I’ll Be Rocking Canada’s New Vertical $10 Bill of Viola Desmond

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Canada just revealed its new $10 bill, and it features a black woman on it, Nova Scotia’s own civil rights activist, Viola Desmond. It is also vertical in orientation while all the currency traditions were being turned on their heads! I think the bill is absolutely beautiful and I’m gonna be rocking it when it comes out around Christmas, 2018!

You know how some people flaunt cash in $20 bills, or maybe $50 or $100 bills? Well, I’ll be flaunting my new $10 bills like that! I’ll carry only $10 when I can, opting out of larger bills, and only carrying $5 bills when I get them as change. I might even spend the $5 bills a little frivolously every now and then to get rid of them, or make an extra purchase so as to get less than $5 in change back… all for the sake of “image” as the $10 guy, and helping the economy with a little extra expenditure. 😉

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CBC Musical Keys Signature Series

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A week ago, I stumbled across an award winning series on CBC Radio which I absolutely loved! It was a called the Signature Series, and comprised of 5 minute podcasts about each musical key. Each podcast is a poetic narrative about the persona represented by that key, beautifully done by  Paolo Pietropaolo, over mostly famous classical music all composed in that key.

You can listen to the series via the CBC websites, or on SoundCloud, where you can “collect” them by Likes or into playlists. However, the SoundCloud free account was so freakingly limited for what you could do with building playlists, especially for this day and age, that I’ve decided I’ll collect them here on my blog for reference, and to share with others.

Here are the podcasts of all the keys, from C to B like on a keyboard, alternating between major and minor keys. Enjoy!

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See Super Bowl LII’s Best and Funniest Commercials BEFORE the Game

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Apparently, you can see them ahead of time as shown below! Maybe this has been going on for years. I don’t know. I live in Canada! We don’t get those commercials here in 2018 even if you did watch the big game, unless you had some specialized channels! I always thought you had to at least wait till game day to see them, if not after, but not any more!

Besides, it’s only the Patriots this year. Just watch the commercials now and save yourself some time Sunday! 🙂

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My Halifax Regional Municipality Budget 2018, with Explanations, from its Budget Allocator

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Halifax Regional Municipality (HRM) did an innovative and democratic thing this year to have an interactive online Budget Allocator to let people try their hands at creating a municipality budget for the area, and submit it for City Council’s consideration. How much consideration each, or all the submissions might get, is another story, but I won’t be cynical here. I want to share my example of a cohesive budget that’s more than just the numbers, with rationale behind the choices, although the numbers are critical to make things work, of course. We’ll see when HRM presents its final budget, if it will do something similar to explain its choices in a way understandable to the general public.

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