Over the weekend, Canada rejected a trade deal with the United States that would have resulted in a loss of economic sovereignty for our northern neighbors.
Donald Trump took this surprisingly well.
Oh, who I am kidding. Donald Trump doesn’t take anything well. He’s a petty little B.
It took me about thirty seconds to realize why he would fixate on the name “Lake Ontario.” It’s because Ontario is also the name of a Canadian province, so in his mind he can punish Canada by taking away a name.
Like I said, petty B.
And today he did. He held a ceremony in the Oval Office, and he signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario to “Lake America.”
As with his stupid renaming of the Gulf of Mexico, I will not be using his new name.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada had a few words on the meaning and the antiquity of the name, Lake Ontario.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s office also had thoughts. New York borders Lake Ontario, though I have a pre-Revolutionary War map which shows Pennsylvania’s northern border extending to the shores of the lake. (Pennsylvania’s land claims were extraordinary.)
A few commentary posts I saw. Posted without comment.
The actor Tim Curry died yesterday. He, like Dolly Parton the day before, was eighty.
I have never seen the Rocky Horror Picture Show. I haven’t seen Home Alone 2. I didn’t even see IT.
I saw Clue. And The Three Musketeers. And The Hunt for Red October, where he delivers one of my favorite lines in the film: “You will receive the Order of Lenin for this, captain.”
He was also the original King Arthur in Spamalot.
I listened to the Spamalot cast album yesterday morning. I bought it at the Target at North Hills in Raleigh in the spring of 2005. I don’t recall why I’d gone there, but the memory of that Target and the Spamalot cast album is distinct.
At Diamond I would sometimes belt out “I’m All Alone,” especially during the days of COVID when I might’ve been the only person in the north half of the office. I hope I did Tim Curry’s performance justice.
For several years Eric Idle wanted to make a Spamalot movie.
The other Pythons put a kibosh on that recently. I suspect they’d given cautious approval when Terry Jones was alive, as his share of the Spamalot money could go toward his care, but after he died in 2020 the other Pythons respected Jones’ feelings on Spamalot — he didn’t like it, he called it “rubbish” and “utterly pointless” — and pulled the plug.
Unless Idle were going to get the original cast together — and after Curry’s 2012 stroke, which left him confined to a wheelchair, that was not going to happen — I also thought a Spamalot film was “utterly pointless.”
But I’m just a fan, and my opinions don’t matter to Eric Idle.
Rest easy, Tim Curry. You have at last escaped to the one place uncorrupted by capitalism — SPACE!!!!