By James Bow

It's been noted elsewhere that the flip of the clocks from saving to standard time and back has become a lot easier these days. Our computers, our phones, and our watches make the switch automatically in the middle of the night. In my house, only four clocks need to be manually changed, and three of them are in my kitchen (my stove and microwave, pictured above, and a battery-operated wall clock behind me). For a brief moment on Sunday morning, my kitchen enters into its own timezone, like Arizona. My car also needs a switch, but that just requires a few taps on the screen into the settings to turn off (or turn on) the Daylight Saving switch).

Which, I guess makes it strange that the switch between Daylight Saving (Summer) Time and Standard (Winter) Time is becoming increasingly unpopular.

Because it is. Over the past twenty years, I've heard the complaints increase. I've heard news reports talk about the rise in car accidents following time changes. I've heard people complain about the sudden loss of light in November. Politicians have been promising an end to the time changes for a while and, recently, have kept their word in many jurisdictions. Today, all of Canada west of the 90th meridian (including northwestern Ontario, but not including Nunavut) has officially backed out of the change, with BC, Alberta, Manitoba, and northwestern Ontario choosing permanent Daylight Saving Time.

And I support this. I've been finding the time change increasingly annoying and unnecessary as the years go on. I am living for the moment when the Ontario government flips the switch on the change that it's already passed into law: to stop the time change once Quebec and New York State agree to stop the time change as well. But I'm uncertain why I support this so strongly, other than to complain about the annoyance of adjusting my (four) clocks, and the sudden onset of early sunsets and dark evenings.

But proponents of stopping the spring-forward/fall-back ritual are split between those who want to settle on Daylight Saving Time (me) and those who want Standard Time. Standard time has become increasingly beleaguered, as the change-over dates have been pushed back later in fall and earlier in spring. There is some institutional pressure for keeping to Daylight Saving Time, but Standard Time still has its proponents, citing their fears of sending their kids to school in darkness.

Well, I did offer a possible compromise: instead of flipping our clocks an hour forward or back, flip it just a half-hour instead, and live with that time change as the new standard time for the whole year. Winter evenings don't begin quite so late, and it isn't quite so dark when the kids go to school in the morning. And, for once, our easternmost province would get its revenge, starting all their shows at noon, instead of, as the CBC radio announcer would long intone, "12:30 in Newfoundland".

But that appears to be off the table.

I don't know why we feel so strongly about this, but we do, and I think it's right that we should proceed to end the seasonal time change throughout Canada. I hope the United States does it as well. I would prefer we stick to Daylight Saving Time because the sudden evening sunsets come November always throw me for a loop. It's just awful seeing the dark of midnight at 6 p.m.

Yes, this may mean that we're sending our kids to school in darkness, but this brings up another question: why the heck are we sending our kids to school so bloody early? Studies have shown that teenagers are hard-wired to sleep in, and starting school later in the day improves academic performance among high school students. Anecdotally, the worst time for non-violent property crimes (vandalism, etc) comes between 3 p.m. and 5 p.m., when we have a large group of students sitting around unsupervised. If we end school times closer to 5 p.m., this window vanishes, and we know most teenagers won't get up early to commit minor misdemeanours.

For the Lord's sake, some high schools in the U.S. have start times of 7:00 a.m.! What in the heck are they thinking?

Maybe if we didn't live our lives so beholden to our clocks; if we had a bit more flexibility on when the day starts, we wouldn't be so flummoxed each time the clocks change, and we wouldn't feel so bad about late winter sunrises or early winter sunsets. In my opinion, the first step is to stop the silly spring-forward/fall-back merry-go-round, but the second step is to be a bit more flexible about when our days actually start.

We'd been warned that severe thunderstorms -- even a possible tornado -- were in the offing later in the day. But at around 4:30 p.m., the sun was still shining, so I decided to nip out two blocks to my local Sobeys to pick up some items for dinner. I usually drive this route when collecting a large number of groceries, but I didn't need much this time, and I felt virtuous using my own two feet. There were some mounded clouds on the horizon, but I thought I'd have no trouble getting back home.

Shopping took me a half hour, and the moment I paid for my purchases was when the sky opened.

This was no ordinary rainstorm, for Kitchener. The sky went very dark, and the rain became torrential. The large roof that covered our big box store rattled with it. Then everybody's cellphone blared out an emergency alert: our area was under a tornado warning. We needed to take cover immediately.

The storm with the dangerous rotation turned out to be outside Mitchell, Ontario, but that front was moving fast. We all needed to take it seriously. And as I'd walked to the store, I had no transportation home, so I decided to shelter in place. I sat down in a seating area that Sobey's provided, with an eye on the door, places where I could duck and cover, and the path to the nearest windowless interior room (the store's public bathroom) that I could run to if needed.

Things got intense out of doors. The rain fell so hard, we lost cellular reception. That means it blocked the line of sight between my cellphone and the nearest cell towers, even though cellphones can find a signal through most walls. Visually, we couldn't see across the parking lot. Then the wind hit. I was told that someone struggling to get through the parking lot was blown back three steps for every forward step taken. Our cellphones blared multiple times, for updates to the tornado worning, for dangerous wind warnings; this wasn't to be taken lightly.

And when the employees mentioned that the windows at the front of the store were vibrating from the storm, I stood up, announced I was heading for an interior room, and strongly suggested that others follow. A store manager also mentioned that Sobeys had a basement. Who knew?

By this point, the store was mostly empty. I'd been waiting for at least a half-hour. Nobody was coming in to shop, and shoppers were gradually leaving, to try and chance things in their cars. The upside of this was that many store employees decided to walk back to the store's break rooms, which were also interior and away from the windows. A reasonably safe spot.

Things eased up after that point. We could see across the street at last. The wind died down. There was at least six inches of standing water throughout the large parking lot, rising up to Sobeys' doors, but that started to recede. My family, who had taken cover in their basement, hauling in a contractor who was working on our property to share our shelter, ventured out. Erin got the car and came to get me. I returned to a flooded driveway (which I cleared by finding and clearing the blocked drain), a partially flooded garage (with two drains that took care of the problem) and wet feet. There were some branches knocked down in our street, but there was no serious damage to our property or ourselves.

It's important to note that I respected the weather and stayed indoors, eyeing all the paths to proper shelter, because I married a Midwesterner. Erin, born in Iowa and raised in Nebraska, knows and respects severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. She knows what a bad sky looks like, and it looked like home out there today. I've never been through such a storm, though. My respect comes entirely from her hear-say, and I suspect I didn't treat this storm with the full respect it deserved (I should have been in the interior windowless room the whole time, rather than watching the waves of rain through the doors, taking the pictures you see).

But that's nothing compared to most people around me, who stared out the floor-to-ceiling windows in awe, who waded out into six inches of water to get to their cars, who ploughed through flood zones on the street raising a wake taller than their own vehicles. If things had gotten worse -- if a tornado had shoved itself through, if devastating winds or baseball-sized hail took aim at our big box roof, or if the rain had continued in its intensity for another half hour, flooding into stores and homes and floating cars into one another on the streets, we would have seen a true disaster.

Earlier today, my old friend, political jockey Warren Kinsella fired a cheap political salvo at Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow over the concerns she raised about the storm that was coming. In his words, "The sun is out and its lovely in Toronto. Good thing Olivia Chow practically declared a state of emergency and said that we were going to be facing a torrent of rain, hail and tornadoes."

Warren. I love you, but when you try to score cheap political points off of something that many meteorologists warned was coming, you're going to get soaked, and not just literally. Maybe respect the experts? Maybe, just maybe, don't go for the cheap political jab every chance you get?

But Warren's blazé attitude isn't unusual. It comes naturally to most of us without the political sidebars involved, because Ontarians don't understand how bad things can get when you get the weather that they get out in the American midwest. We've never faced the storms they've faced. We don't understand what living in Tornado Alley truly means. We gawk out of floor-to-ceiling windows vibrating in the wind.

Thanks to climate change. Tornado Alley is shifting east, and possibly north. These storms are going to happen more often, and right now, we're not prepared for them.

Unless we treat stormy weather with the respect it deserves, it's going to kill us someday.

An Open Letter To:
The Right Honourable Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada,
The Honourable Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario,
The Honourable Steven MacKinnon, Federal Minister of Transport,
The Honourable Prabmeet Sarkaria, Ontario Minister of Transportation,
Mr. Michael Lindsay, President and CEO of Metrolinx,
Ms. Tracy Robinson, President and CEO of CN Rail,
Mr. Matthieu Paquette, Interim President and CEO of VIA Rail Canada,

To paraphrase author Judith Viorst, on Friday, August 7, 2026, VIA Rail had a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. For my family, it started with VIA Train 84.

VIA Train 84 left Sarnia on time at 8:40 a.m. By the time it reached London, it was 23 minutes late. The delays compounded east of London due to conflicts with CN freight trains and slow orders on CN tracks between Stratford and Kitchener. By the time Train 84 reached Kitchener, it was almost an hour late.

Erin, the kids, and I were riding VIA Rail to Ottawa for a conference. We departed Kitchener at 12:58 p.m., moving onto tracks owned and operated by Metrolinx, but our problems did not end there. Although we made good speed out of Kitchener and across the Grand River, our train pulled into a siding just east of Breslau and eased to a stop.

And there we stayed for close to two hours.

At the time, we were told that we had to wait for a GO Train to pass us. However, I had the Transit app on my iPhone, and I could see that the GO Train that was supposed to meet us just east of Breslau was actually at Mount Pleasant GO Station in Brampton, two whole counties away. That GO Train was at least 45 minutes from our position. But apparently, there was nothing we could do.

The GO Train finally passed us at 2:17 p.m., but VIA Train 84 stayed in its siding. The GO Train made its way to Kitchener, switched ends, and came back the other way, passing us again around 3:00 p.m.. The reason for this delay was because, thanks to the earlier delays caused by conflicts with CN freight runs, slow orders on CN tracks, and waiting on a GO Train that wouldn't reach us for three quarters of an hour, we'd passed our engineers' legal time limit imposed by Transport Canada for the very sane reason that they don't want tired and overworked engineers driving huge trains across this country. Thus, we had to wait for VIA to bus out a new crew to take over. We finally got underway at 3:15 p.m.

As a result, our two-hour layover at Union vanished completely. The train we had to connect to left without us, and we had to rebook the second leg of our journey on a later train. We were far from the only ones, as dozens of us lined up at the VIA ticket stands at Union. In the end, where we were supposed to get into Ottawa at 8:00 p.m., we ended up arriving at midnight, crashing into our hotel closer to 1 in the morning.

To be fair to VIA, they did their best to ease the pain. They comped us 50% of our ticket price for the journey between Kitchener and Union. Because of delays between Union and Ottawa, we received another 25% refund on that leg of the journey, which let me ride for free on VIA a couple of weeks later. Multiply this by the dozens of passengers affected, and this must have cost VIA Rail thousands of dollars. VIA's ticket agents managed a long line of harried passengers quickly and professionally and got everyone on their way. Even while waiting on the train, the seats were comfortable, the air conditioning worked, and train staff explained as much as they could and were suitably apologetic. To the credit of the riders, everyone remained polite and in good humour. So, this is not a complaint that should be addressed to VIA Rail. They had little or no control over the delays that afflicted their train and cascaded across their system (other VIA Trains saw considerable delays that day). It's the fact that VIA Rail has little or no control over the conditions their trains operate under, and their poor treatment by CN Rail and Metrolinx, that is the problem.

CN's slow orders due to poor track conditions between Stratford and Kitchener were perhaps the biggest problem. The long stretches where the VIA Train had to crawl along at 16 km/h (precisely 10 miles per hour, because that's the North American standard speed for tracks that are in particularly poor condition, and CN is a North American railway company) was frustrating to watch on VIA's Live Train Tracker, as Train 84's arrival time was progressively pushed back. Metrolinx recently extended GO Train service to Stratford, but that service, while useful, is hamstrung as it copes with these same slow orders. A trip between Stratford and Kitchener that used to take 27 minutes a couple of decades ago, now takes closer to fifty. Metrolinx's extension to Stratford won't succeed unless these poor track conditions are fixed.

Possibly Metrolinx will pay for these necessary repairs, but while CN is currently a private for-profit railroad, it was a Crown corporation from 1918 to 1995. Canadian taxpayers paid billions to maintain and upgrade CN's tracks, and it's shameful to see our investment left to rot.

But even more aggravating was Metrolinx's treatment of VIA Train 84. Bringing that train to a stop when the meeting GO Train was more than 45 minutes away boggles the mind. Surely there are other places between Kitchener and Georgetown where these trains could meet and pass each other. If not, what is Metrolinx waiting for? They initially promised that we would have two-way hourly service between Kitchener and Toronto by 2024, but that's not possible with the limited passing sidings they've built west of Georgetown.

As I said, VIA Rail compensated its passengers for the delays of that day, but it seems unjust that they should have to pay when CN Rail and Metrolinx directly contributed to the problem. Private for-profit railway or not, CN's rail infrastructure should be better maintained. While Metrolinx has a GO Train network to run, passengers are passengers, and VIA Rail's passengers shouldn't be treated as second-class citizens. The federal government and the Ontario government should hold CN and Metrolinx more accountable to ensure such a delay on VIA Rail doesn't happen again. By making sure that no trains are bogged down to 10 miles per hour, and that all passengers get through the network with minimum delay, benefits not just VIA Rail's passengers, but the economy as a whole, by speeding up freight service, and ensuring people can ride from southwestern Ontario through the GTA to Ottawa, Montreal and beyond without clogging up traffic on Highway 401.

My family deserved better. My fellow passengers deserved better. VIA Rail deserves better, and so does everyone trying to move back and forth across this province.

Fix this.

Sincerely,
James Bow

What's with the teapots in Ottawa?

The family is in the city while Erin attends a conference. While there, I take Eldest Child out for breakfast at Fathers and Sons restaurant near the UOttawa campus (excellent food), but Eldest Child was flummoxed by the teapot their tea was served in. The glass is uninsulated, and so quite hot, and the heat resistant banding on top was only mildly effective. There was also no spout, so the hot tea easily spilled. We thought it was a weird affectation of this college campus restaurant and moved on...

Until we went to the Downtown restaurant Eggspectations the next day, and was served the same pot.

Is this a weird Ottawa thing?

So, I wrote this a week ago on Facebook and got a number of answers. Apparently others have seen this style of teapot, in Vancouver and in Colorado. Apparently, they were more common in the 1980s and the 1990s, so maybe it's falling out of style and these two restaurants happen to be odd throwbacks.

I do know that, when we returned to Eggspectations on our final day in Ottawa, Eldest Child was served tea from a normal teapot (fully ceramic, with a handle and a spout). They were delighted by this and thanked the waiter for using it, explaining the whole weird thing we'd encountered on Saturday and Sunday. Her reply was (paraphrased), "Yeah, we have a couple of those teapots in the back. I hate them, and try to use the regular ones when possible."

So there you go!

I realize this will not go anywhere, but I need to say it: it's time for Ontario to have its own flag.

Because, in reality, Ontario doesn't. We didn't have an official flag until 1965, during which we typically flew the British Union Jack. In many ways, since that date, we still haven't flown our own flag because the flag we picked to fly was the Canadian Red Ensign, modified to include the Ontario Coat of Arms on the right half. This was done by premier John Robarts, who preferred the Red Ensign to Canada's brand new Maple Leaf flag, and adopted it for Ontario in order to preserve it.

And isn't it a little presumptuous (and unfortunately rather like Ontario) to appropriate a symbol belonging to all Canadians as their own?

Vexilologists do not rate Ontario's flag highly (see the video to the right). It fails on a number of fronts, of which many velilologists list five. Here's their criteria:

1. Keep it Simple

Look at Ontario's current flag. Just look at it! Flags should be so easy to draw, our schoolchildren could do it. The Union Jack is already a hefty challenge, as is our maple leaf. Then, we add a sea of red and a coat-of-arms with not one stylized maple leaf but three realistic ones? What sick sadist came up with that idea? Somebody who hated schoolkids, clearly.

2. Use Meaningful Symbolism

Now, here the current Ontario flag is all about symbolism, but primarily one piece of symbolism, and is that symbolism truly relevant in this day and age? Has this symbolism aged well? One of Ontario's mottos may be "Loyal she began, loyal she remains" in reference to our first major settler group being United Empire Loyalists fleeing American persecution following the War of Independence, but that's not what Ontario is all about today. Today, we are a multicultural and diverse society, with distinctive regions within the province itself. How relevant is the British flag to the communities of the North? How relevant is it to the generations of immigrant families from other countries who have built up for literal centuries throughout the Greater Toronto Area? How relevant is it to our First Nations peoples?

The thing is, Ontario is actually pretty good with symbols -- which,at their root, rely on simplicity to convey a greater idea. The trillium, Ontario's official flower, has been used to great effect in promoting a united Ontario identity. It's all over our government buildings and many of our transit vehicles. Ontario's official colours are green and gold, which is why our GO trains are green. I prefer the simplified styling of the trillium that arose in the 1960s, during an age of remarkable design ethic that brought us GO Transit's iconic logo. The Franco-Ontarian flag gets this right, conveying their history and identity with two symbols and two colours, which is why I based my proposed flag heavily on their design.

Ontario's trillium is nowhere to be found on Ontario's current flag, and its colours of green and gold are relegated to an insert on the right half of the flag. We can do better than that.

3. Use 2 to 3 basic colours

I'm counting at least four, here, two of which aren't official Ontario colours.

4. No lettering or seals

(Looks at Ontario's coat-of-arms on the right half of the Red Ensign. Clears throat meaningfullly).

5. Be Distinctive or be Related

If our flag is related to anything, it's Britain, and that has the advantage of being a key part of our history, but little else. It's relation to Canada amounts to a fit of pique by John Robarts protesting our highly distinctive and effective Canadian Maple Leaf. And, is our flag distinctive? Have a look at the flag of Manitoba. If you can't easily figure out whether you're in Winnipeg or in Toronto by looking at the provincial flags they are flying, what the heck are we flying?

The flag I propose above is based off the proportions of our current Canadian flag. It uses the major symbol of Ontario, and one of two Ontario's official colours (why not the other one? Well, gold is used less often, and when applied to my proposed flag, this is the result). Best of all, it's simple. It requires the use of one crayon against a blank white page, and it's easily identifiable from a distance. While I know this is unlikely to happen, I strongly feel that Ontario's flag must change, and I strongly suggest that the flag above is what we change it to.

I know that a lot of people will have a knee-jerk reaction against the prospect of change. Our Red Ensign has been flying for 71 years, now, and changing things may be a wrench. But our flag has changed before. If it can change in reaction to the creation of the Canadian Maple Leaf, it can be changed into something that better reflects what Ontario is. It can change to provide a flag that's easier to identify, easier to draw, and easier to appreciate.

So, it appears that Doctor Who may be done for a while.

Russell T. Davies recently confirmed that his production company and the BBC had parted ways. There will be no Christmas Special for 2026, and the cliffhanger at the end of the second season of Disney's Doctor Who will likely never be resolved. Instead, the BBC will be tendering out the property to potential co-producers, with no relaunch date in sight -- language eerily similar to what they said after the original series ended in 1989.

And, strangely enough, I feel fine.

Make no mistake, this is a bittersweet moment. It's hard to overstate how much of an impact this show has had on my life. I am a writer because of Doctor Who. I met the woman who became my wife through Doctor Who. The show has provided me with many happy memories since I stumbled upon it on TVOntario in 1978 and pretended to be a Dalek on my elementary school's playground (I was six). I have loved every single Doctor I watched from William Hartnell to Ncuti Gatwa, and all of the extras that have been shoehorned in, including Jo Martin and John Hurt. Will it feel like something's missing in my life as we pass another Christmas without a special, or another year without a season? Yes.

But if I'm honest, I could sense this closure coming, back when the BBC decided to farm the show out to Disney rather than replace exiting producer Chris Chibnall with someone else in-house. Returning producer Russell T. Davies gave it his best shot on the Disney revival, but it felt like too much of a break from what had come before, and it felt like Disney's heart wasn't in it. The production values were strong, but the seasons were shorter, giving the storytelling far less room to breathe (a problem of many television series nowadays, including Star Trek). When Ncuti bowed out early rather than suspend his burgeoning film career for a third season that might not happen, the writing was on the wall, in spite of RTD's attempts to sugarcoat the thing.

And maybe that anticipation makes this closure easier to accept. Or, maybe it's the fact that I'm forty years older than I was during the program's cancellation crises of the mid-to-late 1980s that I'm able to be philosophical about the whole thing. Right now, given the shenanigans RTD had to pull to get the ending of the second Disney season that we got when he realized he had no guarantee of a third season, I'm glad he was able to pull off some semblance of an ending. I'm still impressed by the audaciousness of Gatwa regenerating into Billie Piper and leaving us hanging on that moment. Say what you will, but it still makes for a memorable send-off.

So, as bittersweet as this moment is, I am... thankful. I'm thankful for Russell T. Davis. The fact that this moment is bitter is because of the many good memories of the show over the past twenty years -- memories that would not have happened if he hadn't successfully launched it and set its tone. I am thankful that we got twenty years out of the revival, which is comparable to the twenty-six the original series got. I am thankful for the many actors who took on this role, who were able to give their own take on the character of the Doctor while staying true to his essence. And I am grateful for the many friends I have found through the show's fandom, from the time I first saw the program in 1978, to the past twenty years of its existence.

Yes, anybody who revives this show is going to have a devil of a time dealing with Russell T. Davies' ending cliffhanger, and frankly they'll probably avoid addressing it altogether. That's fine by me. Let fan fiction figure this one out and do a hard reboot instead. We know this program can do it, because it's done it successfully before -- not only in 2005 with the revival's first episode, Rose, but at several places within the show itself, from the original to the revival. This show can change course and set aside its old continuity very easily -- far more successfully than, say, Marvel or DC Comics. The Doctor just falls through another universe. Time can be rewritten. Et cetera. Et cetera.

It may be that a rest and a reboot is exactly what Doctor Who needs. Let the fans process the twenty years of new material they've been given. They have plenty of other sources of Doctor Who for their fix, and plenty of spaces with which to share their passion with other fans. Let them get hungry again, and then bring things back after a few years. As long as the new producers remember that this is, at heart, a story about a wizard with magical cabinet that can take him anywhere in the universe -- an individual who fights for peace, but doesn't believe the ends justify the means, who values intelligence and empathy over raw strength, then it will be a success again.

After all, this is how we things restarted back in 2005.

So, thank you, Doctor Who, for the past twenty years. Thank you for the past sixty-three. You have given me so much in my life, and we will always have Gallifrey.

Further Thoughts

• One thing that I am especially sad about is Carole Ann Ford, the actress who played Susan, who was brought aboard in the final season for a few mysterious appearances to build a plotline that will now never be resolved. The contributions she made were worthwhile and stand on their own, but I still think she deserved more than what she got, and that's a shame.
• I will say, regarding the finale, that while it was a brazen scramble by Russell T. Davies to pull a resolution out of his ass, I do appreciate one particular element of Ncuti Gatwa's regeneration: the fact that RTD finally got it right. Every other Doctor in this revival has passed away in epic, sprawling adventures. While Ncuti's last story was epic, he decided to regenerate in order to save the existence of a single child. That was the regeneration Davies wanted for David Tennant's Doctor, which he got talked out of. And while there are similarities to Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi's regenerations, in that they sacrificed themselves to save small communities, they did so while fighting Daleks or Cybermen. Ncuti's Doctor sacrificed himself for Belinda's child after the main fight was over, because everyone matters. Every single child. This Doctor sweats the small stuff, and that's what makes him the Doctor. Good on Russell T. Davies for remembering that.

The image to the right is by Denis Vermeirre, and is used in accordance with their Creative Commons License (Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)

There's been an interesting development in the games we play with Ontario license plates.

As well as the old game of Bumper Stumpers (remember that?), one game I play (and I know my friend Andrew plays), is trying to log the "highest" Ontario license plate possible. Standard Ontario license plates follow the pattern of four letters, followed by three numbers, with license letters and numbers raised incrementally. I remember when (roughly 1997) there was a mild kerfuffle over the fact that our old license plate system, which used three letters followed by three letters, was running out of 'numbers", as we were nearing ZZZ 999, so what were we going to do then?

The answer, of course, was to flip over to AAAA 000. And, since then, the highest license plate I've seen is in the DA region. According to Wikipedia, as of December 8, 2025, the highest license plate number is DJVP-046. Given that this pattern allows for 456,976,000 variants, it should be about a century or so before we have to update this system with five letters.

(Actually the total number of variations is significantly smaller than nearly 457 million. The letters G, I, O, Q, and U aren't used because they're too similar to each other and to other numbers, and this brings the number of variants down to 21 to the power of four, multiplied by a thousand, or 194,481,000. Legislation also prevents the use of certain letter combinations because they spell bad words or are reserved for government officials. Or both.)

A wrinkle in this game comes in the form of green license plates for electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles. When these license plates were introduced, back in 2010, they had green lettering instead of blue, and gave you additional perks, such as the ability to use high occupancy vehicle lanes without the requisite number of passengers. All of the green license plates followed the four letter and three number pattern of regular Ontario license plates, with the exception that they all started with GV ("Green Vehicle" -- although FrancoOntarian drivers had the option of picking up VE license plates for "Véhecule Écologique").

Because the total number of possible GV licenses is significantly smaller than the total number of regular license numbers (441,000), I couldn't help but notice that we were running up the alphabet quite quickly, and I wondered what would happen when we tipped over the edge. A few days ago, I got my answer. I found myself driving behind another electric vehicle with a green license plate, but there was something strange about it. Then I realized: the license plate was in the GWAB 000 format.

I pointed this out to younger child, who shrugged, but laughed when I said, "I guess the guy is driving a Green Whe-hecle." She came up with one better, saying, "It stands for Green Wheels".

But now, in my head, I hear Chekov's voice, referring to the car with the license plate as a "Green Wessel".