Category: Holidays

7 Things I Love About Canada and 1 More

Today is Canada Day — Canada’s Birthday — and, in honour of the day, here are seven things I love about my country and one I hate.

canada arm

1 — Aside from the Brits, Canadians have the coolest flag on the planet.

2 — My country is incredibly beautiful.  For some strange reason, cameras love Canada the way French pigs love truffles.  I suppose it helps that 90% of the country doesn’t have any people in it, but for drop-dead gorgeous, even our slums aren’t that bad.

3 — Canada is safe.  Yeah, yeah, yeah! There are places in this country where you don’t want to be stranded, drunk off your ass, at two in the morning.  The thing is, though, those places are 2 — maybe 3– hundred kilometres outside any established urban area, and the local inhabitants there don’t want to rob you — they want to eat you.  In general, to get killed, beaten up or even pushed around in my country, you really have to work at it.

4 — Hockey

5 — Go to any city, town or village in Canada and you will find a library and anybody — ANYBODY — can go there, get a book, sit down and read it — for free.

6 — We’ve got the whole world in our backyard.  Walk 2 or 3 kilometres in any direction in any city in Canada, and you’ll hear at least four different languages.  Keep going and you’ll eventually hear them all — even the dead ones.  You can eat in a different ethnic restaurant every week for two years and never repeat yourself.  You can dance, sing, read, write, paint or practice the fine art of Bulgarian nose knitting in my country — and everybody thinks that’s cool.

7 — Butter tarts, Terry Fox, Toboggans, Norman Bethune, Cheezies, Poutine, David Suzuki, Leonard Cohen, a warm parka on a cold morning, nothing between me and the horizon, Spring, Tim Hortons, Rene Levesque, mitts, John McCrae and all those other things that are so uniquely Canadian I can’t even explain them to anybody who doesn’t live here.

However:

Unfortunately, most of our “unique Canadian identity” is taken up with one overwhelming idea — we’re NOT Americans.  This crap is really tiresome.  We spend huge amounts of time looking over our shoulder, checking and comparing and waiting for the Americans to do something stupid so we can feel inherently superior.  When George Bush was president you could cut the smug in this country with a knife.  Now that we’ve got Donald Trump to kick around, we’re on the verge of a national orgasm of auto-erotic vanity that may never be equaled.  This is not healthy.

But what the hell!  If it wasn’t for the Americans playing silly bugger all the time, we’d have nothing to bitch about except the weather.

Happy Canada Day!

Summer Solstice 2016

stonehengeYesterday was the Summer Solstice. Normally, it falls on June 21st, but such are the vagaries of astronomical science. For those in the know, the only place to be was the party at Stonehenge, on the Salisbury plain, in England.  Stonehenge is one of those fascinating places on our planet where ancient architecture meets contemporary dumbass so seamlessly that it produces some of the smoothest con jobs since the Canarsee Indians of Brooklyn “sold” Peter Minuit Manhattan for $24.00.*  There are a number of variations on this spiritual sleight-of -hand, but they’re all basically the same.  Here’s the Twitter version:

Our ancient ancestors were spiritually connected to the physical world — the rhythms of the seasons, etc.
We are not.
Since we have no spiritual connection to anything, we have become assholes — to ourselves, to others and to our planet.
If we’d just take a minute, quit listening to our cell phones and start listening to each other and our planet, we wouldn’t be assholes anymore and perhaps both the planet and the people on it would be better off.
What better place to start the process than at Stonehenge et al where our ancient ancestors figured it out the first time?

Sounds legit — so far — but then we have the kicker:

Buy this book, film, seminar, television program etc., etc., etc. and I’ll show you how it’s done.

Here’s the deal, folks: we have no real proof that our illiterate ancestors were any more in tune with the planet than we are.  In fact, we have some serious evidence that says they weren’t.  They may have recognized day and night and winter and summer, but after that it was pretty much hit and miss.  Remember, these people were still 3 millennia away from “Hey! Don’t poop in the river; it’ll make you sick!”  The truth is we’ve given prehistoric humans these spiritual attributes. Whether they ever had them in the first place is still up for debate.

Plus, volumes have been written on what we DON’T know about Stonehenge.  It might have been a calendar; it might have been a church; it might have been a burial ground; it might have been a navigation centre for aliens.  Actually, given the utter lack of any hard evidence, it might just as easily have been a Neolithic Comedy Club — a sort of Bronze Age X Factor.  We have no way of knowing what went on at Stonehenge circa 2000 BCE.  For all we know, they could have been eating each other, or deflowering virgins or both.  Tying your spiritual wellbeing to that kind of chimera is dodgy, at best.

I don’t mind anybody having a party once a year — especially on my birthday.  If you want to have a howl and a dance and welcome the summer sun, knock yourself out.  But call it what it is, and BTW, suggesting people can buy their way to spirituality is nothing more than a scam.

 

Best Father’s Day Gift — Ever

FatherSunday is Father’s Day — as if you didn’t know.  As holidays go, it’s one of the biggies — even though it doesn’t actually get a day — just a designated Sunday.  But that still tells us that dads are important: just not as important as Columbus who invented the Caribbean Cruise in 1492.  Which, BTW, you should never give your dad for Father’s Day — that’s kinda a husband and wife sorta thing.  Of course, I’m not saying wives can’t give husbands Father’s Day gifts — although (not to go all Freudian) ya really don’t wanna look at the psychology of that too closely.  Just take it as the given and move on.  But I digress.

Father’s Day is all about dad and his place in the family.  In the old days, dad’s job was a job.  He did all the work in bed to start the family rolling and then buggered off to real work so everybody had a roof over their head, food to eat and a second car for mom to take the kids to school and Little League.  Every once in a while, he’d come home early, scare the hell out of the kids, maybe cut the grass or play with his power tools, eat dinner, have a couple of cocktails, kiss the wife and start the whole process all over again.  It was a good life, but nobody much bothered with dad until it came time to pony up the cash.  Of course, in our contemporary society, dad’s role in the family is really quite different.  However, as of last year, the #1 day for collect telephone calls around the world was still Father’s Day.  Plus ca change!

The real problem with Father’s Day is what do you actually do with dad?  Unlike Mother’s Day, when a bunch of flowers and a badly cooked breakfast in bed will reduce any mom to tears, dads  have higher expectations.  After all, this is the only day they get, so they’re going wanna make a meal out of it.  Let me give you a hint: outflank the old guy.
“Hey, dad! Father’s Day’s coming.  It’s your special day, so … what do you want to do?”  GOTCHA!  The ball’s in his court now, and you’ve solved the problem.  You see, dads really don’t like those humourous neckties or the ACE Grip Power Bender 5000 Utility Tool.  What most dads want is time — time with their kids.  Give him that.  And if he insists on paying for the green fees, or the tickets to the ballgame, or the beer or the lunch — give him that, too: he’s your Dad.