On Tue, 07 Sep 2004 23:42:00 -0400, Peter J. Alling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Sudbury, Sudbury, where the heck is Sudbury... > (Welcome back anyway).
Peter, As Neil Young once sang: "There is a town, In North Ontario..." Sudbury is the nickel capital of the world. Worlds largest nickel mines are there, boy! It's famous for other things, as well. It had what was once (may still be - who cares?) the tallest smoke-stack in the world. It was built so all the ashes and crud from the smelters didn't land on Sudbury. Now it all lands on North Bay, 150 miles to the south east, which is fine with the Sudburese. It also has a Giant Nickel (with a beaver on it an everything, because Canadian nickels have beavers on one side and the Queen on the other, but I'm not going to make a joke about the Queen and the beaver, because that just wouldn't be right). The Giant Nickel is just off the Trans Canada highway, on the way into town. Real Canadian nickels actually have nickel in them, US ones don't. That's why we're better than you. Back when the Apollo astronauts were training to go to the moon, they came to train in Sudbury. Apparently they thought that the terrain around Sudbury looked a lot like the surface of the moon. Or maybe they trained on the slag heaps outside the smelter. Whatever, it is true that Apollo astronauts trained for moonwalks near Sudbury. See? Isn't Sudbury a cool place? Lest you think I'm making all this up, Canadian country and western icon Stompin' Tom Connors (there's a reason you've never heard of him, but he does exist) wrote a rather famous song, called "Sudbury Saturday Night". INCO, referred to in the song, is the International Nickel Corporation, who basically owns Sudbury: http://www.allcountry.de/Songbook/Texte_S_04/Sudbury_Saturday_Night/body_sudbury_saturday_night.html As I understand it, Sudbury, Ontario is about as nice as depicted in that song. So, Butch, is that the Sudbury you're in now? <vbg> Oh yeah, welcome back!! cheers, frank -- "It's about time we started to take photography seriously and treat it as a hobby." -Eliott Erwitt

