Every shitty little town in BC is just, like, a gas station with two pumps (one of them out of order), a museum, a motel that looks like it’s actively operated by bed bugs, a church, a hand-drawn sign that says something insane like “HAIRCUTS $5 TURN NOW”, and always, always, a cannabis store.

if you wonder why folks from metro Vancouver don’t believe that there’s anybody else living in BC it’s because every other town for 400 kilometers is just this bullshit

that, or open-air retirement communities like Nanaimo or Penticton where the average age is 70 and the average political stance is “terrified of wi-fi, but you can’t tell if it’s for nazi reasons or granola reasons”

“i support the lamplighter’s union! this is vital infrastructure that deserves public support, not a dying technology on its last years of life support”

but the message is undercut by my delivery, standing on a soapbox, lit by the very electrical grid and incandescent bulbs that are to blame for this whole mess

I think Canada Post should also get a monopoly on all packages as well as letter mail, it’d keep ’em in business in the new post-letter-mail universe, it’d keep good union jobs in town, and shit like Dragonfly, Purolator, FedEx, and Amazon Prime would all suffer (oh nooooo).

Suddenly your package takes 3-7 days to arrive instead of 15 minutes, but you can feel confident that the person delivering it didn’t have to pee in a bottle, that’s worth something.

if Canada Post rates make Amazon less competitive in Canada, oh noooooooo

“we’ve lost the worst jobs in Canada”

So, with the pandemic finally kinda nearing behind us, I was planning on going to the United States and doing a bunch of geeky stuff - PAX, MagWest, maybe JoCoCruise - but then instead the USA came down with a bad case of the fascism and I got stuck at home doing camping instead.

Thing is, after camping, like, three times, I’m not convinced that I like camping so much as I enjoyed buying and trying out camping gear. That’s the real sport, I think.

If you aren’t way in to the beautiful outdoors, Canada can be boring as shit, y’all, this whole ass country is like if Montana were 50 times bigger and exactly as boring.

Honestly, though, buying a whole bunch of camping shit and going camping a bunch of times turned out to be, like, a fraction of the cost of going anywhere and doing anything, so that’s nice.

At the expense, of, like, going to nowhere and doing nothing and eating sandwiches in the dirt next to like 18 other families.

once again, the CBC would like to remind you not to laugh at the misfortune of others

one thing about following the /r/BuyCanadian subreddit is folks’ll post a basket full of nothing but cheezies and Canadian Whiskey and go “i’m switching to Canadian products” and you look at their cart and have to suppress your urge to say “please also buy a vegetable, we make some of those here too”

but honestly, if you were making do with nothing but cheetos and jim beam before, I’m still glad you made the switch

I was a bit surprised how whiskey focused this trade war has been so far.

“What’s that going to accomplish, how much whiskey could Canadians possibly drink?”

“Oh. Oh wow. That’s … that much, huh?”

Look, Cheetos and Doritos are puffed cornmeal dusted with MSG and carefully hand-optimized in a lab to be just unsatisfying enough that you’ll rip through the whole bag without thinking about it.

Hawkins Cheezies are like crunching down on angry rocks hosed down with sharp cheddar. Each handful of Cheezies has more condensed Cheez flavor than a whole bag of Cheetos combined. You have to stop eating them out of sheer flavor exhaustion.

They use a 70-year old machine to crank these out and only a handful of people know the recipe, which hasn’t changed since before my father was born.

most of the other uniquely Canadian snacks, like all-dressed chips, ketchup chips, and Coffee Crisps, are … forgettable

would you believe that the first place my mind went here was homoerotic subtext?

okay but actually what the hell am I, a person who doesn’t like going outside, supposed to do in Canada on vacation

this whole country is boring as shit, it’s like if someone were to take 26 Montanas, line them up one after the other and freeze the whole thing half of the year

there’s Montreal I guess

everybody’s like “such natural beauty, so many mountains, wild and untamed outdoors, pacific northwest, snow sports” but I’m allergic to literally every part of that

my face will get puffy and I will get a nosebleed, that is enough majesty of the outdoors for me thank you

for the love of god, give me a walking food tour in a major metropolitan where there’s nothing but concrete, or an open-sourcy tech conference

wine touring in the Okanagan is pretty nice but honestly after about three tastings I can’t differentiate one wine from another at all any more

also the horrible growing conditions and constant fires of the past few years have left the wineries grimmer and sadder than ever before, they’re either barely willing to run tastings or they’ve turned tastings into an expensive activity

as a practical consideration, you also need someone to drive you from tasting to tasting OR you need to really, really pace yourself

My thoughts on trade protectionism are actually kinda fraught?

Like, it turns out the ability of global capital to reposition itself with unlimited freedom just means that all work is done by the lowest bidder, with labor going to the country that has the fewest anti-slave-labor laws and food safety regulations on the books, right?

Trade makes us all richer but protecting a local industry by pushing out gigantic international incumbents - like with dairy, or the CBC - also can be good?

China’s ridiculous digital protectionism utterly sucks, but also China’s software industry wasn’t completely flattened by FAANG like it was in the entire western world.

Lots of local industries here are choked by practices that are so shady they almost feel like racketeering - tomato companies disappearing any stock that goes over quota so that they don’t ruin the price of tomatoes as part of a vast tomato conspiracy, in order to preserve the profitability of tomato growers. Dairy prices artificially inflated so high that a basket of cheese feels like a treasure chest. (i mean, it is)

Canada is just chock-a-block with local cartels enforcing profitable little fiefdoms - with oligopolies that collude to create monopolistic behavior.

Bad for the consumer and yet when trade disaster strikes we suddenly have no oranges but a lot of tomatoes and cheese.

I think the analogy I go to for this is that off-the-grid subsistence farming where you compost your own feces is miserable, but also living in 400 square feet downtown doing gig-work for pennies and doordashing everything you want to eat is miserable:

sane trade policy lives somewhere in the middle, so trade protectionism vs globalism both exist on a spectrum where total adherence to one or the other is going to be… bad

“maybe we need worker protections but also mcdonalds” is the kind of lukewarm centrist take you should expect from me

so the Hudson’s Bay Company is in serious trouble

one thing to note, uh, BC is named after the Columbia Department, which was one of the departments of the HBC, presumably next to “menswear” and “kitchen”

ultimately there’s a lot of really dark history there, and I’m not sad to see the HBC go, like, when I shop at Canadian Tire I never think “I bet this store killed a whole bunch of people”

I mean, I DO think that when I shop at Amazon, but free shipping

woof, someone tried to compile a list of Canadian digital services and in the “replacements for cloud services like AWS” column they have, like, eight versions of “guy running a software consultancy out of his boat” and a bunch of companies that can not meaningfully compete with Hetzner

I’m pretty patriotic but I’m not “hosting services in Canada” patriotic, I could just as easily shovel money into a fireplace

i wouldn’t be surprised if Canada turned out to be the enterprise Java capital of the world and I want that to carry every centimeter of the derision I intend

I’m less irritated about a new King on the currency because I haven’t actually used enough currency in the past few years to notice.

i had quietly kinda hoped we’d just quietly phase out putting royalty on our coins after the Queen, but it doesn’t matter because we’re just quietly phasing out coins

If you’re in #canada and you’re curious about how to forge a closer relationship with local food supply, consider looking for Community Supported Agriculture programs in your area.

You pay in advance and get vegetables all year at their respective harvest times.

It’s more expensive, inconvenient, and fussy than just buying your vegetables from Loblaw’s, and you still need to buy vegetables from the store when you need Specific Vegetables, BUT big plastic tubs full of fresh veggies.

Lots of downsides to getting food from an actual farm, like: instead of getting the same 8 vegetables you get on repeat from the local store, the availability and supply of different vegetables changes a lot month after month, and I’ve had to pull some tradwife farm-ass shit like “dealing with an absolute mountain of plums” and “learning to pickle”.

Also sometimes they will attempt to send you radicchio, which I think should be considered a war crime.

However: a couple of years of being forced to get creative with a hyper-local bounty of unpredictable farm fresh vegetables have, I think, forged me into a much more capable and resilient home chef.

It’s really funny because every now and again I will go to Savio Volpe, which is one of the hot ticket local restaurants, and I’ll see the same vegetables I’m dealing with on their endlessly rotating menu, because they’re pulling a version of the same vegetable swindle I am, trying to get their mitts on the freshest and most local veg.

They, uh, reliably do a much better job with these vegetables than I do.

I’m not actually 100% convinced that there’s much, if any, of a flavor or health benefit to these locally sourced vegetables compared to the actually reliably excellent bounty from a local vegetable store like Kin’s - expensive vegetables are mostly just vegetables.

The health benefit is more, I think, being forced to cook a large plastic tub full of vegetables on the regular.

anyways, I’ve been a member of the metro vancouver Glen Valley CSA for 2 years, now, and it’s also quite a bit more well run than the last CSA I was a member of.

also, and this is only a bonus if you’re an idiot like me and lack long-term object permanence, paying a lot up front makes it feel like you’re getting free vegetables from a genie

Jesus christ, CBC, what recipe was she searching for?

ed: (in the actual story she found the video because she was poking around the browser history of her boyfriends’ laptop, but the headline makes it sound like AllRecipes.com was hosting the video under their recipe for Broccoli Casserole or something)

So there’s this italian dish, pasta alla zozzona, which is where you take sausage and guanciale, fry ’em up, and serve them with a mix of grated cheese, egg, and tomato paste (using a cacio e pepe or carbonara like technique to get things nice and smooth)

you can’t fool me, ITALY, that’s just kraft dinner with hot dogs and ketchup

compare:

a while back I discovered that the popular roman dish “cacio e pepe” is just cheese and pepper and pasta and butter and I swear to god that’s just a classier, much more difficult Kraft Dinner. Now I call Kraft Dinner with too much black pepper cracked in to it “trashio e pepe”.

me most of the time: nationalism is stupid

me, defending the cheapest, shittiest food you have ever heard of:

weirdly, a lot of canadian hockey team names are just kinds of people from here? like, there’s “canadiens” which just means “canadians”, and “canucks”, which just means “canadians”, and then there’s the “nordqiues”, which means “northmen”, which is just a fancy way of saying “canadians”

then “oilers”, which is… for the canadians… who work the oil fields, which is to say, canadians

“senators”, for canadians who work the parliament fields, another word for “canadians”

canadians, number one in the world at naming hockey teams after: ourselves

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/nunavik-dog-slaughter-apology-1.7391834

Canadian government apologizes to Inuit in Nunavik for mass killing of sled dogs

Minister of Crown-Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangaree has formally apologized to Inuit in Nunavik for the federal government’s role in the mass killing of sled dogs in the region in the 1950s and 1960s.

…

“Without investigation and without asking the owners about the importance of the dogs they wanted to kill, without inquiring whether the dogs they wanted to kill constituted a real, serious and current danger to the people.”

There are not a lot of things that can get through to my hard, black little heart, but this still made me go “What the fuck, Canada”.

People alive today still remember an era where the RCMP was cheerfully murdering puppies at scale for what we now admit was basically no reason.

i don’t know why I feel such weird pride when people enjoy something from Canada but I do

A&W and Triple O’s are top tier burger chains dammit

Okay, so, this is a fairly spicy take, but I think that these burger chains have a burger that is at least in the same postal code as the highly venerated In-n-Out and Five Guys burger options

So, some time ago, a Canadian brand, Tilley, sold to private equity and started moving all of its clothing production overseas so that they could expand their brand into…

…. this?

Did, uh, did nobody explain to them that black-and-red crossed hammers are overt white supremacist symbols? Like, VERY prominently?

It started with their use in The Wall, and like other satire intended to mock white supremacists, they missed the satire, thought it looked cool and adopted it.

Did Tilley just decide “it’s time to appeal to the stormfront demo”?

Benefit of the doubt: I prefer to think that they were just too incompetent to do a google search for “crossed hammers logo” rather than actively deciding in a board room “it’s time for skinheads to have their own lifestyle brand.”

This picture was taken by request, as the folks responsible wanted to gloat

Would throwing hands help or hurt Jagmeet in the polls?

Personally, I propose a political pillar of “punching Pierre Pollievre” practically promises positive poll performance.

i liked the episode of X-men where nightcrawler visited Canada

where did he go?

BANFF

When the local post office is just covered in “please don’t get angry” signs, it’s either because the community is particularly aggressive or the post office is unusually, frustratingly incompetent, or, in this case, definitely both

once you know about the past exonerative tense, you start to see it show up all over the place,

particularly in news stories where the Manitoba police definitely nearly beat a shoplifter to death

well this is new

good news, Vancouver, amidst this crushing housing crisis, I have found an affordable space to rent

“i can’t live in the ad-space for a Coffee News from 2016”

whiners the lot of you

“the 7 grand heroes of the fantasy kingdom, Richmond Brighouse, Scott Road, Royal Oak, Holdom, Gilmore, Edmonds, and, of course, Stadium Chinatown”

“… are they all named after Skytrain stations?”

“… yes”

tell me you don’t want to hear more about a hero named Stadium Chinatown

recently I saw someone circulating a petition requesting that the Canadian government use public funds to provide a mastodon server for all Canadians

in something of a rebuttal, I would like to note that the portal that every single Canadian needs access to for crucial tax information is down for the entire weekend for one of it’s regular nappy naps, and this is one of the government’s more modern and prominent public digital projects

now if someone were to write a version of Mastodon that ran entirely on IBM servers that haven’t been manufactured since 1997, that would be a whole different ball game

behold, the comments section at the CBC:

please, for the love of god, do not let the Canadian government anywhere near your technology

the vancouver sun’s average reader does not understand what an ecoterrorist is but they’re pretty sure that they’re very powerful and malicious, like djinni

the royal bank’s website inexplicably features these two men who are very clearly stealing my money

Why is this in their marketing?

No legitimate businessman is getting into a helicopter with a steel suitcase full of, presumably, money, with sunglasses and matching turtlenecks.

My new home city, Coquitlam, has a handful of new, really good pedestrian/bike lanes: here I’m talking large, wide, mixed use lanes separated from traffic with tree cover that I see people and bikes using comfortably. Nice.

New West had a few of those, too, I’d follow the nice one under the skytrain all the way to Metrotown from Edmonds on sunny days, sometimes.

There are also no shortage of fake bike lanes.

You know, the tiny strip of paint half-heartedly placed beside a busy highway.

I don’t think these should exist at all, to be honest. These are some dogshit bike lanes,

I loved Disco Elysium, which is why I was so surprised when I discovered that BC’s Wildfire Service uniform is…

wait a minute that’s kim!

was his outfit based on emergency services outfits or are our boys in orange just stylish as fuck?

or am I just seeing things

if you live in Canada, you generally assume that ranchers

• can’t spell champagne, “CAMPAGNE”, what?
• make incredibly gross, wierdly creamy champagne
• put champagne on their vegetables

also they have NO SANS

also, am I the only one who thinks that “Rancher’s Choice” sounds like a dime store romance novel?

new idea: a microblog where I rate Canada’s hundreds of Terry Fox statues

This one would be, like, a 2/10.