Monday, April 27, 2009

More for my British friends...

My friend Simon over in England emailed me this link.

Canada tourist video shot in Northumbria
The sea was blue, the beach was gold and the children skipping through the sand dunes seemed a testament to the healthy joys of holidays in the Canadian province of Alberta.

Tourist officials and the national government in Ottawa were delighted with the promotional clip, part of a £14m attempt to offset controversy over oil extraction in Alberta's beautiful wildlands.

But hours of sleuthing by a puzzled sailing enthusiast, aware that Alberta has no coastline, have revealed that the idyll was filmed 5,000 miles away across the Atlantic. The girl with the flying hair and her friend were romping on the sweep of sand at Beadnell Bay near Bamburgh, Northumberland, where the North Sea rolls in from Lindisfarne...

etc... follow the link.

Sometimes this goat rodeo of a country is just too embarrassing...

8 comments:

  1. Well, I've got to give them credit for a rare accomplishment. They've rendered me speechless.

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  2. Well, how I laughed. Then I laughed even more at the section that said the original article called Alberta a state, and said that Edmonton was 400 miles from the Atlantic and 600 from the Pacific. Which makes Canada very narrow indeed.

    Did I mention I had been to Northumberland recently?? laugh?? I thought me knickers would never dry.

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  3. Maybe a refresher course in Canadian Geograpy should be part of the next election requirement. That must have been some pretty strong goat dung they were smoking. Embarrasing.

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  4. Moppets. Advertising is all lies anyway, so what the hell.

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  5. Thanks so much, a book or two would be fantastic. Fiction is really what I'm after, if you happen to have an unwanted Harry Potter or Twilight that would be awesome, but I have so many students (I teach over 1000) that anything that you send will find a loving owner!
    This is my address:
    Jane Cronin
    Shijiazhuang No 42 Zhong Xue (Middle School)
    42 WenYuan Jie
    LianMeng XiLu
    Xinhua
    ShiJiaZhuang
    HeBei 050061
    China
    Thank you! :)

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  6. Thanks for the info Jane.

    For people reading this and wondering wtf? ...

    Jane teaches English in a swanky school in China. Though many of the students are well off there are some that have gained places in the school via scholarships but still being poor, accessing books written in English is beyond their means. She wrote a post about that and asked if anyone could send an English book to her in China.

    More here:
    http://occasionallyj.blogspot.com/2009/04/rural-students-tale.html

    I follow her blog, it's interesting (she ate a sparrow!) and was just that very morning considering a book cull. I figure I may as well send a few off to her.

    Not sure which ones though... would it be cruel to send 'Statistics for Social Data Analysis'? ;-)

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