Читать книгу Let It Snow. Keeping Canada's Winter Sports Alive онлайн

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It’s a misconception of sorts that Canadians love to exploit in the manner of people who have lived so long with an ironic self-image they now believe it to be fact. Rick Mercer, a popular Canadian CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Company) comic, famously went to the United States to prey on unsuspecting Americans in a series of basic knowledge questions about Canada. Broadcast throughout Canada, the show Talking to Americans tickled many Canadian funny bones, as Americans unknowingly took Mercer’s questions to be legitimate. And many of the questions focused on Canada being a frozen tundra.

Ironically, a lot of the naïvete of Americans could be attributed to Canadians themselves, who export comedy oversimplifying Canada’s identity as a land mass of ice and snow. It’s a strange relationship, in which Canadians enjoy talking up the nastiness of Canadian winters, but then roll their eyes when the Americans take these claims at face value and repeat them as truisms. The story of the hapless American showing up at the border in July with skis attached to the top of his car and seeking directions to the snow fields is a Canadian urban myth that never fails to amuse despite the inability to actually identify such an occurrence.