Hometown Meme

Gail has tagged me to serve up four cool things about my hometown. Since I'm not a writer, all I can do is play around with this.

In 2005, the Guinness Book of Records recognized the Rideau Canal as the world's longest skating rink.

The Canal was built c.1850 as a supply route between Montreal and Kingston, just in case EVIL America decided to invade across the St. Lawrence again. They've never recovered from their defeat in 1812. Unfortunately, they've discovered skates ... which could be a problem.

It goes without saying, then, that Ottawa is the home and birthplace of world class beaver tail. Oh, wait! That would be .... Jason Arnott is goin' down.

Ottawa was born as a lumber town, c. 1800. It does have it's charms: "Silicon Valley North"; home of the "Avro"; no industrial waste ('cept for the "Carp dump"); a government run "Experimental Farm" (which legend says used to grow quite a lot of hemp) .....

What is strange about the above correspondence, is that, in 1925, there could not have been any relationship between the names.

One can only hope this had an impact on Canuck/Amerikkkan relations :

On September 5, 1945, only weeks after the end of World War II, Ottawa was the site of the event that many people consider to be the official start of the Cold War. A Soviet cipher clerk, Igor Gouzenko, defected from the Soviet Embassy with over 100 secret documents. At first, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) refused to take the documents, since the Soviets were still allies of Canada and Britain, and the newspapers were not interested in the story. After hiding out for a night in a neighbour's apartment listening to his own being searched, Gouzenko finally persuaded the RCMP to look at his evidence, which provided proof of a massive Soviet spy networking operating in western countries, and, indirectly, led to the discovery that the Soviets were working on an atomic bomb to match that of the Americans.

OK ... so it's not perfect.

Did I mention that Ottawa is Canada's capital?