Guacs, diversions and Paul Newman's salad dressing

After the wedding of the century all is now quiet and peaceful in our lives at the moment. Although while the majority of my body takes a rest from the vigour's of transporting itself around on my hairy leg sticks, my sticky mass of jelly, neurons and probably a little residual alcohol (my brain) usually takes itself on a weird and wonderful journey. It likes to look at things, turn them around and show them to the rest of this lovely little planet and explain why, we are all just a little bit fucked.

Things they don't have in Canada but are normal elsewhere.


Canada is a wonderful place, full of every flavour of person you would care to lick. It is a place where people eat food, talk a language from their mouth caves and sleep in beds made from wood, wool and sausage meat. It is also a very weird and disturbing realm as they don't have some things here which not only are considered normal elsewhere, but are essential to the continuation of humanity as we know it on this tiny little floating planet. Here's a quick list of some of these things which keep my dream state in awe and wonder.....

1. Ring pulls on tins.

So this is weird - drinks cans, much like Mongolia, China, Djibouti and Watford have ring pulls over here. It is normal to grab a can of iced tea (Disgusting) and open it using a ring pull, before pouring the disgusting brown liquid straight down the drain.

Normal

But get yourself a tin of spaghetti hoops, soup or even maple flavoured re-fried beans and you are shagged if you haven't got yourself a tin opener - technology from 1855 (Incidentally cans were invented in the late 1700's so there must have been a lot of faffing about before the invention!).
Yep, there is no little tab to instantly open your can. All the Canadians reading this are now sat, slumped on the floor knowing just what its like to live in the dark ages. Sorry.

Normal

In fact in Canada, opening a can like this video shows is normal - everyone has a lump of concrete in their kitchen to do just this!!

2. Traffic Diversions

OK, so in Winnipeg, we are really lucky. You see the roads are so bad here, we get to see the joys of construction on a daily basis. To watch those plucky workers hanging about in the road watching as one of them sweeps a pile of dust around is just awe inspiring. They could let us know ahead of tine that a road is closed, but then we would miss out on such a fun part of our day. It is quite normal to get to a junction where you want to turn right only to find out its not allowed because Maple Leaf Construction are having a 7 week party there. So you continue and take the next turning, and after getting back on the correct road you now cannot turn left for 3 miles. No left turn anywhere and you end up back on the road you left 35 minutes before. Nobody works out alternative routes and in fact don't tell you of the traffic construction until you get to the front of the queue and find yourself facing a huge fucking digger parked in a hole in the road - of course at this point no one wants to let you into the other lane and you die, sat in your car, of old age after spending 63 years sat there, chewing your old toe nails and crying like a baby.

In the rest of the world, including Barnsley, the lovely friendly and hard working people who fix our roads not only do it quite rapidly, but they put out signs, sometimes miles in advance telling you to take an alternate route because of these troubles. It can be a little annoying, but at least you have a choice.

Go a different way!

3. Mushy Peas

OK, this might not be on the list of delicacies you will find in a posh french restaurant or even in a shitty downtrodden French cafe where people eat boiled cat and puddle water. But mushy peas are a delicious and nutritious way to eat to get some healthy vegetables down your gullet without the need to chew. I have a plan with this one though..... When you attend a Canadian party, which does happen quite often, the party hostee (Thrower) will usually have some sort of small child sized portions of various coloured foodstuff and some thin wooden sticks that taste like bamboo but aren't as hardy. The idea is to dip the wooden stakes in the coloured goo and make an impressive 'delicious' face whilst attempting to chat about politics, hockey or global warming. It is not allowed to turn down these gifts and in fact its the rules that you must enjoy them. 

This is guacamole. It contains no moles or guacs.

  My idea is not only to save money - Guacamole is grown in underground storage freezers, on the border of Quebec and Mexico. The temperature of these freezers allow the eggs of the guac to be eaten by the moles, who would otherwise freeze to death. Once full however the moles can no longer walk upright and ride a small train which leads to mole heaven. Mole heaven in this case is a small blacksmiths yard where 11 brothers are the only people on earth to know the secret recipe for guacamole. They mix the moles half ingested dinner with grass and copies of the Toronto Star before filling empty avocado cases with the mixture. This is all so very expensive. 

My idea is to import cans of mushy peas (complete with miraculous tin opening rings) and basically sticking labels on saying 'Guacamole', no one will ever know the difference and even if they did they would be too polite to say anything. Then my mushy pea empire will take over the western world and become bigger than facebook, baby Jesus and Wayne Gretzky combined.  

Mushy peas - delicious and not made from moles.

5. The number 4.
This number does not exist in Canada and as such does not appear in this blog post.

6. Tiny fridges.
Now I hope you people of Canadia aren't taking offence ,defence or any other type of 4 fence at this post. I am not saying that things over here are any better or worse than in other stranger countries. Just that things are different elsewhere and sometimes there is no reason for it to be so. However, this obsession with tiny fridges in little old UK is just daft. I wholeheartedly agree with the maple leaf flavour of fridge - Huge, massive, big, large, humongous things able to hold enough food for a day trip of 58 teenagers visiting a zoo where they have to take food to feed all the animals and themselves, plus they have to be able to hide their underage drinking habits by sneaking in bottles and cans of cheap cider hidden behind huge cartons of milk (Skimmed or otherwise, they are all the same size)  Your wonderful fridges can do that and still have room to hide out of date cheese and rotting fruit with ease!!

A standard uk fridge for a family of 9 or 10 plus dog 

 When I grew up and everything was still black and white, TV only had 3 channels (That is actually quite true and they went off at midnight!) and your dinner was cooked under the dog fridges were teeny tiny little things where you could keep a toblerone and bottle of water (fresh from a puddle in the garden) Posh people may have sneaked the odd can of iced tea and piece of fruit inside, but that was just because the rats had yet to work out how to open the fridge doors. Life was simpler and so was the fridge.

The along came Paul Newman and his weird and wonderful sauces to make a healthy salad so much more less healthy! In 1947 just after the end of world war 2, when most countries in Europe were still on rations, it became law in Canada that you must store at least 17 bottles of Paul Newman's Salad 'Dressing' at any time at home. Panic ensued as the famous actor could appear anytime on a Canadian doorstep and demand a salad with 'Ranch', 'Thousand Island' or even French, Greek or Italian dressing on it. It was deemed illegal to offer an unwanted flavour and if the dressing itself was off, then Mr Newman was allowed to take the woman of the house and add her to his collection of wives, who at the time were on show in the 'Paul Newman Salad dressing Wives club', wing of the museum of Kansas. Times were hard for Canadians who in winter had to try and stop the dressing freezing outside, whilst in the summer it would be eaten by the squirrels who by now had gone crazy mental like an outbreak of zombies at the taste of the sticky sweet liquids.

To meet with the new laws Canadians came up with a genius idea....Take a small house about the size of a standard welsh castle, remove the turrets, add a light inside and a swing open door instead of  a drawbridge and lo and behold you now have a wonderful refrigerator in which to keep all your unwanted children, pets, moose and salad dressing.

A medium sized salad dressing container

So you see that things are a little different everywhere in the world, including Canada, (Which is actually somewhere in the world, not everywhere). Its an exciting time to be alive with the fight for freedom for guacs and moles. Luckily the laws on salad dressing have been reduced and its now permitted to have as few as 13 bottles in your fridge. Paul Newman actually died in 2008 and would have liked it this way. He never liked ranch dressing anyway, he preferred Greek. 

That's it for today. I hope you have been enlightened into how we live over here in Canada and all you crazy Canadians should watch out.....Mushy peas are coming.......