Twenty years ago today, I went to my first baseball game. The Expos had the NL East lead, a half-game up on the Pirates, and it was half-price ticket day for under 16s, so I convinced my parents to drive all the way to the Big O with the family.
The Meech Lake Accord had failed the day before and it was St-Jean-Baptiste Day, so for the first (but not last) time in Expos history, many in the large (for the Expos) crowd of 25,000 booed Canada's national anthem. Anytime the Expos played at home on St-Jean-Baptise Day after that, they played the anthems during the warmup so that no one would be there to boo.
We sat in the first row of the upper deck, right behind home plate. Dennis Martinez had a solid start, but the relief was weak and the Pirates won the game, retaking the NL East lead (which they kept for the rest of the year). Disappointing, but I'll never forget how awesome it was to eat peanuts and ice cream and watch the Expos in the Big O on a hot summer day, during that brief time when the retractable roof actually worked.
We've predicted Canada and the US; why not someplace where only some of us have any idea what goes on? The British House of Commons has 650 seats (529 in England, 40 in Wales, 59 in Scotland and 18 in Northern Ireland). There are many minor parties that can win a few seats with less than 2% of the vote. The categories for this contest will simply be "Conservatives", "Labour", "Liberal Democrats", and "Other". (If you want to specify the "Other", you are welcome to, but it won't count in who has the best prediction).
I previously wrote about Baarle-Hertog/Baarle-Nassau, a tiny town in Holland with a few dozen parcels of land belonging to Belgium. International borders run haphazardly through the town, dividing streets and buildings, like so:
Well, it seems that Google maps has Streetviewed all of Holland and none of Belgium, resulting in Streetview stopping and starting at near-random intervals through Baarle-Nassau. My favourite part is that some of the Belgian parts have little parts inside them that belong to Holland. These tiny strips of Dutch land, some no bigger than a front yard, are streetviewed, while the Belgian parts are all cut off.
For those of you who don't know, Eurovision is a decades-old, cheesy pop music competition among most European countries. Here are the most entertaining entries from the past few years (warning-- contains some awful music):
I've travelled a lot, and so have read quite a lot of hotel reviews. But Montreal's very own Hotel Eureka has the worst hotel reviews I have ever seen.
