I'VE BEEN WATCHING CURLING

YES, INDEED IT'S TRUE.

ALL WEEKEND, I'VE BEEN WATCHING CURLING.

I SO have to get a life, you say...

But what kind of curling have I been watching? It could be this kind...

But it's not.

***

It could be this kind...

Not that kind either, although I should probably be doing both those kinds of curls. My hair has been losing its curl with all this cold weather and my body tone has flown south for the winter.

No, it's the middle of winter, and up here in the Great White North, we play a game called curling. The Scots say they invented it but there's no doubt, it IS our game.

We call it the Roaring Game.

Yes, it is a lot like bowling on ice or shuffleboard or even darts, on ice. Essentially, I've been watching grown men throw 40-pound chunks of granites down thin sheets of ice all weekend.

The object is to get as many of those chunks of granites -- called rocks, or stones -- as close as you can to a concentric circle painted on either end of that sheet of ice.
Nobody's better at it on the planet than we are, although it's safe to say most people on the planet don't even know it exists, likely, or at the very least know little about it.

In fact, Canada's men's team won the gold medal at the 2006 Olympics in Turin, Italy. That's them to the right. They're from Newfoundland.

America's Peter Fenson, from nearby Bemidji, Minn., won the bronze medal.










Nobody in Canada is better at curling than we in the province of Manitoba are. We can make this boast because no province has won more men's championships than we have in Canada.

And right now, this weekend, the provincial men's curling championship is being held in a place called Dauphin, about three hours from here.

The winner, to be decided Sunday, will play in the national championship in Alberta later this month.

The winner of that title will play in the world championship in April against Sweden, Norway, Scotland, the U.S., Japan, Russia and other countries that have taken up the game.

I curled as a teenager and we won the fourth tier of the provincial high school championships.

I covered curling when it was a demonstration sport at the 1988 Winter Olympics in Calgary. I've covered national and world curling championships, both men's and women's.

So I have an interest...and so does a whole country.

I wonder if the rest of the world thinks we've got rocks for brains...

Cars with names like...

I'M THINKING ABOUT BUYING A NEW CAR.

But this raises far more than the obvious questions.

My 1996 Ford Contour appears to be nearing the end of its productive life cycle, having apparently succumbed to -45C windchills and other vagaries of a Canadian winter, now in its 11th year.

It still functions. And I'm prepared to spend quite a bit of money to fix it up so I can hand it over to my 18-year-old daughter, who would gladly take a vehicle I think can survive several more years.

But beyond the mechanics of a vehicle, I have to think about my precious identity and ego. Do I want to be an Explorer, he of the great outdoors and associated with all that name suggests, even though most of the time I'm Mr. Urbanite?

Do I want to be In My Ellement, as two of my fellow bloggers have in recent weeks? The car companies want us to believe we are what we drive. That our vehicles give us or at least reflect who we are.

So should I become a Viper or a Mustang or a Ram, or should I just become a Grand Caravan or something practical or boring? Am I a Model T Ford?

Should I just let it all hang out by buying a Hummer and try to be Mr. Macho (or Thomas the Tank Engine) or should I try to be Mr. Sporty Sexy Guy with a new MG convertible (RIGHT!!!!)

Here are some of the latest models and their names, at least on one website, listing vehicles by best names, most lame names and newest, weirdest names...personally, I like The Naked. What's the name of YOUR car?

And do you feel like it's you?

FATHERS BE GOOD TO YOUR DAUGHTERS

THIS GUY IS COMING TO MY TOWN...

He's John Mayer. I wanted to post some of his songs from YouTube below, but new Blogger won't let it happen.

I've instead posted one of his videos to the right.

He's full of soul and talent and song-writing ability and I AM going to the concert on April 26 because the guy is amazing.

I asked Homo Escapeons if he and his wife might be interested in going. "John Mayer can kiss my ass," he said.

I asked the music critic at the newspaper where I work about Mayer, and he said "He's great, but you'll be surrounded by women. They all love him."

Well, I guess he's a good-looking guy. But I'm going to go to listen to his music.

I don't want to go with my mother or my daughter, as much as one of his most famous songs is about them and fathers.

So I know there's still more than two months to go. That should be enough time for me to find a date -- as long as she's not spending the whole night cooing over him...

THE BEAUTY AND BEAST OF MULTICULTURALISM

ONE THING I LOVE ABOUT BEING CANADIAN IS OUR HERITAGE AS A PLACE OF MANY PEOPLES, MANY CULTURES, MANY COLOURS.

This isn't a whole lot different from America, Great Britain, Germany or any number of countries that have welcomed other people to their lands with open arms.

It gives us variety. It gives us spice, in more ways than one. It gives our lives value and diversity and opens up our hearts and minds to other ways of living, much as blogging does.

But as we invite and allow more people from India, Korea, Chile, the Phillipines, Indonesia, African nations and those from the Middle East to live within our shores, we're screwing up.

We should consider ourselves honoured and fortunate that people from other parts of the world want to move here and live here, even despite our cold climate, for so many reasons.

We have far more land -- beautiful, mostly untouched land -- than we need, and we can share that. We have resources coming out of our ying-yangs. We are, for the most part, accepting of other ways of life.

Here in Winnipeg, we celebrate something called Folklorama every summer where the different cultural communities show us how they dance, how they eat, how they dress, how they celebrate living.

They invite us to do that with them. And we do. Some of my kids' best friends are from China, from Korea, from India, Pakistan, the Middle East. It's globalization in its most pure, ideal form.

Over time, it will break down the stupid barriers we have between us now.

But it has gone wrong in some ways. We're inviting people here to share our vast wealth, but we're not giving them the basics to help them do that. We're not helping them enough to integrate.

I volunteered as an English language tutor for more than a year at a place called the International Centre, a one-stop resource for new immigrants to Winnipeg from other countries.

Initially, I wanted to help out an individual or family that had been displaced from their home country by war, by persecution, by death threats, something like that.

Instead, the demand is so great for language tutors that the centre operates on a first-come, first-served basis. There's a shortage of tutors. What more could a new immigrant need than to be able to communicate in his new country?

I was handed the next name on the list: a family from South Korea. The gentleman's name is Jung Soek. He moved here with his wife and two young sons (now three young sons) and he could barely speak English.

Over that next year or so, I met with Jung Soek once a week at a local shopping mall that I could hit on my way home from work. We of course worked on learning English, but more importantly, we became friends.

We talked about how his Canadian/Korean employer gave him little power and insisted he not speak English during lunch breaks. We talked about what to say and how to say it to his banker, his landlord, etc.

I became his link to Canada. Not just his literal translator but his cultural translator too...what does this mean, that mean? How do I deal with this or with that?

I learned a lot about Korean culture and he learned a lot about Canadian ways of living, and the two don't naturally intersect. I no longer tutor him, but he still calls me and wants to be my friend.

And all of this is to say that in Canada, we invite people like Jung Soek and his family into our country, but we don't give them what they need to assimilate and to mix a whole lifetime of who they are with who we are.

It's not that we don't have good intentions, it's that we don't set aside enough money for the resources and people we need to help honourable immigrants like Jung Soek become comfortable, beginning with language.

I hope that changes over time.