Friday Factoids #4 – Two countries separated by a common language
OK, so George Bernard Shaw* actually said it (“England and America are two countries separated by a common language”) but the same is true for Canada, and I’ve decided to use it as my theme for this week’s Friday Factoids. [*There are some who attribute this to Winston Churchill, but the majority of references I can find agree it was GBS.]
If anything, this is probably just going to highlight Canada’s split-personality, sometimes with ties drawing it closer to the USA and sometimes falling back to its British roots.
- Canada’s political system is based on the British system, with regional (county / provincial) government and national (federal) government. The American system is loosely similar but theirs lacks the variety of parties that both Canadian and British electoral systems provide.
- When entering a building at ground level, the floor above is the first floor in Britain, but the second floor in Canada and the USA.
- Both Canada and America celebrate Thanksgiving … but on different dates and for different reasons. The American’s celebrated yesterday but for Canadians it was over a month ago.
- I don’t know why, but the British use some French terms (e.g. aubergine, courgette) whereas the Canadians don’t (equivalents: eggplant, zucchini).
- Canadians use the American definition of a billion, i.e. one thousand million; sometimes the UK use the same definition but personally (and to [other] purists) a billion is a million million.
- If you cut up a potato and fry it, they’re chips to a Brit or fries to a Canadian. How can they get that wrong? Fish & Fries? Huh? (However Brits will understand French Fries, thanks(?) to MacDonalds.)
- Following on with mixing terms up: a (British) flat is an apartment, not a puncture. Thankfully most Canadians spell tyre correctly … other than Canadian Tire, that is!
- In the event of a puncture, you should pull off the road (pavement) towards the pavement (sidewalk). [OK, I've only heard a few Canadians refer to the road as pavement, but footpath seems alien to most of them.]
- I’m not sure of the Canadian equivalent of a motorway – here in Toronto I’ve only heard people refer to 400-series roads.
- If the Brits were to eat PB&J (which they don’t!), the J would be jam, not jelly; jelly is what’s served at children’s parties.
- A fortnight is two weeks – is it really that strange a term??
- Cider is alcoholic apple juice; why do Canadians need three terms (apple juice, cider and alcoholic cider) when there are only two states?
- Canada Post uses postal codes, the same as Her Majesty’s Royal Mail (except it’s post, not postal, code).
- To steal a quote from a friend of mine: “To a Canadian, 100 years is a long time; to a Brit, 100 miles is a long way.”
There’s a lot more but I’ll save them for another post (or two) … but feel free to post your favourites in the comments.
You knew it was coming – Smash My XBox, the video!
Following the success of SmashMyiPod, the creators asked people to donate and SmashMyXBox (360).
From their site:
November 22nd 2005 – 10am – Well, after 55 hours of pain, cold, and suffering, we have got our Xbox 360 and successfully smashed it outside Best Buy minutes later, with a large sledgehammer in front of a few Xbox Fanboys who just bought brand new 360s.
Download the video here
If you want to contribute to the fun, there’s always SmashMyPS3 and SmashMyRevolution!
What’s brown and sticky? A stick!
There are a couple of posts that I want to mark as sticky (i.e. they always appear at the top of the main blog page) but if I have too many sticky posts there’ll be no room left for the regular one, so here are links to them:
- Free logo … but first we need a catchy name
- Suggestions for my “blog of the week”
- I’m in the process of updating my BlogRoll so things may look out of order for the timebeing … I aim to finish this in the next couple of days.
Renting
I meant to post about this a few days ago, but there never seems to be enough time in the day to do everything. Anyway, a belated welcome to Dawn at Reflections In The Mirror, who’s renting the ad space in my blog. At the same time, I’m renting a spot over at Webby’s World.
Top Ten Tuesday #next – I’m bored of counting already!
It’s only week four and I’ve already decided I’m going to stop numbering these entries. Feel free to take a pen and write the number alongside this entry – it’s your screen.
I was thinking about doing a Top Ten Scotch list but Sunday’s tasting session has made me realise I need to revisit everything I’ve ever tried, now that I’ve discovered that adding water can actually be a good thing!
So how about a techie Top Ten this week? How about my Top Ten Techie Toys that I’ve owned? That sounds like a good idea, and then I can do a Top Ten Toys I Want For Christmas in a week or two.
Oh, and I’m scoring these on how good they were when I got them, not now, before someone laughs at the age of some of the picks. :p
- The new video card/ TV tuner I got at the weekend – a TV window in the corner of the screen is really distracting
- Dell Latitude laptop / wireless router – I’d wanted a laptop for a while and we finally bought one on eBay; it’s really useful for when I write my notes during the Formula One races. [Sad but true]
- The hand-built Linux server that I put together…
- …and the cooling system that got it through this summer!
- Dell 19″ LCD monitor – if it hadn’t been on sale, I don’t know when we’d have been able to get one … and it’s a huge improvement on the CRT I used to have.
- Creative Nomad Zen Xtra MP3 player
- Hooking up our Pioneer 5-disk DVD player to the Samsung Worldwide VCR means that not only can we play video tapes from (almost) anywhere, we can also watch DVDs from other regions. It’s really smart – just put the tape/disk in, hit play, and the VCR works out how to translate it to NTSC. Very cool.
- Palm PDA – first I had an M105, then an M130, and now I’ve got a Tungsten|E – each one has more bells & whistles than its predecessor, but they were all great.
- Canon PowerShot S110 digital camera – it’s just over 4 years old and still going strong; it goes everywhere with me, which is why the photo gallery is so big!
- Memotech MTX512 – my first computer (circa 1984) and co-star of “Weird Science“. Yes, it had 32Kb RAM (that is Kb, not a typo) and a 4Hz (yep, 4 Hz, not KHz or MHz) Z80A processor
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