O Canada...and their boys in uniform

Magnet #420 - Royal Mounted Canadian Police

So this magnet is only tangentially related to the quick plug I want to make...

I used to have a coworker from Canada who used to explain some of the Canadian mysteries of life - proving that natives actually say eh, why curling is a sport, poutine, and for me, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Mainly, because we got to talking about the RCMP, the show Due South (that I never watched, but my sisters did), and Dudley Do Right (whom I love, but not really as much as I love Brendan Fraser).

The way my dearly missed Canadian colleague explained it, is basically, they're the equivalent to our FBI, being essentially a national police force. More about the RCMP in a later magnet, since apparently, I have a few of them. I know you're shocked.

Here's where the tangent comes in. And I promised quick, so I won't go into how much (and oddly) I love Hugh Dillon, and surprisingly, Veronica Mars' dad, Enrico Colantoni, plus the other cute-cute-hot boys on the team. (Again, I'm forced to ask the question, what is it about hot boys from Canada?)

Have ya'll watched this (Canadian) show called Flashpoint? Because you should. Even if it's on Friday nights and you have to DVR it. Honestly, with almost 60 shows on my dance card throughout the year, you'd have thunk the show about a Toronto Strategic Response Unit (SRU) team (not to be confused with the RCMP, thank you), with cute-cute-hot Canadian boys and big guns would have gone off my radar. Or, not, if you know me at all.

It's one of my top 20 shows. Seriously. For some reason, the storylines always get to me. They generally start out the show at the point where things have escalated (usually a hostage situation) to where their team already has "a solution" to take out the perp, and they flash it back to how they all got into this situation (from the SRU team's POV, but also the bad guys, who aren't always as bad as you think).

For the most part, I think use of flashback in a story can be lazy and somewhat boring, but they manage to get you back to the flashpoint fairly quickly, and we watch (sometimes with bated breath) how the team resolves the situation, through conflict resolution/negotiation tactics, trying to talk the perps down, or through brute force, if they have to. Awesome.

Great stories, great team.

And the cute-cute-hot boys and the big guns don't hurt, either.

Toronto, she so pretty

Magnet #372 - Toronto

OK, folks. How freakin' adorable is this magnet? So cute.

Then again, package something up in pretty, pretty colors, and I'm most assuredly your first customer.

I picked this up one of the several times I've been up to Canada. I want to say it was at the mall where we saw Independence Day...the weekend of July 4th. Heh.

I must say that I absolutely loved the city of Toronto - it was marvelously clean, it was not terribly crowded, they have great coffee, and the people are so, so nice. I even went so far as to investigate what publishing houses were up there - Bantam and Harlequin - at the time. But, I ended up staying in NYC, which is not so clean, terribly crowded, sometimes great coffee, and sometimes nice people. Well, yeah, that makes sense. Heh.

Anyway, I picked this one for today, because I was thinking, it's nice that I like Toronto so much...because if the next few weeks don't pan out like I want them to at work, I may just move on up there.

Casa Loma, eh?

Magnet #30 - Casa Loma, Toronto

Casa Loma is billed as one of Canada's most famous castles. We just happened to stumble upon it on a random roadtrip to Canada. It's the former home of Sir Henry Pellatt, a financier - who was at one time, Canada's answer to Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan.

It was built on a hillside, and had a great view of Toronto. Of course, we took the tour, ran around the rooms and the grounds.

And, of course, the only thing I remember out of all that history is that they filmed parts of The Skulls with Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker in the Conservatory.

What? It was a good movie!