International Conflict Brought On By Heat - Film At 11:00

With summer comes summer fun. People run off to the beach, they play in sprinklers and visit swimming pools. They even throw water balloons around to beat the heat and have fun. Another key element to summer fun, at least in our are, is the summer festival.

Every weekend another town or city has a festival celebrating everything from community and culture to foods and produce. So it was only a matter of time before someone decided to combine the two. The end result was the creation of the ultimate water balloon fight. 2005 has become the summer of the world wide water balloon battle. It began when 1,102 participants threw 10,882 water balloons at Sint-Michielscollege, Brasschaat, Belgium, on April 15, 2005. The set a new Guinness World Record and raised the bar from the previous goal that Hamilton was setup to attain of beating the Peace River Bible Institute of Sexsmith, Alta., which last year had 800 people hurl just 8,000 balloons at each other.

Not to be outdone by this foreign menace, Canada decided to fire back. Hamilton began to rally the troops and prepare for a counter attack but were headed off at the pass. While our larger city was setting up for the counteroffensive a small guerrilla strike force from Fort Nelson in British Columbia, consisting of 4,694 people, rallied 40% of the town for a total of 2,269 people on June 18 for a mock battle with 40,360 balloons. So Hamilton has had to up the ante and now plans a larger strike than initially devised. After revising their plan of attack they secured supplies with the aid of the best discount warehouse in town.

Currently they are recruiting for the battle, so I do my part as a citizen and put out an open call to all bloggers in the greater Hamilton area. If you have the time then do your part to secure one of the more irreverent records in the book for our fair city.

After trying to boost our city's image by renovating our art gallery and our local paper's issuing of a challenge for people to make suggestions to get people revved up about Hamilton, it is nice to see an idea most people can get behind. Let's face it folks, it's no big deal to win a Guinness record for geography, Mother Nature did all the hard work and you're just riding on her coattails. Let's do our part people and put this fair city on the map through the actions of it's people and not its geography!

The first shots have been fired, it's our duty to return fire and let thos pesky Belgians know that we won't take this sitting down.