Not To Be Trusted With Knives

1. “O Canada,” as we know it, isn’t the original song. There have been different version and the line that was recently brought into question (i.e., “in all thy sons command”)¹ wasn’t always in there.  Other lines have included “May stalwart sons, and gentle maidens rise,” and “”thou dost in us command.”
2. You can build a computer on Apple.com that costs more than $125,000.
3. Canada will be getting plastic money (instead of the paper we now use) by next year.
4. Flu viruses can last on paper money for up to 17 days!
5. No matter how many bowls of water you have sitting around the apartment, cats prefer to drink out of your water glass.

1. though I heard on the radio that the Government of Canada, who proposed changing it, has already backtracked and said they won’t change it [↩]

You could not have written a better script if you tried. Canada loses to the USA in the preliminary round – needs to avenge this defeat. Beloved hometown goalie in net. The Americans tie up the game with only 30 seconds left to go in regulation!  And then young superstar Crosby, who hadn’t done much during the tournament, scores right when we most need it! And the crowd goes WILD!!!!!!!

And go wild they did!  I was watching the game with some friends at The Vogue Theatre on Granville and let me tell you, the crowd went crazy!

Everyone was yelling and jumping and hugging random strangers and we all poured out on Granville Street after we watched the medals being given out and I’ve never seen so many people in my life as were on Granville Street today!  Pictures don’t really do it justice, but this is sort of what it looked like:

People as far as you could see in every direction.  There were quite a few cops out, but they looked a bit at a loss – I mean, there were thousands of people in the streets, but no one was doing anything wrong!  We were yelling and cheering and chanting “Crosby! Crosby!” and singing “O Canada” and playing music and dancing and high fiving anyone and everyone – including the cops! – and when we got to the corner of Granville and Robson it was an absolutely crush of people – like the biggest mosh pit ever.  People were crowd surfing in the street!  There were people climbing light poles:

We enjoyed the crowd for a while and then grabbed some food and then headed back to the Vogue to watch the Closing Ceremonies. And when I left near the end, the street were still full of happy, happy celebrating Canadians¹!

I can honestly say that this is an experience that I won’t soon forget!

Also I have to say congratulations to all our amazing Canadian athletes²!  The most gold medals by a country in an Olympic games – that’s pretty freaking amazing!  As Chris put it in her blog posting, we own part of the podium – the gold part!!!

1. And, in a typical Vancouver scene, I saw cops dumping out some guy’s beer, while not batting an eyelash at the fact that the entire downtown core smelled like pot! [↩]
2. What? They could be reading this.  You don’t know that they aren’t [↩]

Ok, so that was a close hockey game! Canada had a nice, comfortable 3-0 lead and then the Slovaks scored two and I nearly died of five heart attacks¹ . But thanks to Roberto Luuuuuuuongo² and his awesome goaltending³, we are going to the gold medal game!

Here’s a photo of me watching the game at Robson Square:

Props to the nice volunteers who were handing out the plastic ponchos!  It kept me from being entirely soaked – I was just nearly entirely soaked.

1. I totally stole this line from @enniscath.  Because it perfectly sums it up [↩]
2. as an aside, I love watching hockey games where Roberto Luongo is playing with someone who has never seen him play before. Whenever he makes a save, the entire crowd stays yelling “Loooooooou!” and the new person gets very confused, “Why is everyone booing him?” [↩]
3. I just typed that as “goldtending” at first. Freudian slip! [↩]

The internets gods have finally deemed me worthy enough to have my very own internets connection in my very own home.  And what a great night for that to happen.  Canada – and Canadian women in particular – kicked some ass at the Olympics tonight and I got to watch it all via the Internet streamed broadcast!  My Internet hookup came just in time to watch the Canadian men kicked some Russian ass at hockey – you know, *Canada’s* sport.  Then I saw the double medals – gold and silver – in women’s bobsleigh and the silver in women’s short track speed skating (3000 m relay). Combine those with Ashleigh McIvor’s gold medal in women’s ski crossClara Hughes’ bronze medal in speed skating in the afternoon and that’s a pretty good haul for the day!

Is 33 too old to take up bobsleigh?

Go Canada Go!

I don’t know much about figure skating, but I had heard that Canada’s Tessa Virtue & Scott Moir were going into the last part of the ice dance competition, which was held tonight, in first place and so I watched because I wanted to see if they could pull off the gold.  And pull it off they did – they were amazing!!  No one was questioning the judging on this one – they were gold all the way! w00t!

On a related note, does anyone know why at some events they do the medal ceremony right away, whereas for other events they have to wait until the following day’s “Victory Ceremony”?

I turned the TV on earlier this evening just in time to see Jon Montgomery’s gold medal winning skeleton run.  And then, as he walked through Whistler amidst a huge crowd of fans on his way to be interviewed on CTV, someone handed him a pitcher of beer, which he proceeded to chug!  The pitcher¹ reappeared later in the interview when Montgomery was asked to show off his auctioneering skills, which he did with said pitcher.  Hilarious!

Montgomery’s medal marks the first Canadian gold won at Whistler and our fourth gold medal of the games!  Go Canada Go!

1. or at least a pitcher. I can’t guarantee it was the same one, but I suspect it was [↩]

Honestly, this city is transformed.  There’s an electricity in the air. People are smiling and laughing and *talking to strangers*!  Vancouver is not generally a city where people talk to strangers.  Vancouver is a fairly social place, but people tend to socialize with those people they know and not so much with the talking to people they don’t know.  But in the past few days, I’ve noticed a lot of total strangers around the city talking to each other.  “Are you going to any events?” “Where are you from?” and “OMG, where did you get that hat!!  It’s SO AWESOME!!”¹.  We’ve heard a lot about people who are anti-Olympics in the time leading up to these Olympics² and not much in the way of support. But now that the Opening Ceremonies are just a day away, the supporters are coming out in droves.

This was Cambie Street today at about 2 p.m.:

And this is about 40 minutes BEFORE the flame is scheduled to arrive.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much red and so many maple leaves in such a small area as I did today!

And here’s the big moment!

I made this video clip for my niece – seeing all the kids so excited about the torch going by made me really wish she were here³.

For the record, here’s a video of the Olympic flame for Vancouver 2010 being lit in Greece back on October 22, 2009:

Pretty amazing to think of the amount of time this flame has been burning and all the distance that it’s covered!

1. That last one may have been me when I saw five people with hats shaped like maple leaves today [↩]
2. and I’m not discounting them.  There are a lot of good reasons to be ticked off – e.g., cost overruns,people being told they have to take signs down from their own windows [↩]
3. even more than my usual “I wish she were here!” [↩]

So I bet you want to know all about the Olympics Opening Ceremony, the dress rehearsal for which I attended tonight, don’t you?  But I can’t tell you.  I mean, I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.  You know how it is with state secrets.  There were parts that are so secret they didn’t even show them.  They had stand ins for celebrities and in the place of the person’s name on the screen it would just say “Talent ID” or “Flag Bearer 1.” Anyway, suffice it to say that’s it’s pretty awesome.  Especially the part where Quatchi does a striptease.

Less awesome = the lineups.  We stood in no fewer that five lineups tonight – one to get into the stadium, one for the bathroom, two food lineups (because you can’t buy both the overpriced veggie dogs and the overpriced fries at the same concession stand) and a lineup for Skytrain to get home.  The lineup to get into the stadium was the most crazy – it circled around several blocks!  The food lineups were longer than they needed to be, both because they wouldn’t sell fries at the hot dog concession counter (even though the two concessions were side-by-side and appeared to share a kitchen) and because the people working there were, to put it nicely, not very efficient.  Lineups are not my friend.

But the show totally made it worth all the lineups!  I can’t wait to see it on TV on Friday!

I picked up my Olympic tickets today!

Women’s hockey and men’s sledge hockey.  Stoked!

I had to go downtown to pick them up and downtown is really looking spiffy these days.  My personal fav is this building with the giant Canadian flag on it:

Also, I saw these dudes from Russia walking down Granville:

Oh yeah, and I don’t think I’ve mentioned it here, but I also have a ticket to go see a dress rehearsal of the Opening Ceremonies on Monday!  I’m probably more excited about that than anything!  My friend Kim’s husband is in the show and everyone in the show got tickets to the dress rehearsals for their family/friends.  So Kim and I are going to see what people are paying thousands of dollars to see, but we get to see it for free and four days earlier!

Let the games begin!

For Christmas, my friend Clayton got me an iTunes gift card. He did so specifically because he knows I’m too cheap to buy any paid apps for my iPhone, but he knew I’d appreciate being able to get my hands on some sweet, sweet iPhone apps.

I redeemed my card to my account and then bought an app, but the app got charged to my credit card instead, which I thought was pretty annoying.  So I took my credit card information out of iTunes, so that the only payment info they would have would be the gift card.  And then I tried to buy another app, but iTunes asked for credit card info and there was no way to say, “Just use the damn gift card!” It was super frustrating, because I could see in the upper right of my iTunes that I have $50 worth of credit!  So I tweeted my frustration, figuring that the geeks would know how I could fix this problem.  And I got responses right away, but unfortunately it was not good news.  Apparently in Canada you can’t use iTunes gift certs to buy apps due to some sort of “tax laws and commerce restrictions for software in Canada.”

What a bunch of crap.

Image Credit: Posted by Zoë Campbell on Flickr.