NO FAIR EATING THE COMPETITION

Making the rounds at the Toronto Star-Sponsored Ultimate Travel Show on the weekend and stopped to visit some folks from New York state.

"Hey, check out this picture," a tourism worker said, pointing at an adorable little girl with pigtails and a pale green frog in her hands at the Colton Country Days fair in the Thousand Islands area. "There's a great story behind this picture."

Okay, I said, I'm game.

"See, she's holding this frog. She and her little brother each had a frog entered in a jumping contest. But her bullfrog ate her brother's leopard frog before the contest could start. And then," she said with a straight face,"her frog was too heavy and couldn't jump."

As Dave Barry might say, you couldn't make this stuff up.
 
THE MAINE THING

 

Not far away from the New York booth was a guy representing the state of Maine.

"We've got mountains and restaurants and great beaches and great shopping," the chap said. "We're like the Alaska of the East."

"So," he was asked, "do you have your own version of Sarah Palin?"

"Not yet," he said with a laugh.

I don't think they have an inland passage or North America's highest mountain range or grizzly bears or old gold rush towns, either, now that I think about it. But it's a pretty place to visit.

CALLING CALLAWAY FANS

Callaway Golf Canada’s newest state-of-the-art club-fitting facility was officially opened last week at ClubLink’s DiamondBack Golf Club in Richmond Hill, Ontario.

The facility is Callaway’s newest in Canada and its second in the Greater Toronto Area, "offering the same technology used to fit touring professionals, a simple process that can benefit golfers of every skill level."

On hand was Trish Stratus, the WWE legend. Sorry we missed it.

90 PER CENT CHANCE OF SHOWERS ... OR MAYBE MEDALS

Stephanie Levitz from Canadian Press had an interesting story on the weekend about how athletes competing near Whistler at next year's Olympic Games will have a new radar system for "up-to-the-minute weather forecasts."

A $1-million Doppler system has been put in place just outside Whistler, B.C., allowing meteorologists to monitor conditions along the Sea-to-Sky Highway and over the two competition venues in the area, she wrote. The radar joins a network of weather stations and a wind profiler installed specifically for the Olympics to feed into existing systems.

Now, if someone could create a better forecast on the chances of finishing first in medals we'd be onto something.