I have a 12 year-old daughter going into Grade 8 and the usual summer braindead zombieness has struck already.

With tomorrow being Canada Day, and some work colleagues gently teasing me earlier about my preference for referencing physical, printed dictionaries over online search (“He hates trees!”), I decided to challenge myself this evening.

As a journalism student in the late 80s, it would’ve been sacrosanct for me to not be able to list off the full slate of premiers (as well as the federal and local provincial Cabinet members) by rote if asked on the spot, for marks. 

And I horrified myself earlier today by not knowing right away that Nunavut is the territory and not its capital. (Wait, if Nunavut is the capital, what’s the name of the territory it’s the capital of???)

[Cue the barely-avoided full-on panic attack]

That got me going on the worry that my brain is going to mush with all this technology being able to instantly provide any answer to any question one might have about all human knowledge – at least, all that is stored online somewhere.

So I tasked myself (and aforesaid daughter) with attempting to replicate the test my 80s j-school prof laid out, minus the federal/provincial Cabinet members, for lenience’s sake. I asked her to grab a piece of paper and make four headings:

– province

– its capital

– name of its Premier

– their political party 

To challenge myself further, I tried to list all of them in the order they joined Confederation (which I guessed blindly at on more occasions than I care to relate here).

It ain’t much, but there was a time when I knew all this stuff, including all 50 U.S. state capitals and all of Iron Curtain-era Europian capitals as well (so much easier than today). This is as far as I got without looking anything up:

Hopefully you can do better than I. More to come.

Happy Canada Day!