Re: the longest undefended border

Paul Kennedy (kennedyp@toronto.cbc.ca)
Wed, 15 Dec 1999 00:20:11 -0500 (EST) 

Hey Ed!

I hardly know what to say.....


>NOW, NOW (not shouting - just emphasis) - we used to
>sing "Oh Canada" in my fourth grade general music
>class with Miss Rice at the upright piano.  I was nine
>and I liked it.  

Where and when?  Did anyone ever ask you to sing it in French (which is the
language in which it was written)?

Oh Canada, terre de nos aieux,
Ton front est ceint,
De fleurons glorieux....

....better lyrics, by far.  But the Canadian national anthem always shoulda
been "Un Canadien Errant" (Quebec will steal it, if they ever separate, and
I'm looking at landscape in Montreal....)

Un Canadien errant,
Banni de ses foyers,
Parcourait en pleurent,
Des pays etranges (sorry for the lack of accents, folks!  This is a maudits
anglais 'puter!)
Un jour triste et pensif,
Assis au bord de flot,
Il addressa ses mots,
Au courant fugitif....



 Maybe you couldn't get through all
>the on Guards without laughing when you were nineteen
>or twenty and stoned on some good dope but that's
>understandable (and welcome).
>

Well, actually, I remember being BIG TIME pissed off when they finally
adopted the English words--including God, which upset me; and also a line
about "brothers", which I thought, and STILL think, excessively sexist....
And, by the way, I NEVER inhaled.....


>I would certainly stand on guard (as long as I was
>playing my Kazoo) for a nation with nationalised
>health care,

DEEPLY threatened by NAFTA, not to mention WTO....

 the CBC,


Hey, that's where I work.  I'm a national host!  Also deeply threatened...
but no shop talk this late in the evening.....

 Tom Thomson the painter,


LOVE HIM!  

 Molsen,

Bit of a spelling problem here.... I think you mean MOLSON..... And,
frankly, they make the most horrible beer in the western world....  (They
also just fired something like 500 workers in Barrie, Ontario... only an
hour north of Toronto, because they decided to build a bigger plant in
Toronto....  Must I need invoke the ghost of Karl Marx?)


>Toronto's wonderful Transit system,


Oops, again... I'm about to get on it to go home.....   It's ALWAYS
overcrowded, leaving people standing on the station platform for five or six
subway trains at a time....  

 Stephen Leacock,

No argument.... (Although JIM might claim it's BLUNT Canadian humour--I
forget the exact metaphor--something like a rock as compared to a rapier....)

>Margaret Atwood.....

I've got problems that I'll happily personally message you about....


the Nova Scotia coast south of
>Halifax is beautiful, so is about ten or twelve miles
>north;


We're VERY good at landscape.... SEE Tom Thomsom, above.... or the Group of
Seven, or Emily Carr.... 


 just get rid of that damn metric system 

Do you know that the United States, and LIBERIA! are the only countries
still using the IMPERIAL system.... (I thought youse guys had a revolution!)


and
>make the place a bit warmer in January (maybe like
>Boston - that's not asking too much)

Try Vancouver.... 

>......so here you've got an anomolie, a Yank
>chauvinistic about Canada.....
> 


Most intelligent Yanks LOVE Canada.  Most Canadians wish that they'd
therefore try to make the US more like Canada, rather than vice-versa.
Maybe it all has something to do with national anthems.... Our's is
unthinkable (...we stand on guard, we stand on guard, we stand on guard...
against the world's longest undefended border)...... Your's is unsingable.... 

The ONLY good thing about being beaten by the old Russians at hockey was the
chance to hear that STIRRING anthem!

Cheers,

Paul

OSR--Maybe it's because I'm a Canadian--and thereby almost an honourary
Scot.... But I never had any trouble understanding the immediate literary
allusion in the tile of THE CATCHER IN THE RYE..... I'd known the song since
I was six years old.  Did any other bananafishes have trouble identifying
the reference?