Random Thoughts, Canadian Edition

Some random Canadian thoughts for the day as I am sitting on a plane headed back to New York from Vancouver:

• Whistler/Blackcomb is a nice resort for snowboarding. Just a nice variety of terrain for all levels. Although $84 bucks a day is damn steep, especially since the dollar is so weak. Sigh. Stupid U.S. dollar.
• And just to illustrate how weak our dollar is now, I bought lunch from Burger King in Vancouver airport which ended up being $3.84. I whipped out 4 U.S. dollars, handed it to the cashier, and got just one lame Canadian penny back. Ouch.
• I just finished watching No Country for Old Men on my trusty laptop. Can someone please explain to me what the hell the last 30 minutes of that movie were all about? If you looked up anti-climatic in the dictionary, I think a DVD of this movie would be sitting right there, slapping you in the face.
• Why are planes the only place where the bathroom is referred to as a lavatory? No one ever refers to the bathroom as a lavatory outside of this setting, do they? I just find it strange. It would be like if people just started calling a telephone a snog simply because they were using it on a boat.
• In any case, in aforementioned lavatory, I saw this sticker on the toilet (and don't worry, my hands were clean when I snapped this shot, honest):
  
  
  
  Ok, so I'm not supposed to throw cups, bottles, or handkerchiefs in the toilet. I'm not sure why I would think to chuck a bottle into the toilet anyhow. I mean I don't do that in a normal toilet, why would I suddenly think to start doing that on a plane? Even more puzzling, what is that last drawing supposed to be? A bar of soap? A pencil eraser? Why would I even have those things in my possession? I even asked the flight attendants and they were equally puzzled. If nothing else, I think I've sparked a debate that will go down in Air Canada lore of what that drawing is supposed to represent.
• I saw South Park reruns on TV every single night in Canada. Shouldn't Canadians hate this show? All the Canadian characters on the show are morons, and they even wrote a song called "Blame Canada" for the South Park movie, with the lyrics, "blame Canada, blame Canada, it seems that everything's gone wrong since Canada came along, blame Canada, blame Canada... they're not even a real country anyway!"
• I had heard that curling was a huge sport in Canada, but I didn't really believe it until we were flipping channels and saw TSN (the ESPN of Canada) with non-stop curling coverage. They even did that picture in picture thing where they cut away from your match to show you some split screen live action of another curling match in progress. We sat there for 45 minutes watching this thing, and we still couldn't figure out what was going on. Just to give you an idea of how athletic one needs to be in order to compete, there was a guy who was nicknamed "The Kid" and he was nearly 40.

That's all for now, eh?