At the moment, "Ontario Crane Service", "Ontario Construction Secretariat", and "Ontario Council of Shooters".

Oh, and "Ontario Cannabis Store", once it becomes legal to sell marijuana in Canada later this year.

Please don't mix up Ontario Crane Service and Ontario Cannabis Store - they provide two completely different ways to get high.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/windsor/on...-1.4574801

EDIT: Hmmmmm... Ontario Council of Shooters and Ontario Cannabis Store... We need to come up with a possible recreational-drug-related name that backronyms to "NRA".

Arabic writing on police cruisers in London, Ont., angers Americans

Never mind that it's a language in use in the city by a large minority of the population.

Never mind that it isn't the only non-Latin text on the cars.

Never mind that it isn't on every car.

Never mind that it's been there since 2009.

Some intolerant and xenophobic idiots are tying up the police switchboard with their complaints about how they think a single word identifying the car in a minority language has something to do with religion.

<deep sigh>

Grow up, will ya?

Trump says he made up facts about trade deficit in meeting with Trudeau

That supposed "trade deficit" that Trump claims exists between the USA and Canada does not exist.

Quote:Bruce Heyman, the U.S. ambassador to Canada until January, blasted Trump in a series of tweets early Thursday while also apologizing to Canada for Trump's reported comments.

"Lying to your friends only hurts the relationship," he wrote. "Canada has been there for us thru thick and thin. How can you casually damage this relationship? Shame on you!"

Heyman added that the president is "casually throwing Canada under the bus and this is just wrong."

Trump fires his personal assistant, who goes right out and joins the Trump re-election campaign.

...Trump fires Tillerson.

He's already been replaced by the director of the CIA, Mike Pompeo.

...Helen's starting up a new Shadowrun campaign.  Completely new -- our old characters, like my Jewish street samurai Mossad -- are retired (for playing purposes).  And she's got a hell of a concept for the campaign.

We're all kids.  In Berlin.

(Before I forget to mention it, we're using 2nd Edition rules, because they're what Helen's most comfortable with, and what we all have the most books for.  And I honestly can't fault Helen for going with comfort; what I've seen of SR5 looks like a completely alien thing.)

So anyway, the character concepts are working out interestingly.

Attila, ever the one for overkill, is playing a 9-year-old troll physical adept.  (That's basically all you need to know about an Attila character -- it will be hard to kill, and good at killing other things. <grin>)

Peggy's playing what amounts to a 9-year-old version of Hanna, only raised in Sweden instead of Finland, and in Berlin to investigate the disappearance of her father.  She's going to be the team sniper, only she's so small she has to use a hunting rifle instead of a real sniper rifle.  She's also a shamanic adept of Wolf, which if you don't know the system means she's a very minor magic user, basically able to use only combat and detection spells, and only able to conjure forest spirits.  She actually designed the character to be the Shadowrun equivalent of a D&D ranger, so she'll be using the optional Edges/Flaws rules to get a few extra things like Animal Empathy. Lately, Peggy has been beefing up on both real-world and SR Sweden, and has been searching online for just the right picture of a small girl with a big gun to use to represent her. If only she would choose a name for the character. Oh, and her spells.

Me?  I had a lot of ideas at first.  One, which folks might find amusing, was a young Hermetic magic-user who thought he was Harry Potter.  Literally.  He was going to be convinced he had to use this stick and Dog Latin incantations to cast his spells (and I went through all the known spells from Harry Potter and worked out their SR equivalents).  He was also going to address all elves as "Dobby" and "Winky" depending on their gender, all Trolls as "Hagrid", and all Talismongers as "Mr. Ollivander", and his teammates were probably all going to be addressed as various other characters from the books.  And he was certain he was in Germany as part of some convoluted scheme to defeat Voldemort, who naturally was in England.  Completely insane but functional.

Eventually, though, I went with a different concept:  Lukas Veidt, an 11-year-old corp brat whose parents work for Saeder-Krupp practically 24/7, leaving him a latchkey kid ostensibly watched over by his uncle, who basically calls the kid once every day or two to make sure he's not dead but otherwise ignores him.  For fun, Lukas leaves the corp building where he lives after school and basically pretends to be a street kid.  Helping him survive this unwise choice of hobbies are two things:  one, his parents sprung for a "Big Man on Campus" package of bioware when he was conceived, basically giving him an edge in physical abilities and charisma, and two, he's actually a Dog shaman, who didn't realize he was a Dog shaman until recently clued in by a friendly adult.  (He just thought he liked dogs a lot.)  I spent thirty of his starting force points to give him grade 0 Initiation, with the ordeal of summoning a familiar.  So he has a big yaller dog as a "pet" which is actually a Force 2 ally spirit.  This left him with 5 points for spells, so I gave him Stun Missile, Treat, Disregard, Makeover and Fashion, all at force 1.  The last two he uses to disguise himself when he leaves the SK complex, and to cleanup and revert back when he comes home.  His spirit lodge is a blanket over a couple of chairs with all his "stuff" under it.  Oh, and his only weapon is a slingshot.  I've got some Flaws I'm going to use with him (Day Job, for instance, to simulate having to go to school), but I haven't quite decided on what Edges to buy with the points I got back.  Probably more Force points to boost his spell repertoire or power levels, and to give his "dog" an alternate human form.

I suggested to Helen that I could make him a Tiger shaman instead, with a tiger ally spirit, and reallocate a force point from a spell to give the spirit an alternate form of a stuffed toy, and change the kid's name to "Calvin", but she wasn't amused. <grin>

We've got one more player, our friend Frank, but I don't know what he's going to be playing, as he hasn't been by since the first character-building get-together.  When I find out I'll let you all know.

B.C. Supreme Court rules that Canadians do not have a Constitutional right to have more than one spouse at a time

I'm surprised that this made it as far up the court system as it did. (And there's still one more court to appeal to: the Supreme Court of Canada.)

Well.

We got about a foot of snow.

Half of one of the maple trees at the end of the driveway broke off and fell into the driveway, blocking our ability to leave.  Worse, it wasn't the known dead limb(s), but live ones.

The cedar which stands at the corner of our garage was literally bent double this afternoon under the snow -- until it snapped and fell on our car.  As far as I can tell, though, the car is undamaged, as the trunk that fell was fairly thin, as an evergreen it had full and bushy branches which self-cushioned, and it fell on such an angle that if anything got damaged on the car at all, it would be little more than a dent in the pillar between the windshield and the front passenger door.

Good news is, a couple guys just came around and starting in the morning tomorrow will not only dig us out, they will cut up the fallen stuff and haul them away.  They'll even check on the other sides of the house for other fallen branches/trunks.  Which we might have.

I'll try to get pics of the driveway disaster to post here.

So as I'm sure some of you already know, a new Nor'easter is swinging through the Atlantic states here in the US.  Right now I'm working from home and the snow is coming down like soapflakes in an elementary school play.  And we just had an intense and long-lasting rumble of thundersnow.  If you don't know what that is, it's a rare weather phenomenon that's exactly what it sounds like -- thunder generated by a snowstorm.  Apparently it's happening all through the storm, up and down the I-95 corridor and surprising and alarming even jaded New Yorkers.  I know that until 15 minutes ago I only knew of thundersnow from reading about it...  now I can check another item off my ill-defined and somewhat imaginary bucket list.

NBC New York's article on it from about half an hour ago.

AP: Wreck of WW II aircraft carrier USS Lexington found