After a long dry spell, here’s the second face in as many weeks. This one seems more seasonal than the suitcase. I mean, is this not the face of a slightly cross-eyed reindeer?
Of course, given that it’s a Timmy’s cup it could just be Canadiana: a moose, perhaps? Either way, I may never look at a maple leaf, stylized or otherwise, in quite the same way again.
The #TellMe challenge started in 2019 as a social media game: challenging others to express something in an indirect way.
Tell me you’re from NYC
without (actually) telling me
you’re from NYC.
I don’t own a car and life is easy.
Tell me you’re from the midwest
without (literally) telling me
you’re from the midwest.
It started, I think, as a fun and creative challenge playing to exaggerated stereotypes and (mis)perceptions but, social media being social media, it soon degenerated into something a little snarkier. I bet you didn’t see that coming.
Winter in Canada has, perhaps, one redeeming feature: I don’t have to get up too early, or stay up too late, to see sunrises and sunsets. Driving from Edmonton to Calgary last week, we saw all the stages of a sunrise at an entirely reasonable hour.
It started by looking as if it was almost done.
Look at this cute guy, giving me the eye from across the room.
A picture is worth a thousand words, yeah? So that’s it. That’s the post. Well, maybe I’ll just add a few words.
You can see the snow for yourself; the temperature is less obvious. It’s cold in Calgary. But not cold enough, I guess, to trigger that Prairie rule of thumb so often offered as consolation, however faint:
At least it doesn’t snow when it’s this cold.
That’s the whole gambit.
From across the room, I throw a slipper at the TV. No, no I don’t. Is this a case of remarkable self-discipline? Of mature emotional control? Of respect for basic norms of civil behaviour?
No. I’m not wearing slippers.
Don’t you have a pump?
I don’t even draw a breath: any pause would spoil the artistry of my slightly but completely justifiably indignant response.
There’s a pump?
My hair-stylist/salon-owner looks at me in the mirror, trying to decide if I’m serious. I look back steadily and, as well as I can from under the cape, give him the hands-opening-up-and-out-shrug: the universal hand signal for Seriously, I did not know there was a pump.
As recently as a month ago, we still had the beauty of colour.
Now we have the beauty of clean lines.
We really can’t have it all. But what we *can* have is fair-to-middling outstanding.
No wonder people find English hard to learn as a second language. We have oddball past tenses. We have weirdly inconsistent plurals, driven mostly by what language gave us the word.
moose/moose
but…
goose/geesemouse/mice
but…
house/houses
We have weird spelling in general.
Posted: 2025 Feb 21
