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I have a need. There is not much that my employ, family, friends and wit cannot provide me. I have eaten my onions through a winter and drank my ale for years. I cannot, however, make a flag of Norway.

My kin were kicked out of Norway in 1250 for not giving up the pagan way. Since that awareness dawned upon my brain, I have had a soft spot for the place and gladly eat pickled fish products. I could buy one but it would be a new nylon thing which, beautiful in itself, not as beautiful as a old cloth thing that looks like it spent years on a tramp steamer lashed by the North Atlantic west of Stavenger or Narvik – as shown below left. If anyone has a spare, please advise. We can work it out on Al-Bay. What else would you need to do a proper Norwegian event?

Help Celebrate Norway in Our Way…Some Day!

Watched with my Dad as Canada beat Australia 2-0 in women’s soccer this afternoon with 10,066 others here in Kingston. Packed stadium. Sunny Day. Fast, heavy but clean game. The Aussie sweeper, Cheryl Salisbury, was one of the best I have seen but they had no one up-front to make plays like Canada’s Lang or Sinclair. Canadian captain Charmaine Hooper’s header from a corner for the first goal at 71 minutes was pretty good – from the other end of the field it looked like she was a foot over the defender. The second goal for Canada two minutes later looked a lot like a break-away after a foul to me…but “we” won. The “we” is a lot less problematic when it is the women’s soccer team as opposed to the men’s Olympic hockey team for some reason. I wonder when last ten thousand went to a soccer game in Canada?

This week reminds me of a week 22 years ago which I could hardly recall a week later.   Rather than regail you with tales of drinking in 1981 [which I can do if you really want me to…but no one does] let’s consider what the Biggest of Als (a.k.a. Smaller than Some, Bigger than Most) learned and continues to benefit from frosh week:

• One or two pals of mine, met that week, still perform much the same mating ritual that they did then.  It does not work.
• The song “Black Velvet Band” will stick in the mind for decades even though it is sung by a poor excuse of an Irish band and heard through a beery haze.
• The saying “you spend your second term getting rid of the friends you made in your first term” is not necessarily true. Most of my friends now were present during that frosh week or subsequent ones. One was met when I carried him over my shoulder like a sack of potatoes to his bed his frosh week during one of my campus police shifts.
• The excitement I felt the during first meeting of my undergrad Foundation Year classes has rarely been matched, even during the classes within the subsequent few weeks. First, I thought I was on to a great explosion of opportunity. Soon after, I realized I was listening to someone read the book to me. Attendence at future classes soon moved to my 33% average thought 7 years of non-distance university.

That’s all I can think of for now. So what lessons did you learn in frosh week?

Mike is at it again. Posting about things I wished I had thought of. His post about playground games reminds me of stickball.

This was played in one field in Kingston, Nova Scotia in the early-70’s behind Jeff Bond’s and Tony Smith’s houses. We were taught the rules by older kids who drifted out of the game when they were about 12. You were brought in the game when you hit around 9. The game was a variation of baseball with lots of cricket influence. You played with a broom handle and an india rubber ball. The ball was thrown at the batter who could hit it 360 degrees. Like cricket, there was no foul. The ball also had to bounce like cricket before the batter hit it. There were four bases around which you ran like in baseball. No one wore baseball gloves. At any time you could pick off a player by drilling the ball at them if they were not touching a base. If they were hit, they were out. I think there were three outs like baseball.

Anyone else have a local game?  I can think of “Red Rover” and “Redlight, Green Light” in the Queenston Drive Elementary schoolground at Erindale Woodlands of Mississauga in the late 60’s before we moved to NS when I was 7.  Also, king of games, “500 Up”which I played before I was ten until after I was 20.   The elemental “Tag” and “Hide and Seek” with its variant “Kick the Can” were also big in Kingston, N.S. during elementary school.