Hands Across Niagara - The National Post ran an article about Canadian troops working with the Americans in Operation Anaconda. Which Americans? The Tenth Mountain Division, according to the article. That's a nice irony: as I recall, the 10th Mountain features prominently in conspiracy theories as the unit tasked to seize communication centers and transportation nexi in Ontario in the event of a Canadian breakup. I trust we are using the opportunity to spot agents in the Canadian army that can be useful in that cause...

Wither Canada - The Continuing Series - Unlike the United States, in Canada, no citizen goes without health insurance, because of Canada's single-payer health plan. No, it's those darn doctors many Canadians have to do without. While New Brunswick as a whole has lost 7% of its population in the last five years, the city of Moncton itself is growing as rural Maritimers migrate to it. That would seem to make it a promising place to set up a medical practice - if doctors were allowed.

But they are mostly not. Even if a regional health company wants to recruit you (all doctors work for health corporations that get paid by the government and pay the doctors in turn), you can't practice unless the Provincial government gives you a billing number - and this the government of New Brunswick hates to do. The P.G. is deathly afraid of oversupply, so health companies are lucky if they can get three new billing numbers approved per year. They say that the government's formula does not take into account vacation time, physician's leaves of absence, or the tendency of older doctors to cut back their practices as they prepare to retire. Consequently there are long waiting lists of patients not just for elective surgeries and high-tech tests, but even to get assigned a GP.

One health corporation spokesman in the Telegraph-Journal article went so far as to suggest, timidly, that since it is against the self-interest of physicians to so flood an area that no one can make any money, that maybe they wouldn't do that. But that argument is not going to get very far with the New Brunswick government! A story this week in the local Telegraph-Journal recounted a controversy about milk sales. A Nova Scotia milk producer threatens to take a complaint against New Brunswick to the National Board of Trade, that arbitrates inter-provincial disputes. The company wanted permission to sell milk in neighboring New Brunswick, and was turned down by New Brunswick's committee for turning such things down. Ahem, the milk board, by whatever name. New Brunswick law holds that for a competitor to enter the New Brunswick milk market, it is not enough for the company to demonstrate that its entry would benefit local consumers - it must also demonstrate that its entry would benefit existing producers. Which is, you know, hard.

If we let just anyone sell milk here, an official said, why, next thing you know, you might have 200 producers trying to sell milk here, which, the official said, would be absurd. The market could never support that many. If you want to read the original article, it will cost you $3.75CDN after you type "Novia Scotia milk" in the search field.

It is so tough to be an official when it never occurs to you that maybe that 200th producer, or the 100th, or the seventh, would have the sense not to let himself in for that grief in the first place.

Unqualified Offerings is completely aware that its own country's agricultural policy is rife with similar nonsense. What's interesting is to see just how much of the Canadian economy, like its health system, is run on the same principles.

Did Unqualified Offerings mention that New Brunswick is governed by the "conservative" Tory party?

Love Shiac - What Unqualified Offerings referred to below as "shiac" is a local creolized french dialect akin to what we called "franglais" in high school english. Says a musician and expert:

Both in Louisiana and in the Canadian maritimes, the minority position of the language has fostered bilingualism as well as the creation of a linguistic frenglish mix. Consider the case of "Shiac". Shiac is a creolized (in the sense of mixture) English-French mix in which an English vocabulary has been transposed onto a French syntax.

You can find a partial lexicon here. There doesn't otherwise seem to be much about it on the web.

The Ugly American Explains the Issues of the Day

The Canadian Dollar, 63 US cents.
The kilometer, .625 miles.

Accident? Coincidence? Conspiracy??

Out of the Mouths of Potties - Unqualified Offerings has always had a potty mouth in real life, and from time to time expresses itself profanely here too. Occasionally, it wonders about the appropriateness of same. This week the only music it has been listening to is the francophone, shiack and bilingual rock it previously enthused about. But a single snippet of anglophone music kept running through UO's head, a verse about a British neofascist from what is now an old song:

"Billy joined the National Front
He always was a little runt
He's got his hand in the air with the other cunts
He's got to humanize himself..."
The Police, "Rehumanize Yourself"

UO considers the case for the expressive power of profanity settled.

Oh the Irony Dept. - Looking back over the week, I can't help thinking I wrote more and better entries for this site when I had less web access. It feels like once I could access the net in my room, I spent too much time surfing for links and not enough writing. But it could just be that out-of-sorts feeling that comes with travel. Maybe this is why Virginia Postrel rarely posts to her site while traveling. I type this offline in Moncton's airport. Outside, Atlantic Canada offers a meteorological sendoff in the form of more typically seasonal weather than it has offered for most of my stay. Overnight and continuing into the morning - it is not quite 5:30am Atlantic Time - light snow changing to freezing rain and sleet. For my fellow residents of Mid-Atlantic America - Marylanders, Virginians, Washingtonians - yes; their March is our January. More about New Brunswick specifically and Hockeyland generally when I am no longer in it.

Wither Canada (sic) - Okay, I think I'm reusing a headline, but the big chin-pulling topic up here is that Canada has achieved the 70s US dream of zero population growth, or nearly. Nobody sounds very happy about it. For the past five years, the country's population grew at .75% per year, at which rate it would take a century for the population to double. Trends like that are never reliably linear, of course. In fact, experts currently worry that Canada's population will start to decline. Immigration is what's maintaining the 30,000,000 level the country is holding at - the birth-rate has dropped to an astonishing 1.1 children per adult woman.

More as soon as I upgrade IE on this loaner laptop. It's impossible to link to National Post items with IE5.

Goodbye to All That - Speaking of Off-the-Rez bloggers, Diana Moon of Letter from Gotham announces that "this blog is a passtime, and from here on in I'm going to use it to explore the issues that I think are important, and not to respond to the groupthink of the pro-Bush blogosphere." I'll admit to a "What am I, chopped liver?" moment while reading her item. And while I've carped myself about what I've variously called the Official Constellation, the cheerleader blogs, the uberhawk blogs and the imperialist blogs, I think there's plenty of diversity even among warblogs. My other cavil is her identification of the OC as "pro-Bush," when they are actually pro-Wolfowitz. Let Bush get so wobbly as to suggest that maybe Ariel Sharon is mortal, and the OC let him have it good and hard.

Wilderness of Mirrors - Indispensible Off-the-Rez blogger Andy Kashdan of A Libertarian Reads the Newspaper links to the wackiest conspiracy theory yet.

UPDATE: Andy Kashdan now debunks this rumor. Net moves fast, thankfully.

Henley Do-Right - My show is so popular up here it's being held over. I fly home Saturday, choosing the 6am flight out of Moncton so I can get back to Mrs. Offering and Offerings: The Next Generation sooner. And oh by the way, make it to Mid-Atlantic Blogfest on time.

Reviewing entries since the weekend, almost everything seems suffused with the sadness of being away from the family. I don't expect that will change.

Stuck in a Moment - I haven't written 9/11 recollections for a couple of reasons, none of which I can recall. So.

I live in Maryland and work in exurban Virginia. It was my day to get the kids to school and babysitter, and I decided to be late to work that Tuesday. I loafed, then spent mid-morning reading e-mails, including the usual steady stream from the Elvis Costello mailing list. It has not for some years been a mailing list that stays reliably on-topic. An e-mail appeared saying a plane had hit one of the towers of the World Trade Center, a strange, sad thing. More e-mails. One saying that now a second plane had hit the other tower and "the TV is saying it's definitely terrorism."

Downstairs I raced to the TV. A plane had just hit the Pentagon when I turned it on. All that was awful enough. I am a sucker for sad stories at the best of times. I choke up quick, and tears well readily, though actual crying is rare. On the rare occasions when it breaks through, it comes in great hacking sobs. What brought the great racking sobs was:

What was happening - which was awful enough.

The rumors on the wind - for about half an hour, it was reported as fact that a car bomb had exploded outside the State Department. There were stories of other planes in the air, even after the Shanksville crash.

It was the second Tuesday of the month - Mrs. Offering's regularly scheduled trip to the shipyard in Newport News, Virginia. She was in a car whose radio didn't work. She was driving from one potential target, Washington DC, to another, a major naval base. Especially until the car bomb story was retracted, it seemed like the country was under sustained, multifaceted attack by many means in many places. Planes falling out of the sky. More planes missing. Bombs going off. My wife with, presumably no idea that any of this was happening.

You may remember the phone lines were jammed.

I discovered through trial and error that land-line-to-land-line and cell-phone-to-cell-phone calls were more likely to connect than land-line-to-cell-phone and cell-phone-to-land-line calls were. So I finally reached Mrs. O's cell phone from my own, after maybe 45 minutes of trying.

Safety conscious, she had it turned off. In the car.

The great racking sobs came as I shouted pointlessly at her voicemail for her to get the hell off the road, stay the hell away from the shipyard, to not try to come home yet, to find the most insignificant place she could and hole up and for Christ's sake to call me the instant she got this message. And the second message like it. I believe there may have been a third.

And on TV, the Towers fell. And fell and fell and fell. I met Offering Boy's bus with a happy face, unsure what well-meaning school officials would have decided to tell kindergarteners. (Nothing, that day.) And the State Department unexploded, and the airplane inventories reconciled, and my neighbor Laura, whose kindness and advice had kept me sane during my at-home dad years came to the door. Her husband, a lawyer, worked in Virginia, as a lawyer for the FBI. She hadn't been able to reach him and anyway there was no telling when they would let him come home. She spoke, pacing back and forth on my front lawn. We could not even stick together, really, because we were each waiting for calls.

Mine came. I had my wife's actual schedule wrong - she was actually at the Shipyard when the news came. Based on traffic reports, we brought Mrs. Offering back well east of the city, through Southern Maryland, turning a two-hour trip into four hours, but not six or eight, and keeping her well away from DC area bridges. (For weeks after September 11, I did not cross the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac without thinking, "truck bomb.")

Somewhere during all of this, I discovered Instapundit.com, thanks to a referral from Virginia Postrel's site. For some of us, Glenn Reynolds' work on that day and the days immediately following was as signal a service as any American not wearing a firehat or fighting in the skys over Pennsylvania performed for any other American.

Toward evening, Peter Jennings intoned, authoritatively, that things would have to change in this country and "we" would have to accept less freedom, which was nice of him, since anger beats grief, and he really pissed me off. (And I can prove it.)

Several listless days. We cancelled our Wednesday night gaming session. I skipped the Thursday poetry meeting. I listened to NPR in the car, somethin I normally can't abide. Finally, that weekend, I forced myself to go fishing.

The Saturday after the attacks was the first time I saw my neighbor Tayeb, who lives across the street. Tayeb and his family are muslim immigrants from India. Two summers before, we were all shooting baskets in his driveway and I came down wrong on my ankle and sprained it so badly it would support zero weight. Tayeb is a medical technician and his wife is a doctor. While someone went to get my wife to take me to the emergency room, Tayeb and Sultana took care of me. They sent me off to the emergency room with an air cast, vicodin and crutches. The emergency room took x-rays and prescribed - an air cast, vicodin and crutches. I love my neighbors. A half block of Silver Spring, Maryland is my truest country.

I had been worried for Tayeb and his family all week, but when I had popped in to check on them only his mother and his excellent kids were home. That Saturday, we hugged in the middle of the street. What we said represented the sharing of a mutual grief, a mutual anger at a great wrong. Referring to Mrs. Offering's upbringing in Saudi Arabia, this man who drives every evening to the mosque on Briggs-Cheney Road said, "Your wife grew up there. She knows what those people are like."

Things Are Sometimes What They Seem - Unqualified Offerings feels a certain amount of pressure to offer its loyal readers surprising insights that subvert the conventional wisdom about Canada. However, here is a short list of items it will not be able to write:

Canada: Not as Cold as You Think

Who Gives a Puck? The Myth of Canadian Hockey Mania

Temperance Union: Canada's New Sobriety

The Ugly American Finds Something to Like - Quebecois rock! Was tuning in the shine of the light-night dial on the way to the office yesterday in the new rental car, and heard a couple of terrific rock&roll songs in French. Different styles: one more of a boogie, with horns and female backup singers; the other all jangly guitars and wordplay - beyond this site's ability to follow on first listen - like a francophone Elvis Costello. Neither tune was weighed down with the bombast that afflicts current "alternative" music in English (e.g. Creed, Linkin Park). I'd buy this stuff, if I could have understood the DJ when she said who they were.

The Ugly American Teaches French Etymology - Chateau. Hey - That's cat water.

Time Travel Misproven Feasible, Major Media Say? - Amygdala links to an ABC News story that says that the Lorentz-Fitzgerald contraction, which they don't call that, proves that time travel is possible:

According to Einstein's theory, approaching the speed of light would theoretically slow time, traveling at the speed of light would make it stand still and traveling faster than the speed of light would reverse time.

Unqualified Offerings has heard this before, but would someone explain why the claim is not a crock?

The contraction is SQRT(1-v²/c²). UO admits it dropped out of MIT, but it still thinks that, yes, if v>c, 1-v²/c² < 0, that is, negative. BUT THE LORENTZ-FITZGERALD CONTRACTION IS NOT 1-v²/c². It's SQRT(1-v²/c²).

The square root of a negative number is a complex number. Which would seem to suggest that at speeds faster than light, time goes, not backwards, but sideways. Which seems pretty wild, orthogonal time. But it's not backwards. Is it?

Time Travel Proven Feasible, Hoteliers Say - Unqualified Offerings is switching from its 1980s-era internet-free hotel to 21st-century Chateau Moncton tomorrow evening, which has in-room high-speed internet access for $9.95CDN/night. UO would probably pay that even if - UO were paying for it. As opposed to UO's office paying for it. The last couple of days' blogging has been composed offline and uploaded in spurts from a temporary cube on the contractor's premises. Coming tonight (and appearing tomorrow...): MonctonPundit!

Comparative Culture - While this site has previously reported Canada's inferiority in the fake Aussie steakhouse sector of the economy, Unqualified Offerings can now report that hockeyland has achieved rough parity with the US in fake Texas steakhouses. In fact, UO has never found a fake Texas steakhouse that was any good, so what it is saying is that Canadian fake Texas steakhouses are no worse. Strip steak: On the dry side. Fries: Not soggy; actually, a shade powdery. Mushrooms: Somewhat tasty. Chips and salsa: Serviceable. Unqualified Offerings has yet to find an American Texas-themed steakhouse (outside Texas) that you couldn't say roughly the same things about. This is why it swore off Texas-themed steakhouses years ago in its home country, and now adds Canada to the prohibition zone.

Comparative Economics - Yes, the exchange rate is wildly favorable. But I find that if I translate local prices back into US money, the prices aren't that great. Depending on taxes, some things are much more expensive. For instance, gas is $0.70CDN/liter, which works out to about a buck eighty per gallon, US. In the DC suburbs, your expensive gas HQ, it's running $1.10-1.20 this week. Based on what the locals tell me, taxes account for almost all the difference.

Canada is a big country. That's a lot of hauling to get stuff from one place to the other, so you expect those fuel prices to show up in just about everything. They seem to. Moncton is a small city in a low-wage area, the socioeconomic equivalent of, oh, Bangor. Trained Tier 1 tech support folks that would feel underpaid in the US at $30K start at the equivalent of $18K in Queen-free bills. I haven't been to a supermarket yet, and I haven't inspected the real estate ads. But restaurant meals, snack items and magazines cost as much as or more than one sees in an expensive US metroplex.