Arctic Mark in Stanley Park

Well, it seems that many of you decided to rise to the challenge and be Tested along with the Nation (and me) on Sunday night. It's been great hearing from so many of you, with your kind words of encouragement, support and friendly rivalry.  Amazingly enough, the High School English Teachers did not emerge triumphant overall, losing a hotly contested battle in the final rounds to the (gasp!) Ad Writers!!  In the aftermath of the taping last March, one of our team explained away the Ad Writers' victory as the very predictable result of their superb training years before at the hands of their high-school English teachers. Um, yeah, that's it...of course! How else to explain our unconscionable defeat? :)

Anyway, it was some consolation for me to discover that, among the many statistical tidbits compiled by the CBC during the show, the regional results showed that the Northwest Territories had the highest score of any region in Canada!  (Thus the title of this post, which was also the slogan I had scrawled on the little chalkboard they gave each member of the teacher team to brandish as a symbolic prop.)  I'd like to attribute this to some kind of wonderful, spontaneous rallying of the residents of my home territory (at the time) behind their sole representative. But perhaps it's just a result of the fact that, per capita and pound for pound, the NWT has a higher percentage of wily wordsmiths than any other region of Canada. Or maybe it's because only three people in the entire NWT actually watched and played along, and they happened to score very high on the test. I guess we'll never know the full story.

If you'd like to see all of the results and statistical breakdowns, as well as a CBC photo gallery from the show, you can log onto the "Test The Nation" website:  http://www.cbc.ca/testthenation/index.html

At the very least, all of you (non-Saskatchewan-types) now know the correct term for a hooded sweatshirt in Saskatchewan: a "bunny hug"!  I think two hours of your life last Sunday night was a small price to pay for that golden nugget of linguistic lore.

Signing off from sunny Coquitlam, (the "place that stinks of fish slime"),

Mark 

P.S. After just discovering the true meaning of the name of the community I live in just east of Vancouver, I'd like to report that I haven't noticed much fish slime stench since I moved here earlier this summer. Just the occasional aroma of BC Bud wafting over from the grow-op down the street (before the cops shut it down - see my previous post "There Goes The Neighbourhood" from July 28), mixed with the piquant fragrance of freshly spilled oil from the pipeline that burst during a construction accident in neighbouring Burnaby several weeks ago. Several houses, trees, cars, people and pets in the immediate area were doused with a thick shower of falling oil, which took weeks to clean up, and which also unfortunately drained into nearby Burrard Inlet. Officials and scientists are still assessing the environmental impact. But don't get me started on the damage to local real estate property values!  There goes the neighbourhood (again)...