Shower Curtains

Eight percent of Canadians will experience major depression at some time in their lives, according to the Public Health Agency of Canada. These people are nuts! If I had to dig my car out of a snow bank the size of a small house at least twice a week during winter I would be depressed all my life. It appears that 92 percent of Canadians go about digging with a cheerful attitude. That thought makes me further depressed. The true figure is probably closer to 25% but most people surveyed were probably too depressed to speak.

I traveled to Canada one summer when I thought it was safe. For crying out loud, it was 60 degrees Fahrenheit at 1pm in August! Closer to home, residents of Seattle, Washington are said to be the most depressed people in this country, and only because it rains there all the time. That’s the sort of thing that causes you to wonder about the British. Not only does it rain, but also there are too many people in a small space in Britain. The British though, are not as dumb as you think. At least they are smart enough to stay put rather than migrating to spacious surroundings in Canada.

But you may as well get used to the idea of shoveling ducky as we’ll be running out of oil sometime soon and I hear the Canadians have a pile of it, more than they can possibly use, all 32 million of them. They have a substance called tar sands, from which, if you press hard enough, you can squeeze a substantial amount of oil. There is so much tar sand deposits that Canada potentially has the world’s largest deposits of oil. Combine that with our potential for the world’s largest consumption of anything and you have a match made in heaven.

Sitting around gazing at the national navel is not going to cut it in these times of perilously scarce oil. It’s now become standard thinking in the industry that oil supplies will only continue to get tighter as more and more Chinese and Indians discover that in-dash navigation systems are drawing more power than their rickshaws and scooters can produce. The middle class in both countries are moving into cars at an exponential rate and their appetite for fossil fuels is growing alarmingly. I would suggest we act fast before the Chinese make any more money selling us shower curtains and decide to buy Canada.

The entrepreneurial Indians, not to be outdone, may just make a bid for Alaska as we hardly seem to have much use for it. After all, only six hundred thousand Americans live in Alaska, or put another way, that’s the number of spectators at a village cricket match in Uttar Pradesh state on a Saturday morning.

If the Chinese move into Canada and start shoveling snow en masse we could be in for a torrid time. Last time I checked, 25 percent of 1.2 billion worked out to 300 million. Do you have any idea into what kind of brouhaha that many depressed people could get themselves? And lest not even think about their close proximity to Washington state, home of some of the best marijuana grown anywhere.