OK, so it wasn't the end of summer last week. It's this weekend. You wouldn't know it. as it is going to push 30C later today in some parts of Ontario today. A weekend of actual sunshine, warmth and nothing to really do lays out before me. What to do? What to do? We have been playing a sort of lawn bowling with our boules set nightly. Likely the land will hear more of the click of the steel.

• Update: Do you have any idea how nice it was to know that the Red Sox could not lose again last night because they were not playing. The New York Times shares my pain.
• I did not watch the provincial election debate last night. Ontario politics, due to the odd polite role Ontario plays not actually pulling its weight in the national scene, is sort of dull. All three candidates are reasonably polite and reasonably good intentioned people leading a huge government bureaucracy of the scale of a nation within a nation that has seeming difficulties expressing itself as a cultural fact. Though, to be fair, the conservatives use of the phrase "catch and release" justice is getting tedious. And the idea that a broken pledge to not raise taxes is wrong after the promise maker gets in power and finds out, as we all do from time to time, that conservatives (the accusers now) have no idea how to run a finance department without a resource windfall attached to it is simply laughable. I will, however and again, not vote for the winner. If you are interested, the Globe blogged the debate backwards requiring you to read the impressions from bottom to top. The MSM is sooooo bad.
• Ry has a request:

  Ack. We needs a fun topic, Al. Writing 4 page essay length stuff for John and his commentators is killing me. How about we start a pool for the MLB playoffs. It's almost Oct after all. Something like March madness would suffice I think. It's smaller and easier than that, but could still be fun.

  That is reasonable but I am crawling into my shell what with the collapse of the Sox. Did you know that they are in the lead now but not by a huge amount? I mean I should be absolutely shattered because they are in the lead but only by a bit. Any ideas how I can overcome my despair over them being in the lead?
• I have seen this sort of claim from Western apologists before and it is the oddest falsehood for someone to cling onto. From Ezra Levant in (yawn!) Canadian Lawyer's September issue:

  But tens of thousands of Canadians think otherwise. They’re not choosing Saskatchewan, a province with nearly as much oil and gas, more wheat, more potash, and more uranium. Alberta’s wealth is not because of its natural resources but precisely because of its free market is working so well.

  If this shabby thinking is what you need to get you through the night, fine, but it is good for the rest of you to know that as Alberta's oil reserves are 174.8 billion barrels and its gas reserves are 41 trillion cubic feet, Saskatchewan has only 1,244 million barrels of oil (0.71% of Alberta) and just 3.3 trillion cubic feet of gas (8% of its neighbour). Once again, say it out loud, Alberta is incredibly wealthy because it is sitting on the one resource the world is begging for and it was blessed with that by fluke of geology and late Victorian boundary-making. People move there to make a lot of money just like people move anywhere there is plenty of money to make.
• Jay is writing longer pieces. I used to write longer pieces. I used to be able to hold that much in my mind. Jay can. Or maybe he writes a bit each day. Yeah, that must be it. So apparently we could be the new Switzerland. Switzerland?

  In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

  Hoo-ray. Melted cheese for dinner, too.