{"id":358,"date":"2007-09-19T20:55:08","date_gmt":"2007-09-20T00:55:08","guid":{"rendered":"\/blog\/?p=358"},"modified":"2013-09-21T10:13:07","modified_gmt":"2013-09-21T15:13:07","slug":"highway-of-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/?p=358","title":{"rendered":"Highway of Heroes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, one of the busiest highways in the world has a new name<\/a> (at least for a section of it). It’s a name befitting a hair metal band.<\/p>\n

I don’t really care for the name change, after all, we already have several Veteran’s Highways (the former Airport Rd. in London, and the 416 near Ottawa). And it’s a pretty cheesy name, I don’t know how much it really honours our soldiers (and other domestic heroes). The quotes in the article make little sense to me:<\/p>\n

Capt. Mark Bossi, who served in Afghanistan, fought back tears as he rode along the stretch with CTV Toronto.<\/p>\n

“That’s amazing — it really is,” Bossi said when he saw one of the signs. “It’s on (Highway) 401 — people are going to see them everyday.”<\/p>\n

The signs are in response to an online petition in support of renaming the highway that was overwhelmed with responses.<\/p>\n

Bossi understands why the grassroots movement to dedicate the stretch grew so quickly.<\/p>\n

“If you think about it, every soldier has a mom and dad,” he said, his voice trembling.<\/p>\n

“A lot of guys have wives and children. I think that’s one of the reasons Canadians wanted the highway renamed.” <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So seeing the highway renamed made this captain so emotional he had to fight back tears? That makes little sense to me, the highway would probably have to be named after me personally to get that involved in it, and even then… of course, I haven’t suffered unknown amounts of PTSD. The last part of his quote makes even less sense. Every grad student has a mom and dad, and many have wives and children, but that really doesn’t make any sense for a reason to rename a highway. In fact, he seems to imply that the highway was renamed to appease\/coddle the survivors of soldiers killed rather than to actually honour the soldiers themselves.<\/p>\n

At least it’s not something that’s really going to affect me. For brevity’s sake alone, I think most people will still call it the 401 in everyday usage, similar to how nearly everyone still calls that stadium beneath the CN Tower “Skydome”. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, one of the busiest highways in the world has a new name (at least for a section of it). It’s a name befitting a hair metal band. I don’t really care for the name change, after all, we already have several Veteran’s Highways (the former Airport Rd. in London, and the 416 near Ottawa). […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,5,10,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/358\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.holypotato.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}