Uncle John loves Canada! We always make sure to include something about the Great White North in every single one of our books.
But our Canadian readers kept asking for more—“we want an entire book, a full, gigantic, Nunavut-sized Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader all about Canada!” they begged. “Belive us, plenty of great stuff goes down up here.” Our readers are a discerning bunch, conneisseurs of fun facts, terrific trivia, and unbelievable esoterica. We couldn’t do just any book about Canada, and fill it with hockey statistics, Mountie jokes, and photos of Anne Murray. Uncle John just couldn’t do that. And it’s because Uncle John knows a secret about Canada.
Canada is a really weird place.
Behold: Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Weird Canada. A whopping 400 pages chockful of every odd, nutty, crazy, preposterous, silly—and even scary—person, place, or thing, that’s ever been associated with Canada. Ghosts in the Yukon? It’s here. The refusal to adhere to the standards of time in Newfoundland? It’s in Uncle John’s Weird Canada. And so are stories about…
• Creatures, real and possibly real, like Sasquatch, the Ogopogo monster, and the Grolar Bear
• The world’s smallest library, and the world’s largest pierogi
• The only-in-Canada fad of “bed-pushing”
• The man with a window in his stomach
• A ghost-hunting agency in Vancouver that finds the things you can’t see, and a bookstore in Toronto full of the books that they don’t want you to read
• How the government’s push for “Canadian content” led to the worst TV show in world history, and the funniest duo in sketch comedy history
• Weird stuff you never knew about Canadian mainstays, such as Wayne Gretzky, Bryan Adams, Neil Young, Guy Lafleuer, Joni Mitchell, and the Barenaked Ladies
• Funny thoughts on Canada—and what it means to be Canadian—from singular Canadian minds like Stephen Leacock, Will Ferguson, and Douglas Coupland
• More alien encounters, haunted hotels, and unexplained noises than you can shake a (hockey) stick at
And of course, you’ll find the usual dose of weird news, strange people, odd animals, goofy places, and refreshing tales of unlikely success and spectacular failure that you’ll always find in one of those regular old states-centric Bathroom Readers.
In short, there’s something for everyone in Canada, from Canada, or who just plain loves Canada, whether you’re a Slurpee-slurper in Winnipeg or stand-up Sasquatch from Saskatchewan. Welcome to Weird Canada—but we don’t have to tell you that—you probably already live there.
Enjoy reading…and chimo!
(And a hearty hello from Chimo—that’s him down there.)
—Uncle John and the BRI staff