I live right by the border and have lots of canadian friends. I am going to enjoy forwarding it on to them, eh!

(borrowed from my favourite site: [url]www.smartcanucks.ca[/url])

Canadian Temperature Conversion Chart

50 Fahrenheit (10 C)
New Yorkers try to turn on the heat.
Canadians plant gardens.

40 Fahrenheit (4.4 C)
Californians shiver uncontrollably
Canadians Sunbathe.

35 Fahrenheit (1.6 C)
Italian Cars won’t start
Canadians drive with the windows down

32 Fahrenheit (0 C)
Distilled water freezes
Canadian water gets thicker.

0 Fahrenheit (-17.9 C)
New York City landlords finally turn on the heat.
Canadians have the last cookout of the season.

-40 Fahrenheit (-40 C)
Hollywood disintegrates.
Canadians rent some videos.

-60 Fahrenheit (-51 C)
Mt. St. Helen’s freezes.
Canadian Girl Guides sell cookies door-to-door.

-100 Fahrenheit (-73 C)
Santa Claus abandons the North Pole
Canadians pull down their earflaps.

-173 Fahrenheit (-114 C)
Ethyl alcohol freezes.
Canadians get frustrated when they can’t thaw the keg.

-459.4 Fahrenheit (-273 C)
Absolute zero; all atomic motion stops.
Canadians start saying “cold, eh? ”

-500 Fahrenheit (-295 C)
Hell freezes over.
The Leafs win the Cup

When I was a kid we would go visit my grandmother near the Canadian border in Bonners Ferry, Idaho. My grandmother would always borrow us kids for an afternoon and we would drive up to Nelson, B.C. She had a huge Cadillac which was fitted with three fuel tanks which could hold 90 gallons of gasoline. We would go to the grocery store and she would by several hundred pounds of socialist flour, fill the trunk with extra strong Canadian beer, and fill the fuel tanks with reasonably taxed gasoline and we would make one last stop at the five and dime store before heading back home. Our grandmother would let us pick out one thing, actually anything in the store we wanted and she purchased it and kept it until we fulfilled our end of the bargain. We would head back across the border smuggling beer, flour, and gas. Me and my brother and sisters would be sitting on sacks of flowers looking all cute and everything and we would smile at the border guards and they would always wave us through.

As soon as we got down the road out of site of the border station, our grandmother would pull off to the side of the road and give us the toys we chose at the five and dime store and she would critique our smuggling techniques. Those were good times even though riding on a sack of socialist flour hurt your but by the end of the trip.

I recently had a business trip up in Kelowna, BC and on the way back it just didn’t feel right going across the border without smuggling at least something. I felt I was letting my grandmother down, so I went back across the border and at the first store I came across I found some peaches that I decided to take across. It felt good. Every now and again you really need to touch your wilder heritage.

Socialist flour was made from Canadian hard kernal winter wheat. It was highly subsidized by the Canadian government (hence socialized). In a border snit, the United States had prohibitively high tariffs on Canadian flour which almost tripled its price. Most of my family were Dutch Mennonites which prized the hard grain flour for its baking qualities in traditional Mennonite recipes. They would pay twice what my grandmother got it for and she would still make a little profit. (And we would get a toy.) This was a win-win situation which any sensible government should endorse.

I could have had a physical inspection of the peaches, but that really wasn’t the point. Smuggling was way better than the peaches ever could be.

Lee, just a little tussle going on here between the Merkins and the Canucks, eh?
“O Canada, we stand on guard for Thee”.
We also walk quite rapidly in the wintertime.

Ok, smuggle if you wanna, but sooner or later we’re gonna catch you sitting on a bag of flour, looking uncomfortable.
And our highly-prized wheat flour is not socialist, it’s sociable…just check in at any of our donut shops, bake shops, pizza outlets, all the places where we use it in our baked goods, and where we like to socialize the most.

Donna, my wife and I visisted Toronto for the first time last September; beautiful city, warm and friendly people. We will return. They had a Mexican fiesta in the city hall plaza (made us Texans feel right at home). A waiter at the CN tower told us that the official language of Toronto was “broken English” … due to all the immigrants (and I always thought it was broken French). Ce n’est pas mardi gras aujourd’hui.

Gary