meal was great - I did a roasting chicken and dressing, which I must (as an unbiased observer) say was juicily scrumptious (I rock on poultry - and after dissecting rats, the whole neck removal/cleaning process seemed WAY less gross than previously), with the rest taken care of by the Wilson/van Veller clan.  Here is a picture of the teamwork you want to see happening on such an event - Brett and I lifting the bird out of the roasting pan prior to my slice and dice job. 

And now, the bad news.  I have a garbage disposal (or, as it is known to select persons among us, a "garberator") in my kitchen sink (not the bad news in and of itself, but stay with me here).  Having never had access to one of these contraptions before, I am extremely tentative in using it (almost scared in fact) and have thus restricted my use of the garberator to disposing of rice I've soaked off the bottom of my rice cooker pan.  Brett and Courtney, on the other hand, grew up with a garberator and thus have no fear in dumping vegetable peels, meal scraps, small appliances, etc. down the chute and letting the grinding begin.  However, here's a helpful note to those of you who have garberators at home: never drop a whole uncooked sweet potato down the chute.  Why you ask?  Well, your sink backs up and, when your dishwasher empties out, you end up having to apply teamwork of a very different kind:

We managed to keep the kitchen from flooding (by about one inch or so in water height... phew) and the apartment fix-it man took care of it the next day, so all is well that ends well I suppose (more pics here, more for the benefit of the Wilsons whom I am told are avid blog readers).
 
2) I am Premium... for one afternoon - The other nice thing about American Thanksgiving is that virtually everybody goes somewhere else for the weekend... so, if you are sticking around the city, you get your own version of "Thanksgiving leftovers".  I lucked into some very nice leftovers this year when the drummer on our worship team was heading home to Texas for the holiday and just happened to have four Premium Club Boston Bruins tickets to spare.  Here is, as he told me later, his thought process for offering the tickets to me: 1) Todd is Canadian  2) Therefore, he must like hockey.  Stereotypical?  Yes.  But correct.  The seats were amazing - right behind the local cable channel's intermission studio (the side of my head was on TV - I can't tell you how difficult it was to shop the next week with hundreds of people stopping me to say "hey, you're the guy whose side of head was on TV!") behind the Boston goal with tall, padded seats and a bench top table in front of us to support our free (!) food and beverages.  Although I realize that it is bad form to comment negatively on free things, I have to give at least a small critique on the very strange mix of free food provided at the Garden - nachos with cheese, waffles, brownies, and - wait for it - fried cream cheese.  Yes, that was not a typo - fried cream cheese.  Unfortunately, the subsequent required emergency coronary bypass surgery was not provided free to Premium Club members.  The game was a bit of a stinker (5-2 Boston loss to Carolina) but you can't quibble with free.  I actually ended up spending the rest of the afternoon touring Boston with the lab tech I work with at MIT who came to the game with me - it was kind of neat to get to know somebody you work with in a very different environment.  We ended up catching the lighting of the Macy's Christmas tree, which was a bit of a bust really (it really can't hold a candle to New York's tree lighting event) but still a legitimate "Boston experience".

3) Sister in the house - Ainsley came down to visit for six days, which was a lot of fun.  I think we did a fairly successful job of seeing the entire city of Boston over the one weekend I had off (although she discovered Newbury Street, the fancy shopping district, by herself, which is actually good given that one of my "rules to live by" is "never go shoe shopping with a girl, in particularly Ainsley").  In two days, we managed to visit (1) The Museum of Science (including the BodyWorlds exhibit which was at the Ontario Science Centre last year - real bodies which have been "plastinated" and posed, showing the actual muscles, nerves, and bone structures as they would be oriented while doing specific activities - really interesting, although I got a bit obsessed with finding the sciatic nerve we use to do nerve block experiments on our rats in each specimen)  (2) The New England Aquarium (very fun - particularly the Deep Ocean Tank, which featured sharks, three very cute turtles, and (my personal favourite) three yellow-and white speckled fish who just did laps in a group for the entire five hours we were at the aquarium... we dubbed them "the boys" and checked in every so often to make sure they were still going at it... the jellyfish were also pretty amazing)  (3) a classical music concert featuring one of my friends from church who is a professional cellist (really good actually)  (4) dinner at Ye Olde Oyster House, America's oldest continually operating restaurant and frequent haunt of J.F.K. (amazingly good)  (5) desserts at the famous Mike's Pastry Shop in the North End (also amazingly good)  (6) a walking tour of downtown Boston and Cambridge (always fantastic, although we didn't make it to my favourite spot, Beacon Hill... next time).  I very much enjoy being a tour guide, so it was a lot of fun.  We also caught the Bruins game during the week, which (ironically enough given my Premium Club access the previous week) we watched sitting in the VERY LAST ROW of the TD Banknorth Garden (and I mean last - the back of our seats was the concrete wall of the arena).  My, my, how the mighty can fall so quickly... but the game was WAY better, decided in a shootout and ending in a Boston victory despite Ainsley's cheering for Tampa Bay "because they were cuter". 

4) Animal Wrasslin' - My lab work is still moving along nicely - I am now completely done experiments for my first paper from my post-doc, which I think will be reasonably good (we have a nice story and, even better, understand why things worked as they did).  My materials were, last week, used in a rabbit experiment to try to prevent adhesions between the peritoneal wall and the intestines following bowel surgery and was found to be amazingly (and surprisingly) bioadhesive, which is very interesting and potentially very useful (although the actual peritoneal adhesion prevention result was, although hardly disasterous, not a home run).  We have also finally figured out how to miniaturize our drug delivery membranes so we can test them in our oscillating magnet, which is very exciting (we already know they work if you heat them up in a water bath instead of using a magnet).  If that works, we will implant our device in a rat and see if we can numb and, uh, "un-numb" the leg of a rat by applying an oscillating magnetic field on the rat's leg.  I am getting kind of excited about this project as I see it come together - this has a huge potential to make a big difference to people with chronic joint pain, potentially allowing them to trigger the release of anaesthetic locally by just holding a magnet to their joint for a short period of time (great, that is, as long as you aren't wearing a pacemaker).  I think there is definitely potential for patents/very good papers for me out of this too, which would be a nice side-benefit.  I am getting deeper and deeper into the lab though... I am now working on six projects (yee!), am co-writing two grant applications for February (one as kind of the primary scientific guy), and am about to recruit my first full-time undergraduate slave, er I mean, "research assistant", so things are definitely picking up.  On the other hand, doing animal research definitely keeps you humble... over the last week and a half alone, I got in a wrestling match with a 10-pound New Zealand white rabbit while we were trying to fix his bandages (I won, although the decision was closer than you might have expected) and (in our last nerve block experiment) handled three rats which, on average, generated 3-4 poops per test cycle (which takes about three minutes and is repeated 7-8 times over the course of a full experiment).  As a chemical engineer, I am seriously tempted to try to work out the mass balance on these rats to figure out how that prodigious waste production is even possible, but the proof is in the pudding (pun not intended) I suppose.  I am a little relieved actually that all my animal work is done for the time being (i.e. tested and dissected) and, as of Wednesday (knock on wood), all my cell work should be temporarily finished, which means I can head home for Christmas without having to worry about any babysitting duties.  Actually, I think that working with animals is very good preparation for real parenting... feeding, constant attention, and cleaning up the toxic waste (we will certainly leave the dissection part out of the metaphor though).

5) Geek Alert I: A couple weeks ago, I got sucked into purchasing a "lifetime subscription" to live streaming internet satellite television, which advertised access to several Canadian TV stations.  Although somewhat skeptical given that the provider would not let me know which 3000 channels you supposedly get access to until you actually sign up, I was sufficiently interested in attempting to get access to Raptors games without paying NBAtv's $179 annual fee (I like the Raptors a lot, but not that much) that I bit.  Turns out that among the roughly 20 Canadian channels included in the package, the only one I had even HEARD of before was CPAC, the Canadian Parliamentary Access Channel.  Now, normal people would be fairly upset at life at this point... I, on the other hand, was actually kind of pumped that I would get to watch the Liberal leadership convention a couple of weekends ago.  I can actually remember watching the convention where Jean Chretien beat Paul Martin for Liberal leader back in 1991, at which point I was (doing the math)... well, 13, and I have been a bit of a convention junkie ever since.  Actually, when you subtract the 90% of the time where people are standing around and/or waving banners and chanting for no apparent reason, political conventions are some of the best pure theatre you can get on TV, and this one was also pretty sweet.  I am actually pleasantly surprised by the choice of Stephane Dion, who has always struck me as an intelligent and (for a Liberal anyway :) very principled person who is willing to do something risky if he thinks it is right (see: Clarity Act).  The next election is shaping up as pretty interesting, with two (and potentially three, if one includes the somewhat intriguing Green Party) relatively decent party choices led by actually intelligent people - a rare confluence of events indeed.  This is in sharp contrast to my opinion of the result had Bob Rae won (considering the first time around was such a rousing success, who wouldn't want an encore, only on a larger scale???)

6) Geek Alert II: Saw this on a shirt at MIT - if you can figure out what it means, you really belong down here.  Feel free to share your guesses (and rationale for the guesses) in the comments - I won't explain it unless somebody at least tries :)

7) Church Stuff - I am definitely feeling more at home in my church here.  I led my first small group this past week (it was like old home week after doing the Philpott group for 2 1/2 years) and have been to a Christmas party and a games night over the past two weekends, both of which were quite fun.  It's not quite the level of connectedness I had at Philpott just yet, but I definitely feel like I am "in the loop" now, which is definitely a nice feeling.  They are now trying to recruit me to lead a small group in the winter, which I am not sure I have time to actually pull off in addition to my other MIT and church commitments with worship team etc., but I have definitely noticed a pattern in that jumping into doing things really has a huge payoff in more ways than one, so we'll see what happens. 

8) A Cultural Experience - Periodically, I miss the last bus out of MIT back to my place and end up walking home through Cambridge's Central Square, which has been termed by one of my co-workers as "slightly scuzzy".  This is, of course, "scuzzy" only by Cambridge standards, which is really not that scuzzy at all (car break and enters are considered "major crime" here).  As a result, I am totally comfortable walking through at virtually any hour of the day.  However, this past week, I had an interesting encounter which backed up the "slightly scuzzy" label.  I was stopped by a black man trying to collect money for a "racism prevention" centre in the Downtown Crossing area of Boston to "fight" the philosophies of Louis Farrakhan, a Malcolm X contemporary who (according to the guy trying to convince me to donate) "pledged to destroy the white race in a pool of blood" (a quote which I cannot find any credible evidence for, although Farrakhan is on record as stating "white people are potential humans - they haven't evolved yet" and "murder and lying comes easy for white people").  He handed me a well-worn laminated photocopied sheet "describing" the organization and claimed this was "the last night" for such donations to be received.  Now I would not give any money on the street to any organization I had never heard of, let alone the $50 he was trolling for to an organization whose goals I was sensing as somewhat questionable, so I tried to extract myself from the conversation by playing my "starving student" card (mostly true) despite sympathizing with his stated goal to "end racism".  As a walked away, the guy heckled me and told me to enjoy the bloodbath to come in which I would presumably be dismembered by the Farrakhan nation along with all the other white people in America.  I think I would ultimately view the experience as equal parts scary and oddly amusing, but it does point to something I have most certainly noticed since arriving even in this supposedly "enlightened" corner of the United States: racial tensions are very, very real (even here in Boston, the cradle of the anti-slavery movement) to an extent I have never even begun to experience in Canada.  Two examples (1) after approximately 30 trips to the local Shaw's grocery store (roughly equivalent to Loblaw's/Fortino's), I have NEVER been served by a non-black or Hispanic worker (to put that into perspective, Boston is demographically a more predominantly white city than Toronto or even Hamilton); (2) in our lab of 70 people total, we have 7 Canadians as well as Dutch, French, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Indian, Israeli, and (insert country here); however we have ZERO black or Hispanic scientists.  There is a real economic divide and, particularly with the black population, what seems to be a very deep-seeded, historical bitterness which provides a very different vibe from the Canadian experience.  I think this is one instance where, even given our obvious historical advantages in terms of slavery, Canada has clearly done a more proficient job at erasing many of the boundaries between the races, particularly among the younger generation.   

9) Rant:  At the risk of repeating myself, I was out Christmas shopping north of Boston last weekend and am more convinced than ever that Bostonians are the worst drivers on the face of the planet.  During the thirty minute drive (covering an uninspiring total distance of approximately... three miles), I was nearly in ~18 accidents, none of which were remotely my fault.  Based on this experience, I now present a (not) actual transcript from a typical driving examination in Boston:

EXAMINER: "OK, let's get started.  Turn on the car"
EXAMINEE: "OK dude" <examinee proceeds to try to insert the blunt end of their house key into the cigarette lighter>
EXAMINER: "Congratulations, here's your license.  Drive safe!"

Never again will I complain about Toronto drivers... until, of course, I do, but at least then I will appreciate their relative average sanity.

OK, here's my new year's resolution: same volume of blogging, better distribution of blogging.  If you survived up to here, congratulations, you have way too much time on your hands :) 

I had no intention of blogging tonight until I saw this story and got mad.  (Advance apologies to anybody who reads this blog and has no interest in politics)

I am very proud of being a Canadian.  Particularly living in the U.S., I find that I bring up the fact that I am Canadian to virtually everybody I talk to through some backhanded way (I have surprised myself at my innate creativity at bringing it up in totally unrelated conversations).  However, I have never (and will never) consider myself a hypenated Canadian.  I am not an Ontario-Canadian, even though I have lived in Ontario my whole life.  I am not an Anglophone-Canadian, even though English is the language I speak.  I am not a British-Canadian, even though that is my cultural heritage.  I am not even a Christian-Canadian, even though that is my faith.  This is by no means to say that these addendums to being Canadian are not important to me; I am proud of where I grew up and what my background is, and my faith is a huge part of who I am, much moreso than any other of these hyphens could possibly be.  However, if somebody was to ask me my national identity, I would answer simply and without any hesitation: "Canadian".  I do not understand how anybody who has the privilege of living in Canada could possibly answer in any other way.  Indeed, I was happy to read an article a couple of weeks ago that the government was reviewing whether or not Canada should allow dual citizenships - I do not believe that you can truly hold an equal allegiance and responsibility to two nations (who would you cheer for in a sporting event?  A slightly non-serious example of this, but it drives home the point).  However, as of tonight, the government and indeed the whole Parliament of Canada has effectively decided that being Canadian isn't really that important.  By effectively endorsing a motion recognizing that "Quebeckers constitute a nation within Canada", our elected representatives have more or less decided that Canada is little more than a filing cabinet, housing all the distinct file folders but of no particular inherent importance itself.  Why does this tick me off so much?

(1) This smacks of political opportunism.  With Tory poll numbers dropping in Quebec and the Liberals consumed in a debate on Quebec's nationhood, the Tories brining forth kind of motion calls out the Liberal divisions and may well buy a few nationalistic ridings in Quebec in the next election.  Thus, I'm sure Harper will be applauded for a political masterstroke in some quarters, and perhaps (politically) it was - the people who hate this will probably vote for him anyway given the lack of alternatives on the right.  However, with a few recent exceptions (the income trust decision comes to mind), our politicians are almost exclusively consumed with buying votes as opposed to doing what everybody knows is right in the long term.  You cannot tell me that this motion, constitutional or not and however cleverly it may be worded, will not lead to (1) increased weakening the central government to the point at which it really has no point any more and (2) more demands from Quebec (not that I blame them for a second - when the national policy on demands is capitulation, I'd keep making demands too).  What appals me even more is that it sounds like, outside of the Bloc Quebecois (who are upset about the "within Canada" part, boo hoo), not a single MP will vote against the motion - that's right, not a single one of our elected MP's in our parliament will stand up and say "Canada is the only nation we should be talking about".  The American congress is pretty messed up in its own right, but I cannot even dream of this kind of thing getting debated here in any form without getting laughed and booed off the floor (and kudos to them for it).  I think politicians would be surprised how many people would vote for them if they acted based on principle instead of calculated strategies to win votes. 

(2) The Liberals have spent the last four months of what is supposedly a brainstorming and reinvention period of picking a new leader arguing whether Quebec is a nation.  Now, Canada's parliament is spending time talking about the same thing.  Perhaps the most maddening thing about it all is that, in all these discussions, nobody has agreed what exactly a nation is (is it a civic nation?  a linguistic nation?  a cultural nation?  a political nation?) or what exactly Quebeckers are (only French Canadians?  if so, are other French Canadians living in other provinces in or out?  are English-speaking, British-heritage Montrealers in or out?).  So let's review: this means that we have devoted approximately one third of a year of our political discourse to discussing whether or not we agree with a statement which may mean about 16 different things depending on who says it and thus has no real meaning besides dividing us into camps.  As far as I am concerned, I want my government to take care of three things: (1) Maintaining or improving our economic standard of living (i.e. innovation, education, infrastructure, economic management)  (2) Maintaining or improving our personal standard of living (i.e. health care, the environment, public safety); (3) Representing our interests and values in the world (i.e. foreign affairs, defence).  So, as our productivity continues to fall behind that of our major competitors, as our funding for research and development as a percentage of GDP continues to fall in relation to other countries (admittedly, a pet issue of mine given my personal stake in it), as we continue to increase our greenhouse gas emissions in direct violation of an international agreement we signed, as health care costs spiral upwards at a rate far in excess of inflation, as our population ages to place unprecedent demands on our pension system and on our skilled labour force, we have chosen to spend time debating a semantic question which has consumed political conversation in our country for at least half of the past 25 years.  What is the point?  How does this conversation enhance our national interest?  How does this bring us together to face the challenges we have as a country?  How does this improve our lives?

OK, enough political ranting for one night - back to your regularly-scheduled, personal anecdote blogging in the very near future (I've got stories ranging from graduation to hockey to eggs, it's good stuff).

OK, I'm finally going to reward you 6-10 loyal people who are (somewhat inexplicably given recent history) visiting this blog every day only to find absolutely nothing new of interest.  I have been very crummy at updating recently because I have, in the last three weeks, gone from working on two projects to working on five projects.  This is good from a "learning new stuff" perspective; not so good from a "free time" perspective.  One additional complication is that most of the work I've been doing recently is biological (either animal studies or cell culture experiments) which, unlike the polymers and other chemicals I am more used to working with, are somewhat needy in terms of very regular and somewhat extensive attention.  Adding to this workload fun is the fact that I have now become one of the favourite manuscript reviewers of the American Chemical Society.  For those of you who aren't familiar with how the academic game works, the best description of whether you are successful or not as a professor is the phrase "publish or perish".  So, people submit manuscripts of highly various quality to literally thousands of scientific journals, most of which are sent out for review by 2-3 "experts" in the field.  Well, I am now considered to be an "expert" on hydrogels (which alone makes me highly suspicious of the entire review process).  In the last three weeks, I have received three manuscripts which I am supposed to read through with a fine-tooth comb and give a recommendation concerning publication.  Basically, this means that my opinion has either a 33% or 50% weighting on whether or not somebody gets a paper published and, by extension (eventually at least) gets promoted, tenured, etc.  As a result, each review takes a huge amount of time, requiring careful checking of not only the paper in question but also previous publications by the author (to ensure they are not double-dipping with the same data in different journals - something I actually caught one guy on before) and other publications in the field (to make sure the data is truly novel).  Interestingly, one of the papers I reviewed copied an entire paragraph verbatim from a paper I wrote (without referencing me)... tough break for that guy (although made my decision much easier).  It's actually kind of funny how the system can work and how lucky/unlucky you may get.  I actually got sent the same paper THREE TIMES - each time for a different, less good journal after I had rejected it previously and each time totally unchanged from the original version despite the two pages of comments I had sent in the previous reviews.  The last time I saw the paper, I returned the favour and sent back exactly the same review I had sent in the previous time (paper hadn't changed, why should my comments?)  I also got one of my papers rejected because one guy who obviously didn't like my supervisor basically trashed my paper for almost entirely unreasonable reasons - it can be a very personal process (although I actually ended up getting the paper accepted in a better journal at the end of the day anyway, so it turned out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise).  Anyway, enough whining about being busy/shop talk... on to some more interesting random stuff:

- Today I spent four hours doing neurological testing on diarrhetic rats.  For those of you who have not had the pleasure of being downwind of a diarrhetic rat, consider yourselves lucky.

- Becoming a post-doctoral fellow or a professor is hardly the wisest economic choice in the world.  They are both relatively demanding jobs (although the travel and relative freedom of what you are doing and when you are doing it are definite perks) and is relatively low-paying in comparison to jobs demanding similar time commitments and education levels.  In order to make up for the sacrificed income potential, the golden calf of academia is consulting, which can literally pay you hundreds or thousands of dollars for your opinion and/or a few hours of work on a particular project.  Last week, my pediatric surgeon boss pulled me into his office and asked me three questions (1) was I happy working in his group (answer: yes)  (2) were my parents rich (answer: two teachers, so not so much, particularly by MIT parent standards)  (3) would I like to be a materials design consultant for a company trying to deliver a therapeutic protein to joints to treat arthritis, a position requiring a limited time commitment and providing a fairly serious chunk of change in compensation (answer: well, duh yes!)  So, while I was once potentially going to lose money during my stay here, now I will definitely come out ahead - assuming I can confirm that my visa status allows me to receive money from an American company (still not confirmed!).  I would have probably done it (and indeed, more casually, have been doing it) for free anyway, even just to have the experience of working on a corporate project - I have always just been doing my own thing, which has a much different vibe.  So, this seems like a pretty exciting(and somewhat lucrative) turn of events, provided the Department of Homeland Security values my scientific advice as much as the company at least thinks it might.

- I attended a homemade Korean buffet dinner last weekend which was surprisingly good.  It is kind of weird that every other country in the southeast Asia region has had its food exported in a wildly successful manner to North America, yet I could not have named a single Korean dish prior to that evening.  To be fair, I probably still couldn't name a single dish since they were all denoted by incomprehensible multi-syllabic names a mile long.  However, I was very pleasantly surprised - kind of a mix between Japanese (featuring sushi-like kelp rolls, only without the uncooked meat which always grosses me out) and Chinese and not in violation of either of Todd's Two Rules of Eating: (1) no extraordinarily hot foods  (2) no internal organs. 

- A couple of interesting articles I've come across recently: (1) Can a football coach passively participate in a pre-game prayer prior to a high school football game while still upholding the principles of freedom of religion?  Good question.  (2) Many Canadians seem to think that our vaunted "role in the world" is to avoid picking sides, being the "good guy" if you will, helping out with peacekeeping forces when required to rebuild countries but never engaging in combat for a particular cause.  However, Lester Pearson (the former Canadian prime minister who literally invented peacekeeping and has the Nobel Peace Prize to prove it) seemed to think otherwise.  I couldn't agree with the premise of the article (and Pearson's viewpoint) more - it is not only impractical but also morally untenable to be "neutral" in a world which really does have good guys and bad guys (or at least whiter and darker shades of grey guys).  Sometimes wearing a blue beret and shaking hands with civilians in the streets just isn't enough if we are going to be taken seriously in the world and if we are truly interested in doing the "right" thing.  A very timely article in the wake of Rememberance Day/Veteran's Day last week - I missed not having a poppy to wear this year.

- As many of you know, I am a bit of a political buff, so it killed me to be living here and not having a vote in the midterm elections that happened last week.  Although the house of representatives and U.S. Senate races get the big national media play, the most prestigious race around here was for the state governor.  Unbelievably, seeing as this is Massachusetts , the incumbent governor was a Republican (probable 2008 presidential candidate Mitt (yes, Mitt) Romney), the ONLY elected Republican in the ENTIRE STATE, state or federal level.  He wasn't running for re-election (too busy traversing the country making fun of Massachusetts to try to win votes in other states for his presidential bid) and the Democratic candidate ended up winning, a seemingly decent guy (if not incredibly vague) and the second black governor in U.S. history.  It is absolutely unbelievable to watch some of the election ads that run here though (makes the "guns in our cities" and Chretien's face ads look like amateur hour) - you can be appalled along with me here if you wish.  In Massachusetts, if the ads were to believed, we got to choose between a Clinton floozie who defends serial rapists and wants to give illegal immigrants driver's licenses (~1/3 true) and a cronyism-obsessed second banana who was partially responsible for the panel falling off one of the highway tunnels in downtown Boston due to her incompetence (~1/2 true) - no wonder people are depressed about politics.  At any rate, I think that the Democratic sweep (and, even more importantly, the Rumsfeld resignation) was what had to happen here - something had to give in the wake of the disaster that is Iraq policy and hopefully the increased diversity of opinion in Washington will come up with some better ideas on how to fix some of the problems without bankrupting the country.  The interesting thing about the whole process is how oblivious most Americans are in terms of how closely their elections are watched around the world.  There are literally hundreds of millions of people around the world who would kill to have a vote in a U.S. election, but almost nobody here really seemed to care that much about the election at all.  I noticed that CBC Newsworld actually devoted more hours of coverage to the election than ABC, NBC, CBS, and Fox, which is kind of telling. 

- And finally, I am headed back to Hamilton on Wednesday to "officially" become a Doctor in McMaster's convocation on Friday.  I actually won the Governor General's Gold Medal, which is kind of the "best thesis" award for the university amongst all Ph.D. students who convocated in the same period, which is fairly exciting actually (however, I would hate to be on that committee... comparing my thesis, 280 pages of math and chemistry, to an English thesis on "The impact of rodents on character development in Shakespeare's early tragedies" and picking a winner... yikes!)  This means I also have to attend a banquet on Thursday night, which is nice in a way (free food is always good.. I am still a grad student at heart after all)although probably somewhat uninteresting considering I am likely to know absolutely nobody there and most people there will have little interest in talking to me.  Either way though, I am looking forward to returning to Canada and saying hello to all you Hamiltonians (as well as picking up some Canadian-only food staples I am craving... who knew that Libby's Deep Browned Beans are truly a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable food item???).  I expect to be called "Most Honorable Doctor Sir" from now on though, just so you are warned

I have a bunch of other stuff I want to write about too, but I am getting tired and rat dissections await early tomorrow, so I will leave you in suspense. - keep checking up, you loyal 6-10 readers!

Tonight I turned on the evening news to find out that a Canada-related political story was near the front of the headlines.  Now, typically, to say that Canada is even on the radar here (even in this, one of the most liberal states in the country and a state only 3 hours or so driving from the Quebec border) would be inaccurate, so I was pretty pumped when I heard this.  Would it be a story about softwood lumber, explaining the Canadian perspective on this trade dispute?  Perhaps clarifying that the 9/11 terrorists did NOT cross from Canada (something that about 30% of Americans apparently still believe?)  Maybe something about how Canada is supporting the U.S. in Afghanistan?  Maybe the fact that we are America's biggest and most important trading partner?  Or, even better, something about how our two countries can disagree politically while at the same time sharing a common heritage and values?

Nope.

Peter MacKay, our interprid potato-farming, Belinda-broke-his-heart-romantic foreign affairs minister, and Condoleeza Rice, American secretary of state, may be dating!  Aww, aren't they cute together! <cue anchor fawning>
Condi loves the Maritimes!  Condi loves sleeping in the Atlantic Breeze!  Petey takes her for a spin around his home town!  That handshake and alternate cheek kiss certainly looked "hearty"!
Newscaster inserts joke that Peter MacKay proposes development of "bilateral relations" <cue hearty chuckle>

Yep, that's the important information you need to know, right there. 

Sigh. 

And we wonder why so few people in either country knows anything about and/or pays any attention to so many of those "less important" issues, like, say, trade, public safety, and world affairs.