What's Nunavut With You?

Here's what I know about Canada: it has territories, which are like our states only they're called territories, not states. The ones that border our northern border are all around the same height. Above that is an enormous, seemingly unpopulated land mass called "The Northwest Territories," which were apparently so important that no one ever gave them a proper name.

Because I don't follow any news out of Canada except when the Yankees are playing the Blue Jays, I had no idea that these Northwest Territories — which is actually one territory, even though it's plural (that's Canada for you, I suppose) — were split into two territories in 1999.

One territory is still called Northwest Territories (plural), but the other, which runs closest to the North Pole, is called Nunavut.

Okay, you're probably thinking, other than finding an excuse to blog in order to convince me to send your wife to the North Pole, why should I give a Molson Golden about this stretch of Canada?

Well, friend, here's why:

That is the Coat of Arms of Nunavut, and it is the most-badass thing I've seen in a long time. You've got a reindeer and a fucking narwhal holding some sort of crazy shield that has a bowl of chili and a smushed sword of some sort, and on top of the shield is an igloo with a crown and a porch light. Beneath the reindeer and the narwhal — which are both standing up, mind you — there's the most awesome-looking language this side of Klingon.

Clearly, they consulted the territory's most imaginative 12-year-old to create this thing. I want to wear a T-shirt with this coat of arms just to see how long people will stare at it to try to figure out what the hell is going on.

(The language is Inuktitut, the language of the Inuit, by the way. Stop by the official website of the government of Nunavut to download some Inuit fonts, and use them in your business correspondence!)

And the awesomeness doesn't stop there. Who wouldn't want to have this license plate attached to their SUV:

Yes. It's shaped like a polar bear.

Here's the flag:

Not quite as badass. It turns out that that image is not a mashed-up sword or a snowman with a giant sombrero, but an inukshuk, a kind of Inuit marker. Still, it's actually a controversial flag in the eyes of flag-watchers, according to the Wikipedia page:

"Following its adoption, the flag has been criticized for vexillological reasons. Specifically, it has been criticized for having too many colours, the placement of the star at the end of the flag, the use of gold and white as the background field, and the use of a black outline around the inukshuk."

Can you just taste the controversy?

Anyway, Nunavut is home to the northernmost permanently inhabited place in the world, appropriately called Alert, a mere 508 miles from the North Pole. "Permanently inhabited" means five people, according to the 2006 census, not counting the transients who pop in and out of Alert throughout the year to man the weather station and other government facilities.

If you send my wife to the North Pole, which you should, she won't be going through Alert; the trip will send her first to Norway or Lapland or someplace like that. But if she doesn't win that trip to the North Pole, I can always suggest she try to increase the population of that five-person city of Alert by 20 percent.

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If this convinces you that you should send my wife to the North Pole, please click this text which is in fact a link that will take you to her essay so you can vote for her so she'll have a chance to go to the North Pole. Thank you.