At Crooked Timber, Ingrid Robeyns has a teaser-post up announcing that she will write a longer post about the political crisis in Belgium. She mentions that most non-Belgians (or perhaps, most non-Flemish) have trouble understanding why language should be such a big deal. Canada is dutifully mentioned in the ensuing comments, and commenter Alison adds this summary of our national skills in consistency:

Re Canada:

In Quebec, even commercial signs must be in French. Outside of Quebec, commercial signs are in the language of the customers.

Document, services and signs tend to be in the languages mandated by the level of government responsible for them. The airport in Toronto is signed bilingually because of its federal connection. The calendar for municipal garbage pickup is available in many, many languages, because Torontonians speak hundreds of them, and the government wants people to put out the right sort on the right day. Provincial laws are bilingual in Ontario, but most public servants are not. The courts have the capacity to operate in French, but it is infrequent except where there is a high density of Francophones.

Clear? Our weather is in Celsius and our ovens are in Fahrenheit. Our buildings are in imperial and our roads are in metric. Our cheese is advertised in pounds, but the shelf signs are normalized for comparison in grams.

We are bilingual and multicultural. Aboriginal people belong to First Nations, but are not included in the Constitution as a founding people, like the British and French. Quebecers tend to ignore the rest of us, but most of our prime ministers (and all of the best ones) have been from Quebec.

There will be a quiz later.

It’s another video roundup.

Hipster Olympics:

This could have been a hollow concept but they flesh it out pretty well. From the scorn round: “If they only knew he was a 911 hero.” “They do.” From Poykpac, but don’t bother going to their website. It belongs to the increasingly common brand of website that has no content other than links to myspace profiles and youtube tag queries. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Outing the SQ at Montebello:

As if the Sûreté du Québec needed to build it’s profile as cynical any-means-necessary thugs, here’s some fun footage of disguised officers getting called out as agent provocateurs by union leaders at the Montebello protest. By fun I mean kind of depressing, in the same way that most aggressive cop:protester or peaceful protester:civil disobedience protester interactions are usually depressing. But it probably advances the cause, as most of these things eventually seem to do.

The SQ had a nasty rep pre Oka, and it hasn’t gotten much better since. I’m guessing the only thing they’ll learn from this is not to send their undercover types in wearing police boots (which they could have learned by watching Serpico anyway). Or perhaps the supreme court will insist they continue to wear their boots to protests as a clever scheme to balance the rights of protesters and security.

West/Galifianakis:

And if you haven’t seen the Zack Galifianakis/Will Oldham video for Kanye West’s Can’t Tell Me Nothin you best be watching that now son. You’re gonna wash out at the hipster olympics ifn you don’t and it truly ranks as one of the year’s sublime moments of hilarity. It’s also damn pretty, makes me nostalgic for grey county. I was impressed West would release it as an official video until I found out it was the alternate official video, but I’m still impressed. And if you like that, or if you don’t, Galifianakis has plenty of alternate comedy gold for youtubing. For instance:

After years of near-extinction, the whacky Rhino party is back

The two groups say they were unaware of one another’s initiatives, as befitting a “disorganized and anarchic” movement, but they plan to meet in a Montreal bar tomorrow to discuss a merger.

I for one welcome our new rhino overlords.

“It’s a de facto economic means test that discriminates against the poor,” said Mr. Salmi, a Montreal resident who has sought office on nine previous occasions, several of them in British Columbia. (Mr. Salmi has legally changed his name to Sa Tan, so his challenge in Federal Court reads Sa Tan against Her Majesty The Queen.)