Running Commentary 7/1/2025

Hello,

This newsletter is coming on a Tuesday instead of the usual Monday, because this week we have a special Canada edition of A Running Commentary, and today, Tuesday, July 1st, is Canada Day. Canada doesn’t really celebrate their independence from Great Britain, which only happened in the ‘80s and was less Canada breaking away and more what was left of the British Empire cracking up altogether. Instead, Canada Day is the anniversary of Canada’s confederation in 1867, when the British territories of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Canada (then just Ontario and Québec) were united into the Dominion of Canada, which is what became the modern nation after a century of westward expansion.

I am not a Canadian; I am a Michigander, which as Americans go is more nearly Canadian than the average, but that just makes it harder for me to figure Canada out. Canadian/American relations are historically very close, but there’s always been one bit of tension between us, namely that the US thinks Canada. the Anglophone regions particularly, might as well be part of our own country, whereas Canadians do not want to be American, for reasons that Americans struggle to understand. I suppose it goes back to Anglophone Canada’s roots being established properly by loyalist colonists who disagreed with the American Revolution, whose descendants became worried that the US would do to them what we did to Mexico, or, indeed, what they did to Québec. But that dearly held distinction between Canadians and Americans never turned into a proper animosity, and we’ve both prospered more as neighbors than we would have without each other and probably more than we would have as a single country, so as an American I’d like to offer my wishes for a happy Canada Day and this very Canadian edition of my newsletter as a celebration of Canadian art, culture, and nature.

Anyway...

Playing...

Warframe

Fittingly for this week’s special RC, the Canadian-developed game Warframe has received a major update for me to cover. We do have another new ‘frame, which, at time of writing, I’ve just built, and which I’ll probably have to give my thoughts on later. But we also have a re-work for Valkyr, who I was able to play as this week, and a new Duviri cycle to play.

Valkyr Rework

Valkyr’s been in a rough place for a while now, not awful; I haven’t played her in at least a year, and while I was reviewing the update notes I realized that I barely remembered what her kit had been before this update. I will say that she’s not a bad ‘frame now. I’ve enjoyed her reworked ripline; I maintain that the best warframe powers aren’t necessarily the ones that deal the most damage or provide the strongest buff, but are the ones that you most miss having when you switch ‘frames. Ripline’s solidly one of these powers now, a really useful, fun traversal power, especially in the Hollvania tileset where you can swing through the city like Spider-Man. Before the re-work you could do that but it was a lot clunkier. The enemy-focused aspect of her ripline is a lot better; it used to be pretty useless, basically knocking enemies down; now it pulls enemies together and pulls you into their midst with one tap, which is basically ideal for a melee-focused enemy. If you need a bit more help you can use her 3 to slow enemies and open them up to more damage, though her 3 I’d say is still not a fantastic ability. Her 2 is the same, really.

Her claws seem a lot stronger than I remember, but I think this might just be because exalted weapons overall were buffed a bit ago. Her 4 no longer grants damage immunity, it just pulls out her claws and gives her some buffs. But, her passive now does make her basically invincible, so long as you’re actively playing: she has a meter that gets charged with kills and melee hits, and which cheats death when your health runs out, so if you’re ripping through a crowd of enemies it really doesn’t matter if you’re taking hits since you’ll be charging that meter to survive faster than they can kill you. If there aren’t enough enemies present to charge the meter, you won’t need the invinicibility.

I’ve enjoyed playing Valkyr; Kullervo is pretty much my favorite ‘frame at present, and Valkyr now plays a lot like him, only with a bit more of a survival focus than a damage-dealing focus.

The Triumph of Dust

The new Duviri cycle is both the farm for the new ‘frame, Oraxia, and the center of a new operation, which means I and other players have been playing it quite a bit. Thankfully Duviri lends itself well to repeat playings. The only thing that repeats each time are the two boss fights. Yes, there are two boss fights in each run, one against a maddened Oraxia and one against a pair of Fragmented Ones. The Fragmented fight is essentially the same as ever, so I won’t get into that. The Oraxia fight is…harder than it feels like it should be. It’s pretty much an aimglide challenge, since twice Oraxia will summon little spiders that will kill you pretty quickly if they get within melee range, so the only way to stay alive is to hop around and shoot from far away. But neither fight is an interminable slog, even on Steel Path. And while running the whole loop takes a bit of time, it delivers rewards for the operation at a good rate, and as a farm for Oraxia it’s both decently quick and something that people who come along after this update is no longer new will be able to do by themselves, which is important in a warframe farm.

Besides the particulars, though, I’m glad to see Duviri get some expansion, not only more stuff to do but a furtherance of the story of the game set there. I got the feeling that Duviri would sort of disappear from the lore of Warframe once we introduced the Drifter, but it seems that’s not the case, at least not yet.

Also, as a PSA to other players: the operation depends on our exchanging of tokens for stuff from Dominus Thrax, not directly on playthroughs of the new loop. Go buy arcanes!

Game Review | Warframe

I don’t play much in the way of video games; I just play Warframe.

The Edwards EditionDerek Edwards

Bird of the Week

In honor of the day, we have the national bird of Canada. Some readers, indeed perhaps some Canadians, will be shocked to learn that Canada’s national bird is not the loon. An iconic figure of northern lakes, loons breed throughout Canada and have long been featured on Canadian money. The loon is as Canadian as maple syrup and the Stanley Cup bilingual signage. But no, the loon is not Canada’s national bird; that honor has been bestowed on a bold little corvid; for Canada Day, here’s the Canada Jay.

The Canada jay is indeed a very Canadian bird, living in forests throughout the expansive country. They can also be found in cold, snowy parts of the United States: Alaska, a few areas near the border, and down through the Rockies and Cascades, but for the most part they are a Canadian bird, and furthermore they do not leave in the winter like the loon and many other Canada-breeding birds will.

It only got picked as Canada’s bird fairly recently. In 2014, Aaron Kylie, the Editor-in-Chief of Canadian Geographic, was inspired to try to rectify Canada’s lack of a national bird with a public polling campaign, intending to see the winner officially honored on the 150th Canada Day (July 1st, 2017). In 2015, the magazine began featuring essays arguing for various birds to be chosen. The loon, the Canada goose, the great gray owl, the raven, the pileated woodpecker, the red-winged blackbird, the Canada warbler, the dark-eyed junco, and Harris’s sparrow all became nominees; the contest gained much more attention and submissions than Kylie and the other members of the Royal Canadian Geographic Society had first anticipated. By the end of 2016 the field was narrowed and a run-off between the top five: the Canada goose, the Snowy Owl, the Common Loon, the Black-capped Chickadee, and the Gray Jay.^1,2,3,4

The gray jay was proclaimed “Our National Bird” on the cover of the December 2016 issue of Canadian Geographic (which it shared mention on with wolverines and Gordon Lightfoot) after winning this run-off. But a magazine, even one with a royal charter behind it, cannot formally declare a national symbol. That would take an act of parliament. Despite Kylie’s hopes and the massive national attention on the contest, Canada Day 2017, and now eight more since, have passed without any such act being passed. The Canada jay is the national bird in a purely informal capacity.

Following the bird’s contest win, Canadian ornithologists David Bird Dan Strickland, among others, successfully petitioned the American Ornithologists Union to restore the gray jay’s original English name “Canada Jay”. This is what the bird had been called by early birders such as J. J. Audubon. The term “gray jay” had come from the notably plumage-color-focused Robert Ridgway, and originally referred to a subspecies of the Oregon jay; after scientists lumped the Canada jay and the Oregon jay into the same species, “gray jay” became the preferred vernacular name for the merged species overall, with its subspecies retaining geographic names: Oregon gray jay, Alaska gray jay, Labrador gray jay, Alberta gray jay, etc. Strickland was sympathetic to the concern that “Oregon Canada jay” would confuse people but argued that “Canada jay” was the original and more authentic name and that renaming it “gray jay” was not consistent with bird naming generally; he also warned that should the Canadian government adopt the bird as a national symbol they might well do so as the “Canada jay”, regardless of what the AOU called it. In 2018, the AOU renamed the species.^5,6

But the name change still hasn’t resulted in formal adoption yet. I have found that a bill for formal recognition was introduced back in March of this year,⁷ but at time of writing I don’t see that that’s gone anywhere. But that’s all right; the bald eagle was only formally adopted as the national bird of the United States last December,⁸ but that didn’t keep it from being a symbol of America for centuries before that. The Canada jay could absolutely become a cultural symbol of the same sort, and indeed seems to be starting to become so, despite a reluctant parliament.

The Canada jay is not a backyard bird to the same extent as blue and Steller’s jays, though those who’ve ventured into its conifer-forest home have found it just as bold around people. Canada jays not only stay in Canada through the winter, they actually begin nesting in winter, laying their eggs in March, when Canada is still consistently cold and snowy; Canada jays must keep their eggs warm in below-zero temperatures. The birds are able to survive these harsh conditions and provide for their hatchlings during the Spring thaw by caching food during the summer; their diet is omnivorous, made up of insects, berries, and carrion, mainly; they will store food in nooks and crannies of tree bark, after first holding morsels in their beaks to coat them with sticky specialized saliva to hold them in place long-term. This food storage habit both enables the jay to survive the cold and makes it dependent on the cold to refrigerate their food, which would spoil in warmer weather.⁹

Besides “Canada jay” and “gray jay”, this bird has been known by many names. The Anishinaabe call it gwiingwiishi, which they recognize as among the smartest creatures in Canada. The Cree call it wîskicahk, which English settlers turned into “whiskey jack”, a colloquial name you’ll still hear some. Anglophones also call them camp robbers (Canada jays will steal people’s food), moose birds (they’ll eat ticks off from moose and other large mammals), and gorbeys (a Yankee term likely derived from a Scots term for a glutton).⁹ French-speaking Québecois know the bird as le mésangeai, a portmanteau of the French words for “jay” and “chickadee”;¹⁰ whether this is because it looks like a chickadee with its black cap or because it acts like a chickadee with its food caching, I don’t know.

To science, the bird is Perisoreus canadensis. Linnaeus originally called it Corvus canadensis, the “Canadian crow”. The term canadensis is Latinized from “Canada”, which traces its roots back to kanata, an Iroquois word meaning “village” or “settlement”; the French explorer Jacques Cartier was told of a “kanata” where now sits Québec City, and he applied the term to the region on the banks of the St. Lawrence River; eventually the scope of “Canada” spread to mean Québec and Ontario taken together, then to mean all British holdings in North America.¹¹ The modern genus name was bestowed by Charles Lucien Bonaparte, the nephew to the emperor Napoleon I and the preeminent ornithologist in North America in his day. A good Frenchman, Bonaparte believed the bird was more like a chickadee than a crow, and he thus sought to split it from Corvus. The name he gave it likely came from the Greek for “one who heaps up”, referring to the bird’s caching habit, though some suggest that Perisoreus is actually Latin, a reference to a bird used by the Romans in augery concerning the titan Saturn, based on some of Bonaparte’s writing on the matter.¹² This controversy has become somewhat fitting, as the bilingual nation of Canada can be thought to have a national bird with a bilingual name.

Curation Links

The Naturalist and the Wonderful, Lovable, So Good, Very Bold Jay | Brian Payton, Hakai Magazine

I found this article while researching for this week’s bird; it’s worth reading in full.

A profile of Dan Strickland, who studies the Canada jay and was a key figure in getting their patriotic name restored by the American Ornithological Union. Also a profile of the jay itself, describing how they thrive in cold, snowy forests.

The Diabolical World of Phone Scams | Sarah Treveaven, MacLean's

“Fraud investigations in Canada have long been under-resourced and overwhelmed. Now they’re even more hamstrung by a crushing number of small fish and the challenges of cross-border investigations. The result is that the rapidly proliferating criminal enterprises targeting Canadians operate with something close to impunity. The CRA scam briefly changed that. Its sheer magnitude forced the government to launch one of the most significant anti-fraud investigations in Canadian history. Then, after stacking up a handful of victories, the effort was dismantled, leaving weary Canadians to once again fend for themselves.”

Connecting Flights | Nishant Batsha, Lapham’s Quarterly

The strange, circuitous history of the Khoja Isma’ili, a South Asian religious group who rode British coat-tails to colonize East Africa, then came to Canada, mainly, as refugees when Idi Amin ejected Indians from Uganda. Why Canada? Because the Khoja’s high priest/king was yachting buddies with Pierre Trudeau.

Revenge of the Earthworms | Moira Donovan, The Walrus

Earthworms are greatly beneficial to garden soil, so many people have come to believe they are a positive good wherever they can be found. But they are not native to the boreal forests of Canada, where they have been introduced and where they have commenced reshaping the ecosystem in massive ways belying their small size. Now, a second, more active species spreading up through Ontario might raise awareness of this squirmy ecological threat.

Hudson Geese | Bernardo Britto

[FICTION] [VIDEO] A Canada goose, hatched in Québec, offers his disappointment in the way a notable episode of history involving him and his kind is remembered. (5 minutes)

See the full archive of curations on Notion