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.

They Don't Mutiny Like They Used To

Just about every well known thing with "Hudson" in its name is likely named for the explorer Henry Hudson. Here's one exception:

But anyway. You probably learned about Henry Hudson during a social studies class that rattled off a bunch of European explorers, and if not for notable bodies of water such as the Hudson River and Hudson Bay, you probably wouldn't be able to tell Henry Hudson — a guy who knew a few things about the frozen lands near the North Pole — from other explorers with a penchant for fancy facial hair and fancier neck accoutrements, such as Sir Walter Raleigh.

 

They also have very pointy chins.

The little you probably remember about these explorer folks is, well, the stuff they explored. But for many of them, more interesting isn't how they lived, but how they died. In Sir Walter's case, he was imprisoned then beheaded, and my mother smoked Raleigh cigarettes for 20 years.

But Henry Hudson has all the other guys beat. His ship was stuck in ice in James Bay in Canada, forcing his crew to spend what was probably a winter more horrible than any of the winters I spent as a student at SUNY Buffalo. After the thaw, a large portion of the crew was looking forward to returning to their homes, but Henry said, "Hey, instead of going home, let's keep looking for that passage to Asia."

Take a look at the map below to where Hudson's ship was, and image how you'd react if you just spent the winter there and were then told you were going to Asia.

China's just around the corner!

Those who disagreed were like, screw that, so they did the reasonable thing: they set Hudson, his son, and his allies on a small boat before sailing home. Hudson and company were never seen again. The mutineers — those who made it back alive — were acquitted of murder.

But Henry Hudson, wherever he ended up, got the last laugh on those mutineers. No one outside of Wikipedia has ever heard of Abacuk Pricket, while Henry Hudson endures with noble landmarks like this:

Take THAT, Abacuk Pricket!

I'm asking you to send my wife to the North Pole, and I do this knowing that she's not the type of person to cause a mutiny. There are a lot of reasons I want to send her to the North Pole, but none of them want me to maroon her on a boat in the middle of Canada.

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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.