"I am your father, Luke. Give in to the dark side of the Force, you knob." - Doug McKenzie, Strange Brew

 

This is a picture I took in Canada. All Canadians are made of ice, and walk around naked, and have ice-leopards as pets. That sure didn’t show up in the tourist websites.

So, in Canada, I was actually early arriving at the hub that would take me to the rather fatalistically phrased, “final destination.” I went to my gate, and noticed an earlier flight to the place I was going that was still there. I went to the ticket counter and asked if I could get on it earlier.

“Yeah, eh. But it’ll cost $50.” Since $50 Canadian is no longer worth $1.50 US, I decided I would go get some chow and wait while reading the book I bought, attempting feebly to not get gobs of mayo on the pages.

I got in line at a place called Tim Horton’s™, which appears to be the Canadian equivalent of some science experiment gone wrong that attempted to splice the genetic material of Starbucks©, Subway™ and Krispy Kreme®. For instance, my choice of drink with the combo meal was . . . coffee. My choice of side? Whichever donut I decided to pick.

For the record, I picked the “cruller,” which Bob and Doug spoke highly of. It was good, eh.

I got back to my gate and attempted to hold coffee at the same time I read a book and ate a sandwich. Just then the gate agent scurried over, and plucked the ticket from my shirt pocket. Okay, have you ever chased a gate agent who stole your ticket without spilling your coffee? This was going to be difficult.

“Mr. Wilder, eh, we can get you on this flight. No extra charge.”

Huh? Are people in Canada empowered to reverse petty bureaucratic rules in order to create justice? I had little time to ponder this as I scurried, blazingly hot coffee in hand, to my plane.

The scenery was wonderful outside of my plane window, if you like snow-covered farmland. We got there, and I got my car.

After a few miles, I realized that the Canadians drive on the same side of the road as we in the US. Sorry aboot that.

Then, a mountie caught up with me and helpfully explained that the signs were in kilometers (kilometres?) per hour, and not miles per hour. Distances on road signs were similarly in the communist metric system. I am not a fan of the metric system, mainly because I think it places too much emphasis on humans having ten fingers. Me? I’m comfortable dividing by 12 or 5280 or whatever to get my answer. Metric takes the fun out of unit conversion.

The nice thing about metric road signs is that when the distances are in km, you REALLY feel like you’re making good progress down the road, especially when you’re speeding like a son of a gun.

Anyhow, I got to my hotel room (late) and flipped around the channels. No HBO©, but, on REGULAR TELEVISION THERE WERE NAKED PEOPLE DOING THINGS TO EACH OTHER THAT ARE STILL ILLEGAL IN KANSAS.

Wow. Eh. No wonder there was no HBO™ – you can apparently put all the nekkid people you want to on TV.

So, I finally finished my trip and got on the plane home. Every single person I had met on the trip who was from Canada was nice, polite, and helpful. I’m thinking that mostly their cops just tell people, “Okay, you were rude in the bar, eh. You can’t go back in until you apologize. You are sorry, aren’t you, eh? Good. Now take off, eh.”

I bet they don’t even have jails. They just threaten to send criminals to Detroit, and *poof* they start behaving.

When I was a kid I would get home from school and occasionally watched Leave it to Beaver. On that show, there was a guy named Eddie Haskell, who would always be nice to the Cleaver parents, but then try to convince the Beav that he should worship Satan, douse his parents in gasoline and then burn the house down while he wiped his nose with the US flag.

I wonder if the Canadians are really, really that nice, or are they all Eddie Haskell-types who, when all the tourists aren’t looking, secretly suck their souls out through some sort of insidious Canadian invention?

Hmm. Don’t know, eh. I sure would like another cruller, though.