Rose: Your comment made me look it up as I had thought Labrador was a seperate province from Newfoundland. I also didn't realize that Nanavut was a territory, not a province. The Wiki page was interesting. I'm really surprised at our schools not teaching us about just a little more Canadian history aside from the war for independnce battles that the United States lost to the Brittish. It looks like the provinces formed a confederation quite different from the Unites States federal government. Secession is something that a province can do without a civil war! No wonder my relatives joke about Alberta joining the United States. :) Toronto is still in eastern Canada even if you are dividing the country into three parts. Ontario's a big place stretching east under Quebec. Why would a Canadian need to know the capitals of the U.S. states? I was never taught them all, though I can name at least twenty of them. Olympia, Salem, Sacramento, Carson City, Salt Lake City, Helena, Pierre, Springfield, Denver, Tallahassee, Montgomery, Austin, Raleigh, Albany, Montiplier (Sp), Wow, I don't remember the capital of Arizona! It surely isn't Phoenix, is it? Atlanta, Frankfurt, I'm not sure about these Honolulu, Memphis, Philadelphia, Charleston, Kansas City, and that still leaves more than half of them! I suppose I might have to get the map out again. I remember that our tenth grade was about a year behind the Canadian tenth graders in highschool on average. This is in the 1970s. With the American invasion of Canada fully in place, I imagine they've dropped to our level by now. :)

I remeber when I was fifteen and visiting my grandma in Southern Alberta. Some of the local kids wanted to play football and my cousin got me to play too. This was about two years before I realized football is not a game one should play if one wants to remain healthy in life! I mean tackle football. The other forms are nothing compared to it when it comes to how hard you can hit or get hurt. The NFL takes this to the extreme and I'm sure the padding helps, but I'd be surprised if many players last longer than three or four years. Australian Rules Football looks pretty rugged too and they don't have padding. Same with Rugby. The Canadian Football League is very similiar in concept to the NFL, but the rules of the game have some major differences.

Anyways, we go down to the field by the school to play some football. We pick teams and the others guys win the toss for the kick off. So we kick it off. A right high kick, and I immediately take off for where I think the ball is coming down and none of the other team's players block me! Right when the guy catches the ball I tackle him. This starts a big argument! Apparently in Canadian rules a kick receiver is allowed a five yard buffer zone for receiving the ball. No one told me and I was playing football the way I was used to it. I can't remember what we did about this, ah, little indiscretion, but we continued the game. Playing sandlot football is a whole lot different deal than organized leagues and teams. There's no referees, and usually the only markings on the field might be the goal lines or a tree or something to mark the out of bounds. Or you take off your shirts and use them to mark the boundaries. Of course there's no field goal posts and touchdowns and safeties are the only way to score. Except Canadian Football has another way to score that American Football doesn't, called a rogue. I learned about these later as we didn't count them in this game either. Since there's no markings and the teams usually only have five or six guys on a team, you have to change some of the rules. Like getting a first down. This is usually done by advancing the ball ten or more yards. In sandlot footbal we always did it by making the offensive team get a 2 or 3 forward pass completions. Then on fourth down the team would either punt the ball or go for a touchdown if they were close enough to the endzone.

Here it is third down and the other team is punting the ball! I'm thinking this is a different way to play football. Canadian football has only three downs instead of four in American football. The Canadian Football season is started earlier than American Football too. I was able to watch a game back then on television and my grandpa explained the different rules. 12 players on each side instead of 11, 2 men in motion before the snap. 25 yard deep endzones compared to our 10 yards. Our field is 120 yards long, the Canadian field is 160 yards. Big difference. They can be on the five yard line looking to score and still throw a twenty yard pass. Goal line to goal line is 110 yards compared to our 100 yards. The field is larger, but they only get three downs instead of four to make a first down. It's been many years since I've seen a Candian Football league game. I'll have to check it out again. I think my favorite football version is still Australians rules, but I've only ever seen two games of it and still have trouble trying to figure it out. A real wild and free flowing game that one is. No lines of scrimmages, so it's like soccer in that respect. It's a trip how the different versions of football from around the world have evolved.