O Canada
I wrote a column this week about my new personal hero, Mike Rowe, a 17-year-old from British Columbia who crossed swords with Microsoft and lived to tell about it.
Mike has a talent for web design, apparently, and he set up a site to showcase his work. And, in the best tradition of wacky Canadian humor, he called it MikeRoweSoft.com. You gotta like Mike.
One does not enter into battle with Goliath lightly. After all, Bill Gates could have just, say, bought Canada and built a really big house on it. Companies take their trademarks very seriously, and there were threats, legal stuff, a severed hard drive mysteriously showing up in Mike's bed, etc.
What the Redmond folks thought, of course, was that Mike was trying his hand at extortion, but when they finally did a little interfacing with this kid they found one of their own. Geekiness knows no boundaries, even northern ones, and Mike graciously turned over his website to them and accepted as compensation some certification classes and an X-Box and everyone made nice. But I could have told them this.
I love Canadians. I am a full-blooded Yankee, with (I'm told) Miles Standish and Tom Paine hanging around the upper branches of my family tree, and I love my country passionately. But there are times, when I listen to too much talk radio or spend time at a mall, that I'm almost overwhelmed by the urge to drive 100 miles or so north just to recharge my niceness batteries.
The Canadians are probably used to this. They see us coming, see us straggle through customs and watch the stress melt away as we slip across the border. "Just couldn't take it anymore, eh?" they ask and we nod and order a Molson's and hand over funny-looking money that they amazingly accept at an astonishing exchange rate.
Canadians are nicer, more pleasant, happier and apparently healthier than we are, but mostly they're funnier. I don't know why this is but it is. I get my fair share of Canadian culture via the good folks at Comcast and I laugh all the time.
So I'd like to welcome another norther neighbor, a relative newcomer to the Salon blogosphere whose blog I just discovered (where have I been?). Meg writes at Blogcabin, and I mean she writes. She's articulate and intelligent and interesting, and of course she's very funny. It's in her blood. Do yourself a favor and check her out. Say hello for me.
10:54:37 AM 
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