17

How I Met Your Mother has 17 professional, fulltime staff writers. Seriously, 17. I can't stop thinking about it, the number 17 keeps repeating in my head. It's the most depressing statistic I've ever heard. I'm sure many of you wouldn't characterize me as a particularly optimistic person, but I'm pretty sure before hearing about HIMYM I would have said that if you assigned 17 intelligent, sane people to solve any problem or produce any one thing on a full-time basis, that they could have a serious impact on the world. Seventeen people assigned to write my dissertation (they could have done it in a couple weeks!); seventeen people assigned to plan traffic flow in the Glebe (1 week?); seventeen people assigned to the question of nuclear fission or nuclear waste or even how to recycle better. I'm still in shock.

After weeks of calculation and consideration, I feel confident in delivering to you, faithful reader, this important information about Canada:

1) Within an error margin of +/-3%, 37% of my students look almost exactly like this:


2) Another 22% look like this:


If I had the power, I would mandate DNA tests to see if, in fact, 59% of Canadians are somehow related to n8.

3) Most people here are named Dave. Sometimes I call Monty, "Dave," but he doesn't like it.

4) The anchorperson who *might* replace Lloyd Robertson on The National (b/c Lloyd is somewhere between 65 and 125 years of age) is named Lisa LaFlamme. In a different country, that would be a stripper's name. Okay, it's probably a stripper's name in Canada, too.

5) Canadians *love* extremely disturbing public service announcements and we lead the world in producing them. The high quality of our PSAs sit in stark contrast to almost every other Canadian-produced movie or TV show which - with very few exceptions - suck ass. This is puzzling because Canadian actors, when they are acting in Hollywood productions, are usually very good (Rachel McAdams, Ryan Gosling, Pacey from Dawson's Crack, Sandra Oh) and Canada, when it's masquerading as L.A. or New York or the planet Caprica, looks like a land of gravitas. And yet Canadian-produced shows have been hit with the you-can't-believe-this-because-it-looks-like-an-after-school-special stick like you wouldn't believe. Why?

A public service announcement runs every other commercial break. Here are two of my favorites, both of which are traumatizing and will take you a minimum of 10 minutes to recover from (you were warned!):

Exhibit A:


Exhibit B:
*spoiler alert! This will fuck you up! seriously, for realz, seriously!!!*



If only we could channel some of our PSA-making talents into normal programming! I don't even think it would take a writing staff of 17 to accomplish. And I think we could reach higher than HIMYM.