Happiness Canadian-style

There's a feelgood story in today's newspaper about a local musician who lacked money to produce his album. So he crowd-sourced, in what sounds like a sort of cheap and cheerful way. The big difference: he did not solicit actual cash, as in that printed by the Bank of Canada, or indeed that of any other country. Instead, he collected 'Canadian Tire' money, which is more easily mistaken for the bills out of a Monopoly set than for legal tender. It is stuff given out by cashiers at the eponymous, nationwide chain of stores (which sell nearly everything, though I have not yet seen tires there) as a sort of primitive version of a customer loyalty card (without the self-interested benefit of actually getting market-worthy information about the customer). It appears mainly in denominations of 1 or 5 or 10 cents. So, the musician, Corin Raymond, collected more than $6,000 in real (Canadian) money in Canadian Tire cash. The total stash weighed something over 60 pounds and counted out at more than 32,000 pieces of paper, providing a good workout in addition to the capital for creating his appropriately-titled album 'Paper Nickels'. In the article Raymond seems delighted and talks about the enthusiasm with which his supporters donated to his cause. Says he: “It made them happy in such a Canadian way.”

It leaves me feeling good, of course, but also wondering: what is happiness the Canadian way, exactly? How does happiness differ nation by nation? How do I go about learning to be Canadianly happy? It seems important.

Ode to cold

I love scanning Twitter on the go, but lately the iPhone icon I click on more than any other is Accuweather. Who writes for them? There must be professional meteorologists(and what a great job title that is) on staff who fill in the blanks for temperature, precipitation, dew point and so forth. But who gets to write the pithy little descriptions? Today, Tuesday, Toronto is experiencing a low of minus seventeen (one-SEVEN) centigrade, and a high of minus thirteen (brrr-RRRR). The one-line description says 'brisk and bitterly cold'. Brisk? Brisk? Where is this writer from? Antarctica?

Tomorrow, luckily, with a forecast ranging from minus fifteen all the way up to minus nine, will be 'very cold with snow showers'. By Sunday, with a high of minus three, we will experience weather that is 'cloudy and not as cold'.

Break out the bikinis.