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[beandelphiki]

Okay, I know I promised a while back I'd write more about Talking to Americans.

For those of you not in the know, it's a Canadian TV show, part of This Hour Has 22 Minutes. The host is comedian Rick Mercer. Basically, he flies all over the U.S., talking to the common folk (and some not-so-common folk like President George W. Bush and Jerry Springer) and feeds them these completely bullshit stories about Canada, and gets people to comment on the stories. The whole point, of course, is to flaunt American's ignorance about Canada.

You may be qualified to find this show funny if you know that:


- Canada has a prime minister, not a king
- poutine is a French-Canadian fast-food dish consisting of french fries, gravy and cheese curd, and is NOT our prime minister's last name
- we do not put our senior citizens out on ice floes to die
- Canada does not have an 80% mental handicap rate in it's population
- Canada became a country in 1867 - not just recently
- our country does not have a hockey puck on its flag
- we do not want to change the name of our country "Canada" to "Chicago"
- there are not Arctic seals in the (prairie) province of Saskatchewan
- speaking of which, it IS provinces, not states
- there is no rhino hunting in the (prairie) province of Saskatchewan
- our polar ice cap is not breaking in half and we do not need the U.S. to lend us a tugboat to pull it back together
- yes, we have ocean access
- our parliment building is not an igloo, and it does not look like the one in Arkansas, either
- we do not run on a 20-hour clock
- yes, we all have electricity
- the lyrics to the Canadian national anthem do not go, "O Canada/that big cold place up North..."
- the U.S. does not have rights to the word "dollar"
- we do not have a five-dollar coin (yet)
- if we did, it would be unlikely that it would be a called the "woody"
- we do not vote by putting pieces of various pine woods in boxes
- Ottawa is the capital of Canada, not Toronto
- our prime minister did not announce "Springer Days" as a national summer holiday
- we did not just complete our first trans-Canada railroad (that was a long time ago, ha ha)

That's all I can think of for now. :)

Comments

[beandelphiki.livejournal.com]

The governor general is a mainly ceremonial position. See, Canada used to belong to Britain, like the U.S. But instead of having a big war to fight for autonomy, we all sat down and played nicely. *grin* So Canada got signed away to be it's own country, but as a result, we have British things in our country - that was the agreement. We didn't totally emancipate ourselves from Britain like the U.S. did. So we all sing the Canadian national anthem AND the British one. (God Save the Queen.) And we have a governor general, who represents the (British) monarch in Canada.

She (or he, but right now it's a she) helps the prime minister out a bit, she signs bills into law (but she has no veto power, so that's very ceremonial), she opens and closes Parliment and she entertains foreign leaders. Things like that. She's not really essential, it's the prime minister who really runs the country.

What right do they have to tell us who we can and can't marry?

Does that mean you're gay, or was that a big collective "we"?

Re:

[windowlessroom.livejournal.com]

Danke for the clarification..*smiles*
Nah, I meant we as people in general.