Rants: The Canadian edition
Jan. 30th, 2005 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyIt's a lovely day today. I mean it. It's like spring outside; I was out for a walk with wet hair. That's how warm it is. Sometimes climate change is my friend.
(Kidding, guys. Global warming is a serious matter. Kyoto Kyoto Kyoto. It's still beautiful out, though.)
Time for the third installment of the rant-on-demand meme. Since I already ranted on the subjects having to do with the drunken policeman to the south, it's only fair that I should talk a bit about the gay Communist lumberjacks. (©![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
erinlin.)
Given my obnoxious nationalism, however, these may be more rambles than rants.
amoonah want to hear a rant about snow.
Asrohmie would say, vehement mixed reviews.
Now, some of you have never seen snow before. That's mind-boggling to me. Sure, you've seen it on TV, but you've never stuck your tongue out and felt snowflakes melt in your mouth and then thought, "Gee, is snow supposed to taste like this? Ick." Every so often, living in Hogtown, I encounter people who have just arrived here and tell me that this is their first winter, that they've never seen the white stuff in their lives.
And I think about how exciting that must be. I try to look at winter through their eyes instead of through mine. It's really quite beautiful if you don't have to wait four hours for a streetcar or wander across town with two scarves wrapped around your face.
I used to hate snow. Growing up in the sticks, you pretty much had to drive to get anywhere interesting. We lived north of a moraine, which meant that when Toronto got a few flakes, we'd get two feet. We had to shovel the driveway for hours, half the time the car wouldn't start, driving was terrifying, and any plans? Cancelled. Fuck winter, fuck snow, fuck this country.
That impression changed my first year in Toronto. That was the year we had the "ice storm." I put that in quotation marks because I'm half-Montrealer, and Toronto's ice storm was lame in comparison to the ones that happen regularly in Montreal. I was living in a student co-op -- 12 of us in one house -- and believe it or not, I was dating the boy next door. (He was a Russian kid a few years younger than me who'd come over to dodge the draft.) School was cancelled, work was cancelled, and the only establishments that stayed open were the bars. Our douche of a mayor called in the army to clear the streets. Soldiers, most of them our age, rode around in tanks (okay, not real tanks, but large, heavy tank-like vehicles) laughing their asses off about what pussies Hogtowners were. We would salute them and tell them that we thought our mayor was a pussy too.
Co-op, socialist utopia that it was, had a very high rate of mental illness. That year, between the five co-op houses on my street, there were at least five nervous breakdowns, two of which were in my house. Michelle lived in the room above mine, and went nuts right before the storm hit. She'd crushed hard on a professor who didn't return her feelings and was convinced that he was leaving her encrypted messages in everyone's rooms. Finally she just took off; leaving her window open and locking the door. No one knew where she'd gone.
Well, when the storm hit, all of the snow and ice came through her window and melted through the floor. My wall and ceiling sprung gigantic cracks; polluted water dripped down the wall and over the window. I put a bucket out and listened to the dripping every night until I thought I'd go nuts, too. Mitya, the boy next door, would come over and tell me stories about winters in Moscow. At night, we'd go out to bars with the other co-op kids; the streets weren't clear enough to drive on, and pedestrians ruled the day. I was flat broke, living in a building with leaking cardboard walls, and I was incredibly, dizzingly happy.
Interesting factoid about snow: We tend to associate it with cold, but when it's severely cold, like the -20 to -30 degree weather we've been having lately, it doesn't snow at all. So when the sky opens and lets loose, it means that the worst of the cold is over. After long enough, you can almost feel grateful for it.
bike4fish wants to know my feelings on the Canadian postal system.
Hey, I'm one of the few people who still makes use of snail-mail. I even pay my bills in the mail. I'm astoundingly low-tech that way.
Every so often, I get a little card in the mail summoning me to the post office. This is inevitably a Really Good Thing, because it means that someone has sent me something that's too big to fit through the mail slot. It's been happening a lot lately.
I guess it's been happening so much that the post office people are getting sick of it, because they've started placing any oversized packages above the frame of my front door, instead of sending me those little cards.
Comme ça:
Which is all very well and good, but I am 5'2 and I don't usually look up. So my mail can be sitting up there for months and I don't always see it. Also, I need to request complete strangers to fetch my mail when they do that, because I am far too short to reach up there.
On a side-note, I once knew an anarchist postal employee named Random. That was really his name, too. Steve Random. He was 40-something and had a mohawk, which he pulled off with great style, and he played in a punk band. I think with a name like Random you pretty much have to become an anarchist postman.
Finally, I've mademaeve66 curious about my opinions on Alberta.
I hesitate to rant on a subject when someone else has already said it much more succinctly than I possibly could. So I'll start off by quotingfrandroid:
"It's got a king that's been ruling for 16 years (and his faction for well over 35 years), it's got tons of oil, and it's so dry nowadays that it's turning into a desert. So that's one would call an Arabian oil kingdom, right?
From now on, I'll just call it al-Berta."
I'll start with a disclaimer. Everyone I have ever met from al-Berta has been very cool and not at all like the stereotype. I suspect this is because they're all al-Bertan refugees. Who would want to live there? Even the more decent places, like Edmonton (and I had so much fun in Edmonton) are still full of SUVs and get even colder than Montreal.
We in Canada tend to view al-Berta the same way liberal Americans tend to view Texas. It's filthy rich because of its oil revenues, and unlike Newfoundland, it's allowed to keep all the profit from what it sells to Americans. They elected a racist drunk as premier. More than once. The cities are more friendly to cars than to pedestrians and outside of the universities, there's nothing to do. They keep fucking up the federal government by voting Conservative. If they want to be part of the US so much, maybe they should secede. They're already wearing 10-gallon hats and complaining about dem Injuns.
Although I blame the al-Bertans somewhat for being right-wing assholes, they are by far more tolerable than their government. Ralph Klein is among the more odious things about this country. He's really, really disgusting. He wants to use the "Notwithstanding Clause" in the constitution to veto public healthcare and same-sex marriage. He once visited a homeless shelter in the middle of the night, completely drunk, and yelled at the people there to get jobs. And he likes to insult Newfoundland, which is totally inexcusable in my books because Newfoundlanders rock.
In summation, I invite you all to play a game of "spot the difference."
(Kidding, guys. Global warming is a serious matter. Kyoto Kyoto Kyoto. It's still beautiful out, though.)
Time for the third installment of the rant-on-demand meme. Since I already ranted on the subjects having to do with the drunken policeman to the south, it's only fair that I should talk a bit about the gay Communist lumberjacks. (©
erinlin.)Given my obnoxious nationalism, however, these may be more rambles than rants.
amoonah want to hear a rant about snow.As
rohmie would say, vehement mixed reviews.Now, some of you have never seen snow before. That's mind-boggling to me. Sure, you've seen it on TV, but you've never stuck your tongue out and felt snowflakes melt in your mouth and then thought, "Gee, is snow supposed to taste like this? Ick." Every so often, living in Hogtown, I encounter people who have just arrived here and tell me that this is their first winter, that they've never seen the white stuff in their lives.
And I think about how exciting that must be. I try to look at winter through their eyes instead of through mine. It's really quite beautiful if you don't have to wait four hours for a streetcar or wander across town with two scarves wrapped around your face.
I used to hate snow. Growing up in the sticks, you pretty much had to drive to get anywhere interesting. We lived north of a moraine, which meant that when Toronto got a few flakes, we'd get two feet. We had to shovel the driveway for hours, half the time the car wouldn't start, driving was terrifying, and any plans? Cancelled. Fuck winter, fuck snow, fuck this country.
That impression changed my first year in Toronto. That was the year we had the "ice storm." I put that in quotation marks because I'm half-Montrealer, and Toronto's ice storm was lame in comparison to the ones that happen regularly in Montreal. I was living in a student co-op -- 12 of us in one house -- and believe it or not, I was dating the boy next door. (He was a Russian kid a few years younger than me who'd come over to dodge the draft.) School was cancelled, work was cancelled, and the only establishments that stayed open were the bars. Our douche of a mayor called in the army to clear the streets. Soldiers, most of them our age, rode around in tanks (okay, not real tanks, but large, heavy tank-like vehicles) laughing their asses off about what pussies Hogtowners were. We would salute them and tell them that we thought our mayor was a pussy too.
Co-op, socialist utopia that it was, had a very high rate of mental illness. That year, between the five co-op houses on my street, there were at least five nervous breakdowns, two of which were in my house. Michelle lived in the room above mine, and went nuts right before the storm hit. She'd crushed hard on a professor who didn't return her feelings and was convinced that he was leaving her encrypted messages in everyone's rooms. Finally she just took off; leaving her window open and locking the door. No one knew where she'd gone.
Well, when the storm hit, all of the snow and ice came through her window and melted through the floor. My wall and ceiling sprung gigantic cracks; polluted water dripped down the wall and over the window. I put a bucket out and listened to the dripping every night until I thought I'd go nuts, too. Mitya, the boy next door, would come over and tell me stories about winters in Moscow. At night, we'd go out to bars with the other co-op kids; the streets weren't clear enough to drive on, and pedestrians ruled the day. I was flat broke, living in a building with leaking cardboard walls, and I was incredibly, dizzingly happy.
Interesting factoid about snow: We tend to associate it with cold, but when it's severely cold, like the -20 to -30 degree weather we've been having lately, it doesn't snow at all. So when the sky opens and lets loose, it means that the worst of the cold is over. After long enough, you can almost feel grateful for it.
bike4fish wants to know my feelings on the Canadian postal system.Hey, I'm one of the few people who still makes use of snail-mail. I even pay my bills in the mail. I'm astoundingly low-tech that way.
Every so often, I get a little card in the mail summoning me to the post office. This is inevitably a Really Good Thing, because it means that someone has sent me something that's too big to fit through the mail slot. It's been happening a lot lately.
I guess it's been happening so much that the post office people are getting sick of it, because they've started placing any oversized packages above the frame of my front door, instead of sending me those little cards.
Comme ça:
Which is all very well and good, but I am 5'2 and I don't usually look up. So my mail can be sitting up there for months and I don't always see it. Also, I need to request complete strangers to fetch my mail when they do that, because I am far too short to reach up there.
On a side-note, I once knew an anarchist postal employee named Random. That was really his name, too. Steve Random. He was 40-something and had a mohawk, which he pulled off with great style, and he played in a punk band. I think with a name like Random you pretty much have to become an anarchist postman.
Finally, I've made
maeve66 curious about my opinions on Alberta.I hesitate to rant on a subject when someone else has already said it much more succinctly than I possibly could. So I'll start off by quoting
frandroid:"It's got a king that's been ruling for 16 years (and his faction for well over 35 years), it's got tons of oil, and it's so dry nowadays that it's turning into a desert. So that's one would call an Arabian oil kingdom, right?
From now on, I'll just call it al-Berta."
I'll start with a disclaimer. Everyone I have ever met from al-Berta has been very cool and not at all like the stereotype. I suspect this is because they're all al-Bertan refugees. Who would want to live there? Even the more decent places, like Edmonton (and I had so much fun in Edmonton) are still full of SUVs and get even colder than Montreal.
We in Canada tend to view al-Berta the same way liberal Americans tend to view Texas. It's filthy rich because of its oil revenues, and unlike Newfoundland, it's allowed to keep all the profit from what it sells to Americans. They elected a racist drunk as premier. More than once. The cities are more friendly to cars than to pedestrians and outside of the universities, there's nothing to do. They keep fucking up the federal government by voting Conservative. If they want to be part of the US so much, maybe they should secede. They're already wearing 10-gallon hats and complaining about dem Injuns.
Although I blame the al-Bertans somewhat for being right-wing assholes, they are by far more tolerable than their government. Ralph Klein is among the more odious things about this country. He's really, really disgusting. He wants to use the "Notwithstanding Clause" in the constitution to veto public healthcare and same-sex marriage. He once visited a homeless shelter in the middle of the night, completely drunk, and yelled at the people there to get jobs. And he likes to insult Newfoundland, which is totally inexcusable in my books because Newfoundlanders rock.
In summation, I invite you all to play a game of "spot the difference."
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 08:52 pm (UTC)Okay, I'm confused. First, how did I miss the drunk cop rant; and second, where are the Gay Communist lumberjacks in this post? Speaking of drunken policeman to the south, I thought this item from The Onion was most apropos:
BREATHALYZER BIG HIT AT COP PARTY
AMARILLO, TX—In spite of the George Jones cover band and the Porterhouse steak dinner, the Lifeloc FC-10 Portable Breath Alcohol Tester was the hit of the Amarillo 12th Precinct Police Jamboree Monday night. "Hey, hey, hey, hey, it's my turn—gimme that or I'll shoot ya," said a besotted Sgt. Bill Dugan as he pawed at the breathalyzer in Officer Jack Ermi's mouth. "I just did five Cuervo shots, and I wanna see if I can get my blood number thingy up to .300." Attendees at the Jamboree said passing around the breath tester was nearly as fun as the impromptu pepper-spray fight at last fall's Coptoberfest
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 01:21 am (UTC)Okay: Gay Communist lumberjacks are Canadians (see below).
The drunken policeman is Abu Hamza's description of the American infidel scum, as reported in VICE Magazine a year or so ago. I can't find the link to the interview, but it's completely hilarious. I think both Hamza and the interviewer were completely drunk, because the interviewer asked if Hamza was Saddam's dawg, and Hamza invited UN weapons inspectors into his house to check for WMD. It's a must-read, but it's not on the VICE site anymore.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 03:05 am (UTC)Oh- I-’m a lumberjack
And al-so gay
I-fight-the-Right
On-the-first-of-May
...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 04:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 09:59 pm (UTC)(BTW,
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 01:21 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-30 10:45 pm (UTC)Edmonton's actually got a very good theatre scene. And Calgary's is okay, too. Not as good as Edmontons though. So if you don't like theatre, then I guess that statement's accurate.
Also: Dead-on about the rest of it. You're talking to a future al-Berta refugee right now. (come onnn, October!)
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 01:22 am (UTC)Are you moving back to Montreal?
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 07:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 07:17 am (UTC)jesus...
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 05:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 02:04 am (UTC)A friend of mine, at some point, went in a mine and dug up some sapphires. He mailed them to Canada, and like a good citizen, he wrote the contents and the value of the contents of the package on the customs declaration: Sapphires, $600. So what does Canada Post do? They leave the package outside his front door. *slaps forehead*
When I moved to Toronto from Vancouver, I shipped *most my belongings* (what didn't fit in my suitcases) in the mail. (It was only 6 boxes, 2 of them being my computer, but anyway.) I can't remember exactly how the story unfolded, but at some point, I realized that Canada Post had delivered my packages, but that I was not in their possession. My house had three different suites (with separate addresses), and immediately I suspected the drug dealer in the junior bachelor of stealing my shit. Eventually I figured out that my packages were in the empty suite. So not only did the Canada Post guy deliver my packages at the wrong address, but it happened that there was a cleaning lady in the suite at the exact time that the packages were delivered, and she signed them off. I was quite relieved to recover my packages, but I was still angry at that stupid corporation.
I love Canada Post for lettermail (they probably have the fastest service in the world, plus cheap Xpress Post!) but I just had a conversation on another board about package deliveries, and that's definitely not their specialty.
no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 02:25 am (UTC)Forgive my ignorance of Canada...
Date: 2005-01-31 03:06 am (UTC)I've hear Winnepeg is actually a pretty liberal and pretty artsy for a Canadaian plains town.
Ironically, until about the time of Reagan, North Dakota, along with Minnesota and Wisconsin , was pretty much the biggest socialist states in the union.
This changed all when the neo-conservative/christian right revolution moved north and west from the south and turned our Lutheran, progressive, anti-capitalist farmers into reactionary anti-government religious fanatics.
Re: Forgive my ignorance of Canada...
Date: 2005-01-31 04:25 am (UTC)The prairie provinces are known for populism of both the Left and Right. The NDP, for example, started in Saskatchewan as the CCF, which called for the eradication of capitalism (but later changed its tune). Then there was the Social Credit Party, which was vaguely left (or at least "alternative") economically but socially conservative. This in turn gave birth to Reform, which was
fascistright-wing populist and now forms much of the Conservative Party.no subject
Date: 2005-01-31 07:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 01:09 am (UTC)Anyway, I happen to live in Alberta, as it happens, and I'm an expat Torontonian who took a ten-year detour through the U.S. before getting a job here. I agree with everything you say about oil, beef, and Ralph Klein, but I still really love living in Calgary, which is actually quite a funky city with a surprising amount of culture. Before I got a job here I would have shared your curiosity about who in their right mind would want to live here, but now I find that I sorta like it. If it weren't for the fact that I have to sit on a plane for at least four hours if I want to see any of my east-coast friends, I'd put down roots here in a heartbeat.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 01:40 am (UTC)But you guys have to get rid of Klein. I know we had Harris, and that's embarrassing, but Klein is just so much worse.
no subject
Date: 2005-02-02 01:48 am (UTC)