Happy Wally Wednesday! I wrote before about my neighbor's dog, Jersey, who died earlier this year. Wally and Jersey were best friends, and here's a photo of the two of them my neighbor sent me.


I read an article in the Wall Street Journal last night about our border with Canada. At a time when the United States is vigilantly cracking down on illegal crossings of the Mexican-American border, as fences are erected and citizens have taken it upon themselves to protect that border, it seems the Canadian border has been well ignored. The International Boundary Commission, in partnership with Canada, is supposed to keep a 10 foot path mowed down on either side of the 5,525 mile border. The problem, as it turns out, is often finding the border. Eighty-two years ago, Canada and the U.S. agreed to mow this strip, "a clear vista to the sky." 8600 monuments were placed to show the border, but over time, many monuments have disappeared. They've been shot up by hunters, frozen and cracked on the Alaskan tundra, blown over in the plains, buried in bogs, and crushed by avalanches in the Rockies. One of the boundary commission's priority projects right now is finding the border between Quebec and New Hampshire. From the article: "In 1842, it was fixed for 20 miles along the center of Hall's Stream. In 1908, the commission set about marking it. But Hall's Stream hasn't stayed put. It has meandered -- 100 yards into Canada here, 200 yards into the U.S. there. The original stream bed is still the official border, but now it's dry, squiggling through dense woods." I found the article very interesting. We've got so much energy pointed toward our southern border, and in the meantime, we can't even really tell where our border to the north is. I don't know why, but I find this immensely funny.

The song of the day is "Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen off his 1980 album The River. Like many artists of Springsteen's era, I didn't appreciate his music until after the fact. When I was working in radio in the late 80s/early 90s, I worked at a station that was a decent Adult Contemporary AM station, considering the small town. We had a play list of about 1500 songs, which is a decent amount, ranging from new music by people like Phil Collins, Richard Marx and Sting to Tommy James & the Shondells, the Doobie Brothers, Poco, etc. I was a 19-year-old with an oddly deep knowledge of bands like the Strawberry Alarm Clock. At any rate, we used to play this song alot. Eventually, we got a new Program Manager who totally stripped down our playlist to less than 500 songs. When I noticed this song was gone, I asked why, and was told it was "far too aggressive" for us to be playing. If you know the song, you know how truly absurd that is.