The Canadian-est invention ever

It’s a reliable sign of the end of the Canadian winter. No, not the lengthening days, the appreciable warmth of the sun on a frosty day, not even the first day you decide you can safely leave the house in shoes rather than fur-lined mukluks. Spring is truly on the way when the already long (but impressively fast-moving) queues at Tim Hortons lengthen appreciably each year with non-regular Timmy’s fans in the first few weeks of March. It is that annual late winter rite, the Roll Up the Rim to Win contest, that brings them out of the woodwork.

I’ve been lucky so far this year, at least compared to last year when I fruitlessly rolled up more rims than I could count for bupkis. This year, I’m on my third free coffee. And you know I love free. Over the course of the year, I drink hundreds of cups of Tim Horton’s coffee, and they buy my loyalty with three free coffees a year. Not a bad strategy on their part.

But I’ve been thinking about this whole Roll Up the Rim thing. I mean, is that not the least hygenic contest you can possibly think of? I’m going to slobber all over this paper cup, then I’m going to tear off a bit and hand it over to the clerk. I’m surprised the folks at Tim Horton’s aren’t wearing latex gloves while this contest runs.

How do you roll up your rim? I’m a chewer, myself. I work my lower incisors in under the rim and do a back-and-forth kind of mastication to loosen the roll, and then pull it up. It’s not too pretty, so I try to remember to use my thumbnail and the side of my index finger, rather than my teeth, if I’m in polite company.

And then I read about this guy in this morning’s Citizen. He invented a Rimroller, “a plastic device the size of a bottle opener that cleanly slices open and unrolls a rim in one fluid motion.” They’ll be selling it at Lee Valley Tools (one of my favourite stores for gadgets and whimsical indulgences) for the most excellent and affordable price of $1.95. Get yours here!

Canadian ingenuity. Ya gotta love it.

Edited to add: Now you too can win your very own Rimroller! See this post for details.

You can’t get there from here

Link surfing is a wonderful thing.

I can’t even remember where I was, but I caught sight of something about a lunar eclipse on March 3. Turns out it wasn’t visible from here, only in a wide swath on the other side of the planet through Europe and Africa. Disappointing. I love stuff like eclipses and meteor showers and the northern lights.

Then further down on the same page, I was reading about the solar eclipses for later this year. (Did you know that there are two lunar and two solar eclipses every year? A lunar eclipse is when the moon travels through the earth’s shadow, and a solar eclipse is when the moon comes between the earth and the sun.) Unfortunately, the solar eclipses for this year will only be visible in eastern Asia and South America.

And THEN, I saw that there will be a total solar eclipse ON MY BIRTHDAY next year, AND it will be visible from Canada. Now that’s way wicked cool.

Except, I kept reading and found out that it will only be visible from the very northern tip of Canada, through Nunavut. And I noticed that the path of totality runs right across Alert, Nunavut, which is the northernmost settlement not only in Canada, but in the whole world. It’s a mythic sort of place, this northern outpost, and I started to think about how I’m always saying that I haven’t seen nearly enough of this gorgeous country of ours, and how I’ve always wanted to see the far north, and an embryonic plan started to hatch in my busy little brain.

Wouldn’t it be way wicked cool to make a family vacation out of going to Alert for my birthday to see the solar eclipse? It’s north of the Arctic circle, but it would be high summer, so not only would the temperatures be moderate, but there would be 24 hours of sunlight – and then an eclipse. Really, could you imagine anything cooler than that? It’s Canadian, it’s astronomical, it’s my birthday: three of my favourite things. This was obviously meant to happen.

So I set out to find out how to get to Alert. And that’s when I started to grasp just how big this country of ours is, and that north as I know it really isn’t so very north at all. I mean, Alert – that’s seriously North. Let’s put it in relative terms. Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is just over 2000 km due north of here. (By comparison, Miami is just about the same distance due south.) Well, Alert is DOUBLE that, more than 4000 km due north. In fact, it’s only about 800 km from the North Pole.

Map courtesy of www.theodora.com/maps, used with permission.
Embellishment courtesy of Beloved.

Not only is Alert north, or should I say NORTH, but it’s isolated, and kind of desolate. Just about the only thing that’s up there is a Canadian Forces Base and an Environment Canada weather station. But neither the northness nor the isolation deterred me. I live in a generation of extreme vacations, after all – I never imagined there could be a populated place in this country that doesn’t have some form of tourism. (Okay, so ‘populated’ is a bit of a stretch – according to Wikipedia’s citation of the Canadian 2001 census, Alert has a permanent population of six.)

Typically, all of this actually encouraged me rather than discouraging me from my summer holiday plans. I spent quite a while googling various combinations of terms and surfing travel sites only to find out that for all intents and purposes, you simply can’t get there from here. And even if you could get there, it’s not exactly a tourism hotbed.

Nothing comes up, for example, when you search on “hotels in Alert” or “tourism Alert Nunavut”. And the closest you can get to Alert on a commercial airline is to Iqaluit, about half way. If you’re curious, it would cost a family of four somewhere in the neighbourhood of $6000 to fly to Iqaluit from Ottawa in August. That’s not including the charter flight up to Alert, which seems to be of the principal that if you need to ask the price, you can’t afford it.

Sadly, I think Alert is now off the table as a summer travel destination. Lucky for me, it’s currently -42C with the windchill right here in Ottawa, so I can have my very own Arctic experience simply by waiting for the bus.

We’re not so different after all

The last line, about being mistaken for a Canadian a lot, made me laugh…

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: North Central

“North Central” is what professional linguists call the Minnesota accent. If you saw “Fargo” you probably didn’t think the characters sounded very out of the ordinary. Outsiders probably mistake you for a Canadian a lot.

The West
Boston
The Midland
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Northeast
The South
What American accent do you have?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

The Greatest Canadian Inventions

I’m in love with CBC TV lately. Last night, I got completely sucked in by an unexpectedly delightful TV special called The Greatest Canadian Invention. It used a combination of archival clips and commentaters to count down the 50 greatest Canadian inventions, as ranked by the Canadian public.

It was full of cultural references and asides spanning the Wiggles to the Kids in the Hall to CSI, and a good dose of quintessentially Canadian humour. Astronaut Chris Hadfield, for instance, in describing the iconic Canadarm, explained that it was so sensitive that it could “take a pencil and stick it up your nose.” He also mentioned that there wasn’t a lot of forethought put into inscribing the Canada wordmark into the insulation around the arm, but when NASA saw that logo in every camera shot beamed back to millions of viewers on Earth, they were quick to put an American flag on the back of the space shuttle to compensate.

The commentaters, a collection of B-list Canadian personalities ranging from Margaret Atwood and Will Ferguson to Mitsou to Mike Holmes and Debbie Travis (I can just hear my American readers saying, “Who??”) and the archival clips of everything from Pierre Trudeau paddling a canoe to the old WonderBra commercials from the 1970s (remember that song? “Wonderful wonderful… WonderBra”?) transformed this into a clever, witty, culturally-laden and ultimately fascinating look at the history of Canadian inventions.

And about those inventions… who knew? I couldn’t find an easy-to-copy list on cbc.ca, so I lifted this one from Wikipedia (I’ve put my “I had no idea” revelations in bold):

Alkaline battery
Ardox Spiral Nail
Automatic Lubricating Cup
Basketball
Birch-Bark Canoe
BlackBerry
Bloody Caesar
Canadarm
Caulking gun
Cobalt-60 “Bomb” Cancer Treatment
CPR-Mannequin: “Actar 911”
Crash-Position Indicator-CPI
Electric Oven
Electric Wheelchair
Electron Microscope
Electronic Music Synthesizer
Explosives Vapour Detector
Five Pin Bowling
Fog horn
Goalie mask
Green Garbage Bag
G-Suit
Instant Mashed Potatoes
Instant Replay
Insulin
Java programming language
Key Frame Animation
Lacrosse
Light Bulb
Marine Screw Propeller
Marquis Wheat
Pablum
Pacemaker
Paint roller
Plexiglas
Poutine
Radio Voice Transmission
Retractable Beer Carton Handle
Robertson screw
Self-Propelled Combine Harvester
Separable Baggage Check
Ski-Doo
Snowblower
Standard Time
Telephone
UV Degradable Plastics
Walkie-Talkie
Weevac 6
Wonderbra
Zipper

These are in alphabetical order, rather than the order in which they were ultimately ranked. The top three, though were insulin, the lightbulb (invented by Canadians, and then the patent was sold to Thomas Edison for $5000) and the telephone.

I love the fact that the retractable beer case handle and poutine made the list! Kudos to CBC for putting together such an enjoyable and ultimately educational show. I hadn’t meant to watch any more than a few minutes, but from the start I was hooked for the full two hours. Bravo!

Christmas Lights on Parliament Hill

It was cold. Damn cold. Somewhere around minus 17C with the windchill, I think. And yet, we bundled up the kids, and coerced a few friends, and headed out to see the Christmas Light Ceremony on Parliament Hill last night.

I’ve lived in Ottawa for 18 Christmases now, and this is the first time I’ve ever gone to the Hill for the lighting ceremony. Might well be the last, too!

Kerry and Tristan keeping warm!

Oh, it was nice enough. They had free hot chocolate and Beaver Tails, if you wanted to wait in the massive queue for them. They had large bbq pits set up with free marshmallows for toasting, if you could get your marsmallow toasted before it froze solid. They even had free candles, and nothing says Christmas entertainment like watching your bored two- and four-year-olds in a stiff wind with open flame!

Tristan’s face DID actually freeze like that.

I had hoped for more carolling and Christmas music, but there was only the Peace Tower bells chiming festively. The boys were restless, completely understandable since it was about a hundred degrees below zero and all they could see was a bunch of shivering butts. I had also understood the 5:45 starting time to mean that the switch would be thrown at 5:45, but in fact, that meant that the political speechifying began at 5:45, carrying on in both official languages for the better part of half an hour. Just when we thought it was over, they started playing taped messages from every single provincial and territorial premier, and the shivering crowd groaned audibly.

Angie and Sam looking cheerful despite the chill!

And yet, in the endurance of the cold and the congeniality of a crowd of people all wondering together what on earth made them choose this escapade over a warm dinner and maybe a nice Seinfeld rerun on the TV, we found it was fun nonetheless. Because the crowd had densely packed itself in an attempt to conserve and share body heat, we couldn’t actually see any of the more than 100,000 lights that illuminate the Hill, Confederation Boulevard and the rest of downtown, but the crowd did gasp appreciately when the Parliament Buildings were illuminated by multi-coloured spotlights and giant drifting snowflakes.

(You can actually see me shivering as I try to hold the camera steady!)

Our national preoccupations

You know I’m intrigued by the differences between Canadian and Americans; you know I’m mesmerized by search results. Many of you know I even have a vested interest in taxation.

How then could I leave unblogged this article in the Globe and Mail that intersects so many of my bloggy fascinations. It compares the top search terms from 2006 on Yahoo! and Yahoo! Canada.

Here’s a list of the 10 most popular search terms on Yahoo! Canada in 2006:

NHL
FIFA World Cup
American Idol
Rock Star Supernova
WWE
Neopets
Revenue Canada
Days of Our Lives
Environment Canada
Jessica Simpson

And here, by contrast, is a list of the U.S.’s top 10 Yahoo! searches in 2006:

Britney Spears
WWE
Shakira
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
American Idol
Beyoncé Knowles
Chris Brown
Pamela Anderson
Lindsay Lohan

I’m not sure whether to feel smug or ashamed. I mean, it’s not pretty that seven of the top ten American searches are for the female celebrity flavour of the month, but it is also rather embarrassing (if not telling) that the top ten Canadian preoccupations in 2006 include hockey, weather, taxation, soap operas and – neopets??

Meeting Farley Mowat

There are some people who are so iconic, so legendary, that when you actually meet them in person, it’s a little bit of a surprise to find out that they are ordinary flesh and blood after all.

Farley Mowat is that kind of person. I think he was the first person I ever understood to be a Canadian Author. The fact that he wrote books was important, but the fact that he was a Canadian who wrote books was even more important. Reading Never Cry Wolf was the first time I, born and bred in the city, became aware that ‘wilderness’ was more than the park at the end of the street, with its little copse of trees.

This week, Farley Mowat was in the neighbourhood because they named a school after him. He said that of all the honours he has received, including the most prestigious Order of Canada, having the school named after him was his greatest honour.

Friday night, he was in our local bookstore for a small reading and a book signing, and I couldn’t resist going. I have a small collection of autographed Canadian literature: Douglas Coupland, Margaret Atwood, Mordechai Richler, and a few local authors. I’d love to meet Will Ferguson some day, and add his signature to my collection, and the autographed book I most covet is that of the reclusive Alice Munro, my first favourite author. Maybe some day.

But I never imagined that I’d have a chance to meet someone as iconic, as mythic, as Farley Mowat. The man is 85 years old, and from what I saw yesterday, still sharp as a tack. He’s a known curmudgeon, but was charming and eloquent in the brief question and answer session that followed his reading from his latest book, Bay of Spirits. I stood in line for about an hour to have him sign my newly acquired hardcover, and I estimate I was about the middle of the pack. The poor man must have had a serious case of writer’s cramp by the time he got home that night.

They had asked that we write on a post-it note exactly what we wanted him to write, but by the time I got to the desk, he was merely writing “to so-and-so” and his own signature. Given the fact that it was near my bedtime on a Friday night after a particularly long week, I hadn’t come up with anything more clever than “To Danielle, (Beloved), Tristan, Simon and Baby” anyway.

(My favourite author autograph was actually how Douglas Coupland inscribed my companion’s copy of Generation X back in 1993. He wrote, “Dear Tom, Thanks for helping me knock over that 7-11. Your pal, Doug.” He wrote it across a traced outline of his own hand.)

Farley… er, Mr. Mowat… er, Farley Mowat took a moment after writing all that down to look up at me, and I could do nothing more intelligent than beam a thousand-watt smile at him. Lacking something pithy to say, but with utter sincerity, I told him it was truly an honour to meet him. He smiled his own genuine smile and said, “I would say God bless you, my dear,” and he gestured toward the very long epigraph he had just inscribed, “but it looks like your life is full of blessings already.”

I smiled the whole way home. It’s truly a joy when a hero is able to not only meet, but surpass your expectations of him.

Quelle surprise! Je suis toute Canadienne.

I was rather flummoxed by the “How Massachusetts Are You?” test at Phantom Scribbler, but it did lead me indirectly to this little gem:

You are 100% Canuck!

You rock, you are an almighty Canadian through and through. You have proven your worthiness and have won the elite prize of living in a country as awesome as Canada. Yes I know other countries think they are better, but we let them have that cuz we know better than they do, eh?

How Canadian Are You?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

Really, I’m hardly surprised.