Northerners Laugh, Not Howl

April Fool, a Canadian love
Rahman Mohamed

The laugh.  No historian has confirmed but it’s likely our human ancestors had a sense of humour, the ones who invented paper in China around 500 BCE but didn’t think of toilet paper for another 2300 years, 1857 CE.  It’s been reported that Chimpanzees, the ancestors of our ancestors, have been observed laughing.  If they can laugh at each other for dropping a banana it’s likely our ancestors laughed at each other for burning themselves while cooking a bunny or stubbing toes on the beta wheel.

It’s widely known many consider that “laughter is the best medicine”.  What many don’t know: Canadians are not just polite, they’re funny.  (It’s true.  They’re not always smiling at you to be polite.  In the future it might be smiling because they’re high.)

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Discrimination: Alive in 21st Century North America

More than ever before
Rahman Mohamed
Updated 5 March 2017

Prejudice: judgement based on a single aspect; considering someone to act and behave in a certain way because of a certain quality. Discrimination: dividing a group of people into multiple groups using prejudice.  Ableism: creating an us and them using disability, a prejudgement of persons with disability second-class to “normal” people or people without a visible disability is a relatively new form of discrimination.  North America has battled discrimination since the landing of the Europeans.  Aboriginals, Indigenous persons, Inuit, and others were classified as second-class.  Although it as made strong gains in attempts to silence discrimination it is still alive in North America, both within society and among social leaders in Canada and United States. Continue reading

Friday the 13th

Good or bad?  The Academics decide
Rahman Mohamed

According to the Gregorian calendar, used internationally, the 13th day of two months falls on a Friday.  2017: January, Friday the 13th and October, Friday the 13th.  Legend has it that Friday the 13th is considered unlucky.  The fact: with varying results, Friday the 13th has has been proven to be both lucky and unlucky in studies by academics (aka people who are just as sane as you or I but “just a bit smarter”). Continue reading