Originally written like, a week ago, and been sitting in the Draft bucket since. For whatever reason, my internet connection also went down. And according to all the news sources, the following never happened.

Sure. Sure…

It’s 2:21am on a Tuesday morning and the BC Hydro “Oh Canada” blast horns have just treated us to an impromptu performance. This (well, a regularly scheduled performance rather than an impromptu one) is something they do every day at noon from the top of the Electra, formerly the BC Hydro Building, and notorious for it’s very Progressive International Fifties poison green and royal blue colour scheme. The horns are a quaint (and, for residents of the building, no doubt extremely annoying) relic of Vancouver’s maritime past.

And every night at nine o’clock a cannon is fired off in Stanley Park, and the ships used to set their various and esoteric timepieces by the sound. At Coal Harbour, you’d hear it at nine o’clock and one second. At further points, later times. Carinthia once listed them all off for me, each of the geographic coordinates and their coordinating time coordinates, for verily she’s a storehouse of information like that, or was, until she started forgetting things, and it’s true that ever since then she’s refused to try to remember things, in case she finds that she cannot.

But I repeat, it’s 2:21 in the morning in Vancouver. It is not noon in Vancouver. In fact, it is not noon anywhere.

I blame Anonymous.

UPDATE: Oh. Oh, this is swell.

I blame Anonymous.

Don’t you hate it when you live somewhere for years and years and years and they change something and they don’t tell you and then you’re taking a bus through that neighborhood or walking by or blogging about the horns on the top of the building that you know o-so-well and you trawl through Google to find something to link to which will familiarize your readers with these things in your memory and so you will move forward with at least some crazy-quilt of a patched-together background of shared memories and THEN AND ONLY THEN do you find out that they moved the freaking horns to Canada Place!

So now the nine o’clock gun fires at Stanley Park as it has every night since 1894, and every noon the horns on Canada Place blasts back at that incendiary upstart with the first four notes of O, Canada and the next day they do it all over again. That’ll teach ’em, yep.

What a wonderful metaphor for Canadian Regional Separatism, really.

Speaking of Canadian Metaphors, I was rather proud of this one.