RCMP

It’s Not a Dudley DoRight Experience


The Mounties came to tame our noisy low-rent neighbors last weekend. My husband wrote about the incident in more detail on his blog, but the short version is that our next door neighbor is a Guitar Hero junkie who likes to fire up around ten or eleven at night probably after he is finished watching the hockey games or CBC’s line-up. I guess it could be worse. He could be one of those who then switches over to the soft porn shows on the Montreal or Toronto stations (yes, Canadians are very European after hours). I guess we should be grateful for a loud and lousy air guitarist neighbor instead of a quiet pervert, right? 

Anyway, Rob called the RCMP, which is Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Mounties to the rest of the world. One of our loyal readers, Girl, made the comment saying, “Man, I want to live in Canada, just so I can call the Mounties on noisy neighbors! The Mounties!” And I can understand why she would. I am an American too, and my only experience with the Mounties was the cartoon Dudley DoRight.

 He was in the Rocky and Bullwinkle line up on Saturday mornings. Just a take off of the silent film area kind of like Penelope Pitstop. There was a villian, Snidely Whiplash and a love interest, Nell, who creepily in retrospect seemed to have a thing for Dudley’s horse, Horse. Dudley wore the old time traditional outfit of the Mounted Police, the jodpurs with the red jacket and the cool looking hat and riding boots. I thought it was a very smart outfit, and I am apparently not alone in my female admiration for it. Rob’s father was a Mountie back in the 1950’s and wore the uniform when he was standing guard duty at the Parliament building in Ottawa. He told tales of American girls who would proposition him while he was on duty. Many of them wanted to take him off into the trees and have their way with a “man in a Mountie uniform”, but he would keep them waiting until he got off duty (which if you knew the tales of Rob’s dad that I knew you’d be marveling at his self-restraint). I don’t know if he wore the uniform to met any of these girls, but American girls, in late father-in-law’s opinion, were pretty forward as my husband would more delicately put it.

The RCMP of today do not wear the garb of old. They aren’t mounted anymore either unless it is for a parade or other ceremonial duty. They are fairly typical of law enforcement officers anywhere, in my opinion. I have had only one encounter myself when I went to get my fingerprints taken for my immigration application. It wasn’t a Dudley DoRight experience.

Tasers are the New Tupperware


Yesterday’s Globe and Mail featured an article in its Life section on what it dubs “security moms” in the United States holding taser parties. At these festive suburban gatherings, women meet to try out and possibly purchase tasers (available in four designer colours). The company responsible for this scene out of a SNL skit is Taser International which began marketing its C2 model this last summer for a mere $299 and available in say, metallic pink or electric blue. Currently these parties are only being held in Arizona but should be available in all 36 states where tasers are legal for citizen purchase by the end of 2008. Wow. I don’t know about anyone else but I feel less safe already. Just when I thought that British Columbian RCMP were the only ones to be wary of receiving a possibly fatal dose of electric shock from, I now need to avoid the well-heeled women of Arizona.

There are have three deaths by taser in the last month here in Canada, all at the hands of the police, and Amnesty International claims that about 200 people have died in the United States since 2001 by taser, which is what I am sure prompted this little article. That and, of course, the somewhat disdainful attitude many Canadians have towards Americans and are inane ways of dealing with issues like personal safety (think guns). Personally the whole taser thing scares me more than a little. People who are most at risk from dying when tased are those with unidentified heart trouble or irregular heartbeats (arrhythmias) which I happen to have. It’s harmless. Nothing I need worry about unless I am perhaps tasered, which is unlikely but the Polish man who died at a B.C. airport after being tasered was the victim of an unlikely scenario too.

It’s interesting to me to read about my homeland through the filter of another country’s cultural mindset. Canadians are not the mild-mannered U.S. wannabe’s that our culture makes them out to be. They are more like Europeans, in that they really think there is nothing about the lower 49 worth emulating save perhaps our mindless consumerism (which they don’t get at all judging from what I have seen – their malls actually close on weekend days by five or six o’clock).

Tupperware giving way to the Taser Lady is something that should disturb us all regardless.