Year-End CanCon Continued

   Here is some more CanCon which was found in an American source. It is taken from a piece by Dave Barry who is widely syndicated and hilariously humorous. It is very difficult to make 2022 funny, but in his rundown of that year, Canada gets a mention in February and here it is:

February

"… there is trouble in, of all places, Canada. The news up there is that the capital city, Ottawa (from the Algonquin word “adawe,” meaning “Washington”) is besieged by a massive protest convoy of trucks, clogging the streets, honking horns, blocking traffic and making it impossible for anybody to get anywhere. Granted, this is the situation pretty much every day in, for example, New York City, but apparently in Canada it is a big deal. As tensions mount, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, in a controversial move, invokes emergency powers enabling the government to freeze the protesters’ access to beaver pelts.

Ha-ha! We are poking some good-natured fun at Canada, which is actually a modern nation and an important trading partner that we depend on to supply us with many vital things. Celine Dion is only one example. In all seriousness, the Canadian trucker strike is a significant event that raises some important issues, which everyone immediately stops caring about because of the situation in Ukraine."

In a banner year for our country, it again gets a minor mention in October:

The verified drama on Twitter is interrupted, briefly, by the midterm elections. For weeks the political experts, relying on Scientific Polling Data, have been predicting a Red Wave, with the Republicans taking control of the House and Senate as well as large swaths of Canada. The outlook is so dire that the New York Times tweets out a list of five “evidence-based strategies” for coping with election anxiety, including — we swear we are not making this up — “Plunge your face into a bowl with ice water for 15 to 30 seconds.”

Covering the entire, very long year of 2022 results in a very long column, which also includes illustrations such as this one: 

   Mr. Barry has noticed Canada before and I pointed that out to you a couple of years ago in a post that you probably passed on since it is titled "On Worms." In 1993, Barry reported on the Canadian worm wars and the widely syndicated column had headlines like these: 

"We've Got One Really Slimy Problem Here"; "Worms on the Highway"; "Worms On the Road: Recipe For Disaster" and "CANADIAN IMPORT OPENS A WHOLE CAN OF WORMS." 

If I produced headlines such as those, perhaps I would have more readers. By clicking on the link above you can learn more about the worm battles along the 401 and, you must be a little curious. Since it is Boxing Day and you probably won't bother, here is a snippet from the post which should serve to make you even more curious. Mr. Barry quotes from a CP piece and then raised the important questions:

In May, the Canadian Press Service sent out a report that began: "GEORGETOWN, Ontario - More than 50 worm pickers beat each other with steel pipes and pieces of wood in a battle over territory." The story states that two rival worm-picking groups "arrived at the same spot at the same time" and started fighting over who would pick worms there. A number of people were hospitalized . . . and a van was set on fire.

You may have the same questions I did:

 

1. These people were fighting over WORMS?

 

2. Is there some kind of new drug going around Canada?

Mr. Barry is now 75 and is likely surprised given that he wrote this book:

I am not sure if he is allowing his daughter to date: 

Source: "Dave Barry's Year in Review: No One Cared How You Did on 'Wordle,' And Democracy Died At Least Three Times; (It's Time to Don Surgical Gloves, Reach Deep Down Inside the Big Bag of Stupid That Was the Past 12 Months, and See What We Pull Out." Washington Post, Dec. 25, 2022.