Following on with our penchant for all things Canadian, this post is a continuation of a collection of verses displayed here on August 10, 2020 (national anthems #1), August 10, 2021 (national anthems #2), August 10, 2022 (national anthems #3), and August 10, 2023 (national anthems #4).
previous poetic posts (Note that captions are available for poems displayed on "Daily Illustrated Nonsense" as of 2024).
(national anthems #1): Canadian spellings, speech borrowings, Canadian weather, Toronto/Buffalonian.
(national anthems #2): compassionate use, overwintering waterfowl, seniors hockey, joual, Canadian moose.
(national anthems #3): Kim Jong Un's visit, snow-biota, Canadian Thanksgiving, Haida Gwaii, prairie home.
(national anthems #4): Mounties, Nanaimo bars, founding cultures, crept and leapt, Newfoundland potato famine.
(national anthems #5): z,z,z,z,z, fifty-first state.
CURRENT CONTENTS (#6)
Fifty-first state
Authors' Note: The Canadian author regrets the unapologetic tone of this diatribe (see borrow). He does point out, however, that the verse constitutes a trio of timely diplomatic nonsense along with Panama Canal Zone and Greenland.
Authors' Note: There is no satisfactory explanation for the similarity of the words encumber and cucumber.
Kim Jong Un, third successive member of his family's ruling dynasty, became leader of North Korea in 2011. He has since garnered world attention by his blustering role in his country's programs to develop missiles and nuclear weapons; the latter are widely known informally as nukes.
In the northern Canadian territories (Northwest Territory, Nunavut and the Yukon), the soil is poor in organic components and prone to salinity and permafrost. Cucumbers, known informally as cukes, must be imported into the Yukon from crops grown further south. The reader may well agree that these territories should remain nuke-free as well as cuke-free.
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Authors' Note:
snowbird: a Canadian retiree seeking a warmer venue to spend the wintry months
The Queen Charlotte Islands are a Canadian archipelago situated between
the northwestern tip of Vancouver Island and the Alaska Panhandle, with landmass one-third that of the Hawaiian Islands (the latter located considerably further south). They had been the heartland of the aboriginal Haida people, who numbered thirty thousand at the time of first contact with European explorers in the eighteenth century. Their territory has a unique environment based on moderate temperatures and heavy rainfall. The province of British Columbia renamed the islands Haida Gwaii (HIE-duh GWIE[-ee], 'islands of the people') in 2010.
Authors' Note: In its evolution from poem to unofficial anthem, the iconic American song "Home on the Range" was known for a time as "Western Home". The lyrics evoke the wilderness surrounding settlements on the "High Plains" in the old west, but do not mention the construction techniques for homebuilding. With little timber available to build cabins in some areas, thick prairie grass could be used as a covering for dwellings, even allowing the cutting of standard door and window openings.
In Canada, the geographically similar area bordering the American plains has been known almost exclusively as the Prairies. The author imagines that living in a sod hut on either side of the border would be a more inviting prospect for settlers once the herds of buffalo had been thinned out by overhunting (an environmental desecration that occurred in the latter part of the nineteenth century).
Readers are reminded that they can, if so desired, sing the poem's lyrics to the tune of "Home on the Range", and on our daily blog you can find suggestions for doing so HERE.
For further reading; 1)https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/sod-houses
2)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_on_the_Range
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Alberta, 1908
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Authors' Note: Spokesperson "Miki" is a Canadian woman of Japanese extraction who is a "Mountie", common moniker for a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a name deriving from the service's early days. Horses now play only a minor role in the RCMP's primary goal, the enforcement of federal criminal law; they are still used for crowd-control maneuvers, and in public spectacles, including the well-reputed "Musical Ride". Since 1966, however, horseback riding is no longer a mandatory skill required in the training of new officers.
Under contract, the RCMP also provides policing service to eight of Canada's ten provinces (Ontario and Quebec being the exceptions), the three Canadian northern territories, and 600 indigenous communities. Under its purview are towns such as Whitehorse, Yukon, and Hay River, Northwest Territories.
To view more verses dealing with Canadiana, check out this later post (part #3) by clicking HERE.
GENERAL DIRECTIONS FOR WEB-EXPLORERS:
To resume your review of the sequence of daily titillations on our related blog "Daily Illustrated Nonsense", click HERE. Once you arrive, you can select your time frame of interest from the calendar-based listings at the bottom of the page, and check the daily offerings for any month from the start of 2020 through the summer of 2026. As of March, 2026, there are 2,000 unique entries available on the daily blog, displaying individual poems (often illustrated) and wordplay, but also with some photo-collages and parody song-lyrics.
Most of these key elements of our work are assembled here on "Edifying Nonsense" in topic-based collections.
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