A quirky people.

This is part of a Canada Day display at a local liquor store, which happens to be attached to the supermarket where I do my weekly shopping. They're all Canadian products, of course, from the celebrated locally-produced Moosehead beer (the green cans, lower left) to the ice wine in the tall, narrow bottles with the golden maple leafs on the top shelf, to the raw, ragged-tasting Newfoundland Screech in the bottles with the tan labels mid-right bottom shelf. (I note, with amusement, that in some kind of promotion, if you buy a bottle of Screech, you apparently get a mini-sample-bottle of some other product. Honey, if you're drinking Screech, you do not be wantin' to be drinking no other product.)

And yes, there is a bottle of Canadian Club on the top shelf, and a bottle of Canadian wine (probably Niagara or BC region) on the bottom shelf, which are wearing tiny, hand-knit maple leaf sweaters.

I sometimes gently mock the stereotypes about Canadians on usenet by starting a post with, "We are a clean, industrious people..." but while some stereotypes about Canadians are true (including that we have a tendency to smugness), the one that it seems to me is least true is that Canadians are boring. Almost all of us are at a minimum funny. Many are slightly eccentric. And some of us are downright certifiable.

Now, I do live in Atlantic Canada, which skews oddball; but all in all, thinking about the conversations I have with strangers and the oddball things I see on a constant basis - such as wine bottles wearing tiny, hand-knit maple leaf sweaters - I'd say we average out at quirky.

ronnie