Date: Fri, 6 Apr 2001 11:31:07 -0700
Reply-To: Alistair Bell <albell@UVIC.CA>
Sender: Vanagon Mailing List <vanagon@gerry.vanagon.com>
From: Alistair Bell <albell@UVIC.CA>
Subject: Re: Friday Follies: Canadian Pride- pshaw!!!
In-Reply-To: <04d901c0be61$ab3e35e0$5d086d18@ivideon.com>
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Oh I hate these kind of lists, even as a joke they often contain glaring
errors and a kind of smug nationalism that seems to say alot about a
country's collective insecurity.
so here are my corrextions (may be more, these are the ones that leap to
mind)
on 5/4/01 11:20 PM, Marshall Ruskin at mjruskin@HOME.COM wrote:
>
> So, what do Canadians have to be proud of?
>
> 1. Smarties;
Oh, that British (Rowntree) candy?
>
> 10. Canada has the largest French population that never surrendered to
> Germany;
What is more interesting is how large a proportion of the Quebec population
in the 30's and 40's that supported Hitler. Anti-semitism was rife...
> 11. We have the largest English population that never ever surrendered or
> withdrew during any war to anyone, anywhere;
mmm, how about the all the brave (and i mean that sincerely, no sarcasm
here) men and women who fought, died, were wounded in the Spanish Civil War,
who "withdrew" or were captured at Dunkirk, who were slaughtered or captured
at Dieppe (an ill-fated invasion "exercise"), pushed out of the Balkans,
Greece, Crete, who surrendered and were captured in Hong-Kong, "withdrew"
from Korea.
>
> 13. We invented ski-doos, jet-skis, velcro, zippers, the telephone, and
> short wave radio. Canadian inventions of insulin and penicillin save
> countless lives each year. (Ed note: ³plus, let us not forget about
> Poutine!²)
Velcro invented by a Swiss gentlman, George de Mestral.
An American, Judson, patented his "clasp-locker" in 1893 (some say elias
howe had the invention forst but didn't patent it), improved in 1913 by
Swedish American Sunbach, word "zipper" coinded by B.F. Goodrich in 1923.
Telephone? Well how about Alexander Graham Bell, Born in Scotland in 1847,
educated in Edinburgh and London, moved with his family to Ontario in 1870,
moved to Boston in 1871, patent for telephone granted in 1876. Did you catch
that critical year in Canada? No? Well, he did spend some of his later years
in Nova Scotia (Baddeck?) having fun inventing/improving hyrofoils and
tetrahedral kites.
Penecillin?
another Scot, Sir Alexander Fleming was born on August 6th, 1881. Educated
in Scotland and London. In 1906 began research at St. Mary's under Sir
Almroth Wright, a pioneer in vaccine therapy. He gained M.B., B.S.,
(London), with Gold Medal in 1908, and became a lecturer at St. Mary's until
1914. He served throughout World War I as a captain in the Army Medical
Corps, being mentioned in dispatches, and in 1918 he returned to St.Mary's.
In 1928, while working on influenza virus, he observed that mould had
developed accidently on a staphylococcus culture plate and that the mould
had created a bacteria-free circle around itself. He was inspired to further
experiment and he found that a mould culture prevented growth of
staphylococci, even when diluted 800 times. He named the active substance
penicillin.
He was elected Professor of the School in 1928 and Emeritus Professor of
Bacteriology, University of London in 1948. He was elected Fellow of the
Royal Society in 1943 and knighted in 1944.
Oh very Canadian!
Alistair
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