Happy Third Annual Louis Riel Day

How time flies! Three years already, holy smokes.

Long-time readers will recall that I had written an Uptown Magazine column for the introduction of Louis Riel Day, then a column the year after that for its second observance. The scheduling just happened to shake out this year that my next column is after Louis Riel Day, so I couldn't really write about it a third time -- but, whatever, two years in a row is still pretty good.

And really long-time readers may even recall as far back as 2007, when I wrote on this very blog about the crucial voting that officially named the stat holiday and established Louis Riel's least depressing legacy yet. It's been a good run so far! (Certainly better than if they had named the thing "Spirited Energy Day" like they had threatened to, I mean. Because, augh.)

So let's celebrate! If you were wondering, yes, I intend to continue my own personal Louis Riel Day tradition: getting good and liquored up and then reading about Manitoba history. But this year is going to be a little different! For the past couple of Louis Riel Days I've been reading secondary sources, but this year my historical research will involve a series of primary documents across a variety of media types. And it's all for the greater good; I created that Manitoba Homecoming 2010 tag specifically for projects like this, so down the line throughout the rest of the year you can expect to see me share a wide selection of hilarious historical Manitoban artifacts with you guys.

But, wait, there's more! Since I'm such a hard worker (and a devastatingly handsome one, at that!), I figured I should get myself a little present -- so I set myself up a Twitter account, finally wandering bleary-eyed into modern civilization for the five or ten minutes before everybody inevitably migrates to Foursquare or whatever. (Of course, the site's servers crashed literally the second after I signed up -- but at least that means people are using it, so I'm not completely behind the times.) I'll have to remember to embed it in the sidebar, once the site is actually working again.

Long-time readers -- who are getting a lot of work today, considering how many times now I've incurred their hypothetical presence -- long-time readers might well be aghast at this news. I know that my previous stance about Twitter was very well defined, and even now I still suspect that the character limit might be rather restrictive to my traditional rambling technique -- so what changed between now and then? Well, Winnipeg Cat happened, basically. I kicked off that project a few months after that column was written, and then one day a little while ago I eventually realized that a Winnipeg Cat entry can only actually contain, at max, maybe seventy characters before it starts to lose its legibility. That's half a tweet. So, if I've managed to pull that off for a few months' worth of entries now, I suppose a hundred and forty characters is probably going to be plenty after all.

(There are FireFox extensions for expanding the character limit, too, as it turns out. It's a strange world we live in.)

So now I've got my bases pretty well covered, I think; anything too long for a Winnipeg Cat, but too short for a satisfying blog post, can be safely farmed out to Twitter for completion's sake. (And at least this way, if I appear to vanish for several weeks at a time, people can check to see whether I'm legitimately dead or just being lazy about posting here.) Bring the noise, new media!