Embracing my dorkness

[bjarvis]

Following up on a thread in iambic_cub's journal yesterday, I went trolling through Google to see if I could determine the last time a Conservative prime minister of Canada entered office with a budget surplus. The earliest possible candidate would be John Diefenbaker in the 1950s but my recollection of the federal coffers under his Liberal predecessor Louis St. Laurent is a little fuzzy.

Anyway, I tripped across this: A History of the Canadian Dollar on the Bank of Canada website. I then spent a half-hour or so of my lunchtime absorbing it all. Fascinating stuff, I thought.

About 8 hours later I realized suddenly than I'm the only person I know who would read such material for entertainment.

And I never did find the historical deficit information I was looking for, although I'm sure it's out there.

Comments

[allanh.livejournal.com]

If it's any comfort, even people I know in Canada started edging away from me a few years ago when I was ranting about how wonderful a new book was that I'd picked up at Chapters in Vancouver a couple of years previous.

The book? "Time Lord", by Clark Blaise. A history of Sandford Fleming, the early Canadian who invented the modern standard time system. The book traces how Fleming's missing a train (because every railroad kept its own time) launched the idea of a universal time standard, and how he pursued this goal until he died. The implications of a time standard are farther-ranging than one would think.

It runs in the family. My mother used to read stuff like "The Naked Ape" and "Kon-Tiki" for entertainment.

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

There is a building (computer sciences) on the campus of the University of Toronto named for him; I worked in the building next door.