Crystal lakes, snow-capped mountains, hockey, Mounties, bilingual traffic signs...and some really, really weird news stories.
HOT CHEESE
Brick cheese, which is commonly used on pizzas, sells for one-third of the price in the States as it does in Canada. In the fall of 2012, three men from Fort Erie, Ontario, were arrested for running an illegal cross-border cheese operation. The idea behind their scheme was simple. They bought brick cheese cheaply in America, snuck it across the border, and sold it in Canada. The smugglers packed cases with brick cheese and drove it across the border without paying duties on it. Authorities say the trio purchased more than $200,000 worth of food and sold it at a profit of more than $165,000.
NO HARD FEELINGS
Dany Lariviere, mayor of the small town of St-Theodore-d’Acton in Montreal delivered a 20-ton boulder topped with a pink ribbon to his ex-wife in the summer of 2011. The enormous stone was spray painted with the message “Happy birthday, Isa.” Lariviere jokingly compared his “gift” to a giant diamond ring, saying he gave Isa 18 to 24 carat-tons. Because he owns an excavation company, Lariviere transported the rock through the town in the wee hours one Saturday using one of his front loaders. Needless to say, the split between the two has been contentious.
WHO WANTS SOME STANBITS?
In the 1992 movie Wayne’s World, Wayne and Garth hang out at a Chicago doughnut shop called Stan Mikita’s. It’s a subtle Tim Hortons joke likely lost on the film’s largely American audience. Co-writer and star Mike Myers is Canadian, and a huge hockey fan—and so very familiar with Tim Horton, both as a hockey player and doughnut seller. Wayne’s World takes place in Chicago, so the characters congregate at Stan Mikita’s—Mikita being a legendary player for the Chicago Blackhawks in the ‘60s and ‘70s. A replica of the movie Stan Mikita’s was built in 1994 for the Kings Dominion amusement park in Virginia. Sadly, it was eventually turned into a Happy Days-themed restaurant.
A TRULY ENTRANCING ACT
To entertain its students at the end of the school year, Collège du Sacré-Coeur in Sherbrooke, Quebec, hired a young hypnotist. Maxime Nadeau performed his act for a small group of 12- and 13-year-old girls in June 2012. His act was going well until the end. When he told the girls that the act was over, several of them remained mesmerized and couldn’t snap out of it, no matter what Nadeau did.
Norma Macmillan, born in Vancouver, was the voice of Casper the Ghost and Gumby.
Nadeau remained calm and called his mentor, Richard Whitbread, who made the hour-long trip from his home in the town of Danville to the school. Whitbread discovered that several of the girls were still under the effects of a mass hypnosis. Whitbread described the girls as “eyes wide open but nobody home.” To break them out of the spell, the master hypnotist made the girls think they were being rehypnotized and then brought them out using a stern voice. One described it as an out-of-body experience. Others who were hypnotized described feeling like their limbs were heavy. Many felt spaced out. One question arises: are spaced-out students different from the norm?
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T.O.’S VERY OWN BIRD MAN
In 2010, a group of scientists from the University of Toronto invented an aircraft powered by human flapping. Called the Snowbird Human-Powered Ornithopter, the invention is the first man-powered aircraft that requires the pilot to continuously flap wings to soar in the air. The team was inspired by da Vinci and set out to create a device similar to his ornithopter (an aircraft that is powered by flapping its wings). To take to the skies, a car pulls the aircraft to launch it as a pilot pumps a set of pedals that are attached to pulleys that cause the wings to flap. The Snowbird is actually a bit of a baby chick that’s just learning to fly.
Weighing a light 94 pounds (43 kilograms), the invention has maintained altitude for just 19.3 seconds so far. It’s traveled 145 meters (476 feet) at a speed of 26 kilometers (16 miles) per hour. Todd Reichert, an engineering student who piloted e Snowbird, said, “Throughout history, countless men and women have dreamt of flying like a bird under their own power, and hundreds, if not thousands, have attempted to achieve it. This represents one of the last aviation firsts.” Obviously, kinks need to be ironed out before all of us are flapping through the sky like pigeons. Plus, Reichert admits that he had to lose 8 kilograms (a little over 17 pounds) to get the machine in the air. Many may choose to remain earthbound if they have to lose that much weight to fly.
Saskatoon comes from the Cree “Mis-Sask-quah-toomia” meaning “fruit of the much wood.”