Not much going on over the last week, as I toured Ontario wine country and swam in Al Purdy’s glorious Roblin Lake. Oh, except I managed to be watching CNN just as conservative columnist Robert Novak misplaced his brain, swore, and wandered off the set like someone looking for the coffee station. So that’s something. And wasn’t there some story about an airplane and Toronto last week? I heard something about that in between the Geisenheims and the Reislings. Oh, and the shuttle not making it back just yet, there’s a new Governor General, and Peter Jennings died, and Ibrahim Ferrer as well. Also, it seems we sent troops to Afghanistan again.

Yep, the summer news lull is in full swing. But I’m back now, so hopefully something will happen this week.

BTW—I watched an hilarious CNN piece on the Air France crash. The CNN correspondent who covered the crash, Jeanne Meserve, was interviewed about how hard it is to cover such a story in an unfamiliar country. She told how she received the phone call while in Ottawa researching surveillance techniques (Ottawa? surveillance?). She and her camera guy immediately rented a car and hit the 417, consulting maps to try and find that Toronto place (for future ref—417 to 416 to 401, speed like the devil and it’s four hours). Their Blackberries wouldn’t work during the drive (damn third world cell coverage), so they “followed” the crash story on Canadian all news radio. Apparently the highway around Pearson airport is very confusing, but they managed to get a stand-up done within minutes of their arrival, interviewing folks who happened to be standing near them about what they had seen and how they felt. She then admitted that she didn’t actually see the crash site until she was driving away the next day. Asked by another CNN reporter if she had feared terrorism as the cause of the crash while she was desperately driving to Toronto, she said “it never crossed my mind.”

So, apparently, this blog covered the Toronto crash story as well as CNN did last week. I don’t feel so bad anymore.