This week saw a couple Americans engaging in Canada-bashing that made us sit up and take to Twitter. And just when we'd gotten over Stephen Colbert's schtick about the perils of a hockey-stick toting, "eh"-dropping Canadian pope, too! First, BuzzFeed's Matt Kiebus posted "an exhaustive list" of "every single way to piss off a Canadian" -- which turned out to consist of only two things: insulting hockey and insulting Canadian beer. How droll! And then writer Neil Steinberg contended that Toronto is hopelessly inferior to Chicago -- without mentioning that Chicago has more than nines times as many murders.

This week, Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave us a taste of his everyday life, tweeting out photos and videos of himself doing the normal human being stuff, like lunching at his desk with a Diet Coke for a companion. A calculated move to appear more approachable? Perhaps. But I've got to say, it's hard not to like a guy who comes home at the end of a long day and takes time out to warmly greet his pet chinchilla. Besides, learning what it's like to walk in another person's shoes is healthy. It broadens minds about how to live well -- be it in a $12-million mansion or a 45-sq. foot 1987 Dodge Ram Prospector.

This week, Huff Post Canada's own Rebecca Zamon put the reading habits of mere mortals to shame by sharing the 52 (yes, I did say 52) books she read in 2012. And we're not talking coffee-table photo collections, here. Meanwhile, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield gave us a sense of perspective with a set of photos Tweeted from space. And back on Earth, a series of pitbull attacks in Calgary reignited the ongoing debate about the efficacy and wisdom of dog-breed bans. Are all pitbulls just too inherently dangerous to trust ? And if so, is legally outlawing an entire breed the way to handle the problem?

For me, the final days of 2012 were a sneak peak at an exciting new professional beginning: taking the helm as managing editor for blogs at HuffPost Canada. There's a frenetic and lively conversation going on here, and I look forward to both helping steward it and diving headlong into it myself. This is what has impressed me most so far: HuffPost bloggers do not all sing from the same song sheet. While one calls out the NRA, another insists that guns aren't the root of our violence problem. That diversity of opinion is a large part of what drew me here, and I suspect it's part of what draws you too.