In September of that year, the agency lost a major account and as agencies do when a major piece of business walks, they started laying off staff.

Eric fully expected to be fired — and when he wasn’t, he felt strangely disappointed.

So he did what disappointed young men have done since time immemorial.

He went to sea.

And not just on any old tub, he signed papers as an apprentice on a windjammer, with the Conradesque name of Moshulu.

At the time, Moshulu was one of thirteen vessels still powered entirely by sail, engaged in the South Australian grain trade.

Owned by Swedish owners and governed by Finnish maritime law, Moshulu’s working practices were rather traditional.

Hence, upon boarding the ship in Belfast’s York Dock, Eric was simply ordered “Op the rigging” and told to keep going.

When he could go no further, he found himself clutching the cap of the main mast, 198 feet above the keel.

{Moshulu, September 1938}

Having proved his head for heights, Eric was given a berth in the Fo’castle and Moshulu set sail.

So began the shipboard adventures of a raw boy of 18 learning the trade of an Ordinary Seaman.

Three months later…Moshulu put in at Port Victoria, South Australia.

Once bargains had been struck and contracts drawn up, she was loaded with 4,875 tons of grain.

The cargo was made up of 59,000 sacks which were manhandled into ketches at dockside, ferried to Moshulu and manually loaded into the ship’s holds.

This backbreaking work took a month.

On March 11, 1938 Moshulu set sail on the return leg.

91 days later she was lying off the entrance to Queensland Harbour in Ireland.

The crew didn’t know it, but they had won the last grain race.

In 1956 Eric Newby published a wonderful book about the voyage aptly called: The Last Grain Race.

Apt it may be, but not accurate.

The title is simply untrue.

It was not the last grain race.

It was not even the penultimate grain race.

It was actually the second to last grain race.

Consciously or not, Eric had learnt something from his time at Dorland’s.

Because, what kind of title would The Second to Last Grain Race, or Almost The Last Grain Race have made?

But he understood the value of smart positioning.

So The Last Grain Race it was.

And the book was a hit.

It launched Eric Newby’s career as a travel writer.

It’s still in print today.

And you can’t argue with that.

It started as a “Did you know?”

And of course, I didn’t.

“You can buy Twitter followers,” a colleague continued.

And what started as an innocent conversation about social media became a little murkier.

I expressed amazement, well perhaps not exactly amazement, but certainly a degree of surprise.

Which isn’t surprising, as one way or another the internet is a continual source of surprise.

And I forgot about the conversation until a couple of days later when my colleague sent this link:

I got to Twitter late and after a year of tweeting I had 52 followers.

So it naturally crossed my mind that finding a following organically was taking quite a long time.

Especially if you subscribe to the theory that one digital year is equal to ten human ones.

There is a metaphysical point where ideas become action, however small the initial step may be.

A few keystrokes revealed there are actually several sites offering to fix you up with a twitter following.

At around $25 a thousand for real followers, which are people with a twitter account, as opposed to dummy accounts set up by bots.

Affordability alone made the opportunity tempting.

But it still felt shabby somehow, like buying a degree, or not changing your underwear every day.

Why?

If Klout can “trade” in my social media brand, why can’t I trade up in it?

Surely the main point of the digital era is that the old rules no longer apply.

Reputations don’t have to be hard-won.

You can go-viral any time – but probably not with just 52 followers.

All I want is more exposure for my blog, and wasn’t this simply the digital equivalent of paying newsboys to stand on the corner shouting, “Extra, extra?”

Then I read a Mashable story claiming Newt Gingrich followers are spam bots.

Hell, if it was good enough for the GOP…and at least my followers would be human.

Ethical dilemma resolved – I got into buying mode.

At which point 1,000 seemed kind of paltry, why not go for a Klout busting 5,000?

So I loosely specified the interests I wanted my followers to share (advertising, marketing, creative thinking, ideas, current affairs, etc.) and anted up around $85.

The process would take 12-20 days and I was warned not to follow or unfollow anyone while it was taking place.

By Friday at 8.16 AM I had 109 followers

At 11.50 AM there were 185.

Over the weekend they plateaued at around 340 (something to do with the algorithms – If you want a more detailed breakdown of process and options Tyler Cruze’s blog is very informative) before continuing to climb to 951 at time of publishing.

About half only fit my profile very loosely, but they certainly open up the randomness of Twitter…

My feed is full of all kinds of stuff.

Religious nuts, porn nuts, Beliebers…in several languages.

In retrospect maybe I should have started with a 1000.

But there’s always a learning curve.

Has it made a difference to hits on my blog?

It’s probably too early to say.

Social media experts tend to agree, it’s not the size of your following, but your connection to them.

They bang on about not diluting your personal brand.

I get that up to a point.

There are a few of the original 52 I banter with sporadically, they’re interesting and informed, if they were in town, I’d buy them a beer or whatever.

But just how much damage can you do to a personal brand of 52 followers?

I listed them, so not too much I hope.

And if any of my newly enhanced following are reading this, I’m sorry I bought you.

But stick around and I’ll treat you good.

I promise!

————————-

Will the Puppy emerge with head held high or tail between legs?

Don’t miss Part Two and see how it all shakes out.

So I’m lying in a hammock in Tulum sipping an ice-cold Pacifico.

The hammock is gently rocking thanks to a constant offshore breeze.

Four pelicans glide overhead in formation and then dip where the turquoise water meets the almost white sand.

Tulum is a beach town in Quintana Roo, a state in south-eastern Mexico on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Watching the pelicans until they fade into grey smudges, it’s hard to believe I’m in a country engulfed in a drug-war.

But as the BBC reports, according to federal government figures, 47,515 people have been murdered by narco-terrorists in the last 5 years.

Conversely, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that the murder rate in the Yucatan is 0.1% per 100,000 of population. No US tourist destination even comes close, to being as safe as I am here.

Statistically, 0.1% is insignificant, unless you are the unfortunate one-in-a-million.

In which case the statistic becomes hugely significant, albeit posthumously.

The Internet may not have been made for statistics, but its binary DNA seems made to order for their proliferation.

Sites like Survey Monkey and Poll Monkey make it easy for anyone to spit out fresh, crunchy stat bites.

Not unnaturally, the flip side of proliferation is desensitisation.

9% unemployment is terrible, it weakens society and affects us all to some degree, naturally I sympathise–but hey I’m alright Jack!

Hell, I’m on vacation.

Unemployment statistics, like crime statistics only really matter when they affect you directly.

The further they get from the centre (you, family, friends, and friends of friends) the less you feel their impact.

If that sounds callous, it’s only 51% callousness brought on through extreme statistical overload.

The proliferation of statistics inevitably means a correlative decrease in credibility.

You can find stats to support any and all points of view.

From the cynically disingenuous, beloved of lobbyists and politicos, to the deliberately goofy, it’s misinformation by the numbers.

Until the only statistic that counts is the one you believe.

It’s as well to remember it’s a belief and not a fact, unless you can prove it, and chances are you can’t.

As the man said, there are “Lies, damned lies and statistics,” the question is which man?

Fittingly, the quote has been attributed to Benjamin Disraeli, Alfred Marshall and Mark Twain.

So it’s a one-in-three chance we even know who coined the phrase.

Time for a second beer, or will that be my third?

{Salud!}

{buns! not buns}

I was walking past the Pizza Pizza near my office.

They had a sandwich board outside, appropriately advertising sandwiches.

And not just any sandwiches, but sandwiches on “artisan ciabatta buns!”.

I asked the guy behind the counter and of course, the buns are frozen.

Now whether food can be both “frozen” and “artisan” is questionable.

But as the LA Times reported on Sept 28, 2011 “Wendy’s has its Artisan Egg Sandwich, Ralphs Markets offers Private Selection Artisan Breads and Starbucks sells Artisan Breakfast Sandwiches”.

More intriguing than foodie nomenclature, is the speed of the word’s downward trajectory.

In just a few years, “artisan” has become a cliché to be avoided, and evidentially it’s not alone.

Lake Superior State University just released its 37^th annual list of Words Banished from the Queen’s English for Misuse, Overuse and General Uselessness.

Their methodology is hardly scientific – the public basically nominates words they’re fed up with.

This ad-hoc approach probably explains how “occupy”, as in Occupy Wall Street made the list.

According to Wikipedia, OWS only started on September 17, 2011.

Can a word really reach it’s sell by date in less than 4 months?

Apparently it can.

From kilobytes to petabyte, language is changing faster.

And it can legitimately be said that acceleration is just as much part of the zeitgeist as innovation.

“Faster, Faster until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death”, as Hunter S. Thompson said.

Our love affair with speed is inextricably bound with our need for the new.

So we don’t just consume tangible products like cars and fashion and technology.

We also consume ideas, creating a vortex of novelty and redundancy, and nowhere is the churn more pronounced than with business jargon, where today’s hot phrase is tomorrow’s cliché.

And if you blinked, well you know…

And business publications from Inc to heavyweights like the Economist and Harvard Business Review implore us not to use certain clichés.

But dismissing a phrase simply because it’s a cliché seems foolhardy, because not all clichés are created equal.

Low hanging fruit may be an evocative metaphor, but it’s an unnecessary piece of business jargon.

You’d be better off saying: easily attainable objectives or rapidly achievable results.

It’s easy to forget every cliché was once original.

Thinking outside the box, contrary to popular wisdom, is an extremely elegant phrase.

You may not be aware of the phrase’s origin describing a solution to the nine dot puzzle.

It’s a metaphor rooted in reality and purpose and one that’s not easily paraphrased.

But use thinking outside the box in a meeting and you’ll be lucky to escape with a funny look.

The problem with thinking outside the box is not that the phrase is a cliché, but it’s a cliché that’s become diluted through misuse.

While E=mc2 and the iPhone are examples of thinking outside the box, your new promotion for acme widgets almost certainly isn’t.

But we crave the next new, so we shoot the messenger anyway.

And Heinz Nordhoff started his new job.

{Heinz Nordhoff circa 1960}

He’d been hired as head of the Wolsfburg Motor Works.

The first thing he did was replace the English sign with one that said: VOLKSWAGENWERK

The British who were supervising the plant sensibly overlooked this small act of bravado.

But it didn’t escape the attention of the rag-tag, largely refugee, workers who produced a quirky little car that came to be known as the Beetle or Bug.

The second thing Nordhoff did was move into the factory.

For six months he slept there on a cot.

This also got noticed by the demoralised workforce.

Two months later, he was summoned to a meeting in Cologne.

On one side of a conference table sat Henry Ford II and Ernest Breech, Ford Motor Company’s chairman.

On the other side were Colonel C. R. Radclyffe of the British Military Government and Heinz Nordhoff.

The purpose of the meeting was simple, to persuade Ford to take over Volkswagen — for free.

When it came to decision time Ford turned to Ernest Breech for his opinion.

Breech replied, “Mr. Ford, I don’t think what we are being offered here is worth a damn.”

And the verdict was unanimous.

A British company,  The Rootes Group had turned down the same deal the year before.

Sir William Rootes dismissed the car as, “too ugly and too noisy.”

Curiously there is no record of either Rootes or Ford driving the car.

Still, one thing was clear.

They couldn’t give Volkswagen away.

It wasn’t hard to see why.

The plant lay in ruins.

Allied bombs had shattered large areas of the roof and all the windows.

Much of the floor was ankle-deep in stagnant water.

Production was pitifully slow, at least 300 man hours per car.

German Reich Marks were almost worthless, so raw materials like steel and coal had to be bartered for Volkswagens.

The only buyers for the car were the occupying forces.

Even though it had been designed by the legendary Ferdinand Porsche, the VW’s engineering was hardly noteworthy.

Air cooled engines had been around since the 1900s.

Rear engine design went back to the earliest days of cars.

Ditto rear wheel drive.

Independent suspension was not unusual.

There was nothing innovative about it

And it was small and funny looking.

But Heinz Nordhoff thought different.

And he left the meeting determined to make VW the largest car manufacturer in Europe.

He realised these features had never been combined in a car with such good fuel economy and reliability at such a low price.

And that was an innovation.

It was a car Porsche had designed from the inside out.

A car that looked funny, only because its bodywork used as little steel as possible to cover the engineering.

Post war Europe was going to need cheap reliable transport.

And Nordhoff believed the Beetle could provide it.

He just had to figure out how to make them efficiently and sell them effectively.

So although there was hardly any production, he instigated strict quality control.

And although there were hardly any sales, he decided VWs would only be sold the VW way.

Even as the factory lay in ruins he sketched out the blue print for a global dealership network on old cardboard boxes.

His strategy was revolutionary and very simple.

Service first, then sales.

Nordhoff was determined to “provide the best service in the world”.

Gradually his vision became reality.

By 1949 VW had recruited over 200 dealers throughout West Germany and production reached 46,154.

{Military green 1949 Beetle}

When the company expanded to Canada in the 1950s, parts worth $30,000 were shipped, before a single car was sold.

It was the antithesis of the sales driven North American auto industry.

As VW expanded into the US, they insisted that their dealerships all looked the same, with uniform signage and service bays that were clean and brightly lit.

And service did drive sales.

The millionth Beetle rolled off the assembly line in 1955.

{Beetle one million with added bling }

In 1961 Volkswagen became the third largest car manufacturer in the world.

By 1962 a million Volkswagens had been sold in the USA.

Henry Ford II congratulated Nordhoff personally.

He had taken a white elephant and turned it into an empire.

How did he do it?

This is how Nordhoff outlined VW’s philosophy in 1961:

1. To develop one model of car to its highest technical excellence.

2. To dedicate ourselves to the attainment of the highest quality.

3. To destroy the notion that such high quality can only be attained at high prices.

4. To subordinate technological considerations to human ones.

5. To give the car the highest value and build it so it retains that value.

Good advice for the innovation business.

Even if you’re not building cars.

N.B. the majority of facts in this post are from Walter Henry Nelson’s excellent book, Small Wonder — The Amazing Story of the Volkswagen.

Benetton’s new campaign employs some masterful Photoshop technique, one of  those rare instances where the execution is so flawless, it is the concept.

And who can hate the concept of Unhate?

Unhate is pretty close to love and you can’t hate love, can you?

As masterful as the Photoshop manipulation is, it’s nothing compared to the company’s manipulation of the Vatican.

They hung a huge banner of the Pope kissing the Imam from a nearby bridge.

This unbridled provocation left the Holy See somewhere between St Peter’s rock and a hard place.

Not to denounce the image was unthinkable.

But denouncing it would bring world attention.

Catch 22.

So predictably Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi spoke out against the campaign:

“This is a grave lack of respect for the pope, an offence against the sentiments of the faithful and a clear example of how advertising can violate elementary rules of respect for people in order to attract attention through provocation,”

He said, thus making my underline a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Maybe they didn’t have a choice.

But they did have a precedent.

Because Benetton did more or less the same thing in the 1990s, with Oliviero Toscani’s original United Colours of Benetton campaign.

{a kiss is just a kiss}

Only this time it was an image of a priest kissing a nun that drew the Vatican’s denunciation and worldwide media attention.

Given they had no choice, they still had an option to act more wisely.

Because it wasn’t like the Vatican didn’t know what would happen when they denounced the current ad.

True, their protest got it withdrawn, but their intention to pursue legal action will only keep the campaign in the public eye.

And I’m not sure what their legal grounds could amount to.

A case for defamation will be shaky and I predict it will never get to court.

Here’s why:

First, is the image actually of the Pope?

Second, if it is, are the image rights cleared?

Third, irrespective of the answers to the questions above, are they objecting to shades of homosexuality, or inter-faith acceptance?

I would say both are equally shaky ground.

Maybe they should have handled it a little less stridently.

A little more humorously.

Maybe they could have said something like:

“The Holy Father endorses love, but not the unauthorized use of his image.”

And left it at that.

Soft power instead of hard power.

I’m neither a theologian or a diplomat, but I doubt it would have made the situation worse.

{we'll always have Paris}

After all none of the other world figures in the campaign have reacted so vehemently.

As the saying goes, fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me.

But the Vatican shouldn’t feel too bad.

However adroitly they were played by Benetton, it was nothing to the way Benetton played the world’s media.

Will it sell more sweaters?

I think so.

From the South Sea Bubble to Goldman Sachs dodgy sub-prime bets against their own clients; with banksters, shenanigans always have and always will hit the fan.

The resulting fraud charges from the SEC are naturally ”completely unfounded,” according to Goldman, CEO Lloyd Blankfein.

He goes on to defend the firm by stating, “We are not a fiduciary”.

Which in layman’s terms means, “You shouldn’t expect to trust us”.

Which is just a hair’s breadth away from saying “Of course we’re dishonest.”

So you’d hardly expect investment banks to be honest.

But the banks I’m referring to are your common or garden high street retail bank.

The type of bank most people use because they have to keep their money somewhere in order to access it through an ATM.

In Canada, unlike the UK, if you use an ATM belonging to a bank other than your own, you pay a fee of $1.50 to the other bank plus a fee of $1.50 to your own bank.

Withdraw a hundred bucks and that’s a 3% fee for accessing your own money.

This double dipping earns the big five Canadian banks a lot.

I say “a lot” — because no one knows how much.

“We won’t comment on that,” the Royal Bank’s Jim Westlake told the Toronto Star.

This lack of transparency is typical of the big five, but collectively it’s hundreds of millions, if not billions a year.

The issue has been mentioned in Parliament and trotted out at elections; but once Parliament goes into recess, or the election is over, the gouging goes on.

Of course gouging is perfectly legal.

But there’s a huge difference between being legal, and being honest, because honesty requires fairness and decency, in addition to merely obeying the law.

Another lucrative source of income for Canadian banks is Interest Rate Differential charges or IRDs.

Basically this is a fee charged to get out of a fixed rate mortgage.

That probably sounds reasonable, but it’s the unreasonably complicated way these fees are being calculated that are making the banks a fortune by unscrupulously penalizing their customers.

And again it’s perfectly legal.

Or is it?

A recent class action suit against the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) suggests it may not be.

Legal or not, it’s dishonest.

I’m not bashing Canadian banks per se, it’s just that I’m familiar with the issues.

I’m bashing all banks who’ve lost or badly misplaced their moral compass.

Examples aren’t hard to come by.

On a recent trip to the UK a Barclays ATM was charging 4.5% commission to withdraw pounds from my Canadian dollar account.

“It’s our duty to maximize profits for shareholders ” the banks would say.

But unbridled pursuit of profit, solely in the interest of shareholders is detrimental to customers.

It’s simple logic.

To generate higher profits for shareholders, one way or another customers pay more.

And customers are beginning to act.

Bank Transfer Day is a response to excessive fees from US banks particularly, $5 per month debit card fees from Bank of America.

It’s objective is to get customers to move their accounts to credit unions.

How successful it will be is any one’s guess, but the fledgling movement has already influenced Wells Fargo to drop their $3 per month debit card fee and made Forbes sit up and take notice.

And some banks seem to understand that fairness can work for them.

Ally have just come out with the follow up to their much lauded “kids” campaign.

You might expect the former GMAC to be stodgy.

You’d be wrong — strategically and creatively.

So one bank at least gets it.

We don’t mind you making a honest profit.

And we’d like you much more if you stopped taking the piss.

Ask a member of the ad industry what percentage of ads they think are crap.

Most will say 90%.

Some will say 95%.

David Ogilvy said 99%*

No one I’ve ever asked has gone below 90% but lets allow a big margin for error.

Let’s say 70% of ads are crap.

I don’t think anyone is going to say it’s less than that.

{where does it stop?}

And the hypothesis also means 30% are good, right?

30%!

Can you imagine if bus drivers operated with a 30% success rate?

Or heart surgeons?

Or refs?

There would be carnage on the roads, corpses piling up in hospitals and riots in every football stadium.

No other profession I can think of would tolerate a 30% success rate.

But in advertising it’s par for the course.

Which suggests that as a profession we seem to be OK with being crap.

Of course it’s not all crap.

Any given year Cannes, CLIO, D&AD and The One Show, among others, hand out awards that prove it.

Even if you disagree with some of the stuff that wins, it’s undeniable each year turns up a slew of very good work.

It even gets published in convenient annuals to inspire us to do more good work the next year.

But we keep right on producing 70% crap.

It’s amazing we even get paid for being so ineffective.

Why do we do it in the face of all that excellence?

Not to mention a whole literary sub-genre dedicated to producing great advertising.

From Claude Hopkins’ Scientific Advertising or Ogilvy on Advertising to Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor from Jerry Della Femina through to Sorry for The Lobsters by Neil French.

There are bookcases of erudition aimed at fostering excellence, and most of all, of avoiding crap.

Doesn’t anybody read them?

If they do then, why doesn’t all this knowledge improve things?

Or does it?

Would we be suffering even more than 70% crap without it?

Maybe we should take a closer look at what we mean by crap.

If I don’t like something, I may well say it’s crap.

And I probably like different ads than you do.

So your crap and my crap may be poles apart.

You may even like my crap and vice versa.

Crap is subjective.

A creative person’s criteria for good advertising may be freshness and imagination.

A client’s may centre around ROI.

An account exec’s may revolve around a happy client.

As much as I believe creative advertising is the way to go to maximize ROI.

It’s also undeniable that crap can be effective.

Think about all that dreary financial direct mail.

Or all those bad infomercials.

Someone is crunching the numbers.

They don’t keep them coming because they’re ineffective.

They work.

But just because they work, doesn’t mean they’re not crap.

Since they work, does it matter?

That depends on your point of view.

And what is advertising, if not a point of view?

Theoretically you could give the same brief to two different agencies and get exactly the same ROI.

But one agency’s work would win loads of awards and the others’ would be crap.

So does it really matter?

Well, I like to sell stuff with a bit of dignity, style and wit.

I think it works best and it’s the way I prefer being sold to.

And if it makes the industry a little less crap.

I’m all for it.

* “Ninety-nine percent of advertising doesn’t sell much of anything.”
-David Ogilvy

I flew out and back from Toronto’s Pearson Airport.

I was looking forward to seeing Ove Design’s recent rebranding of Terminal 1.

So I was a bit disappointed to fly in and out of Terminal 3.

I was hoping it would be Terminal 1 because I’m intrigued as to what extent design can improve time spent in an airport.

I imagine even the best design can only make an incremental difference to an experience characterised by ever lengthening line ups, over priced food and beverages, and inevitable delays.

Since I didn’t get to see it, I don’t know for sure.

Then I was struck by, dare I say, an entirely bigger thought.

Why stop at airports?

Why not rebrand entire countries?

Countries are not static, they evolve.

And the evolution of nations is somewhat more complex than the evolution of brands.

But national brand identities are invariably remnants of  the past.

A glorious history is all very well, but  sometimes you need to get with the program.

So following the order of my trip, first up for a makeover is the United Kingdom.

Or to give it its full title the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland” – a term coined in 1927.

And badly in need of an overhaul after 84 years.

What with the resurgence of Scottish separatism and the London riots, United seems stretching it a bit.

And isn’t Kingdom just a tad chauvinistic for a country ruled by a Queen?

The Disunited Monarchdom would be more apt, if a bit dour.

So how about the United Drinkdom?

Surely this encapsulates the brand character of a country where everyone is united by being on the lash, hungover, or nipping out for a swift half.

It’s a well-known fact that when you arrange to meet a Brit you‘ll end up in a pub, (which is fun when you’re on holiday).

{fancy a quick one?}

Even if, the legendary stiff upper lip has metamorphosed into, the much-loved-by-the-tabloid-press, rubber legged Friday night.

Maybe Diagio could sponsor all that new signage.

Are you thinking cross promotion?

The English word “Turkey” is derived from the Medieval Latin Turchia circa 1369.*

Not surprisingly, this is a hopelessly outdated brand.

Then, Turkey was famous for Sultans, harems and Constantinople.

Today, Turkey is famous for Istanbul, archeology, beaches and hospitality.

And Turkish hospitality is wonderful because it genuinely stems from cultural values even when there’s a commercial aspect to it.

The Turks know how to make you feel at home with warmth and excellent service that anticipates your needs through extra-sensory powers.

Meze, wine, olives, glasses, ice and raki, uncannily appear seconds before you were going to ask for them, in a fine example of just in time supply chain management.

While your host is being charming in four or five languages.

But the name Turkey hardly reflects this, evoking things that don’t work very well and Christian holiday roasts.

{exactly}

No problem, a simple rebrand to HospiTurkity, and they can own hospitality.

They deserve to, so it’s only fair.

That should see them alright for the next seven centuries.

Which brings me home literally and figuratively to Canada.

A country whose copious natural resources include either the second or third largest oil reserves in the world, depending on the credibility of restated Venezuelan reserves.

With a natural conservatism that has made its banking system the envy of many.

Not to mention  Justin Bieber.

Canada doesn’t quite capture the new Canadian exuberance.

But in homage to the original Iroquoian word, kanata, meaning  village or settlement* Kanada has a bit of bling to it.

And as an abbreviation for the currency, K$ with its connotation of “a grand”, is way cooler than C$.

It’s a timely reminder of our relative economic stability and new-found standing in the global order.

Which is just as well when you have bills to pay.

And when you get back from vacation — you always do.

*Wikipedia