Chan's Personal Blog

How do you fight a war elephant? Why pose such a question? Am I using the war elephant as a deep metaphor for problems in our complicated lives? Nope, this has to do with a video game I picked up this last weekend, Rome: Total War. It's a strategy game where you fight historical battles during Roman times. It's so realistic that the History Channel actually used the game to illustrate how famous historical battles were fought and won. I absolutely love the game as it's both very enjoyable to play, and you get to learn about history. Bonus points: The game works on even older computers, which I have.

In either case, so I'm playing as a Roman faction, and I'm doing war with the Carthaginian armies in North Africa. I finally arrived at their capital city, and I'm about to wipe them out. When I finally attack the city, an unexpected foe stands before me and my prize. The Carthaginians are marching war elephants towards my army.

I quickly tried to recall a situation where someone had to fight a war elephant. I suddenly thought, oh yeah, Lord of the Rings: The Return of The King. In that movie, the humans take out war elephants by charging their calvary at it. I'll do the same thing, brilliant!

So I rally all of my calvary to the front lines, and order them to attack the elephants. They start charging, but when they get near the elephants, the horses start freaking out, and refuse to move forward. This is not what I had expected; apparently horses are afraid of elephants, go figure. The elephants then proceed to charge forward, stomping and goring my calvary. Wow, that was a spectacularly failed attack. It worked in the movies! After many more pointless deaths due to elephants, I withdrew my forces, and had to rethink a strategy.

This is an example of what went down, it was horrible:

Today I decided to wear my Canada t-shirt to work. During lunch, I noticed that there were other Canadians sporting Canada t-shirts as well. I found it most amusing as we Canadians walk amongst the Americans, and they're completely unaware of that there are Canadians in their midsts, and that it was Canada Day. My boss thought it was odd that I was sitting with someone who was also wearing a Canada t-shirt, so he finally asked what the deal was.

In either case, to celebrate Canada Day today, I broke out the good Maple Butter, and setup a Maple Butter tasting event in my cube at work. I fired off an e-mail to a bunch of people, telling them to drop by to celebrate Canada Day. I thought it was amusing that some people thought I made the day up. Anyway, easiest way to make new friends.... feed them some Maple Butter. It's delicious!

I also sent around this video to educate my American counterparts.


One of the guys at work is French, and he said, "Oh, I didn't know you were from Canada. Do you know any French?" He then said something in French to see if I understood. He said something like, long live Quebec independence. I responded with, "absolument pas!" Laughter ensued.

Happy Canada Day!