Frazz by Jef Mallett for October 12, 2018

Canada geese in Toronto are Canadian geese. Also, it’s officially Branta canadensis; anything else are just common names, and can be whatever, so long as everyone understands what’s being discussed.

Should they honk before you step in their doot?

https://pics.me.me/the-reason-canadians-are-so-nice-is-easily-explained-once-27516874.png

We get them here in AZ they come to our lake walk on the sidewalk and leave a big mess you have to watch where you walk

Could be worse. You should see where they pooped in ‘Kevin & Kell’ yesterday…

The devil is in the details, but I get the feeling she thinks it’s fowl play.

Damn Canadians, first they burn the White House, now they pollute our sidewalks.

Canada/Canadian, big whoop. Who declared that, the Queen of Canada? (Can some real Canadian tell me if you are citizens or subjects? That’s a bigger difference than about what to call those damned geese.)

Go Habs!

But aren’t you glad that they only eliminate while on the ground?

Now you understand the old saying “Loose As A Goose.”

THANK you, Jef!

A guy… Not a country…

When I lived in Michigan we just whacked him in the head with an ore

I was going to say, they look a bit like nene, but it’s a long flight from Hawaii.

Goose “doots” are bigger than my cat’s.

VOY, eh?

The Habs? Really? The HABs?!?

Around here, they are Commuter Geese. They don’t migrate. They fly from golf course to golf course.

We lived on a lake in Michigan, not far from Jef’s previous home. My kids had two names for the offerings: “gosh” and “geces.”

Says the janitor wearing a Montreal hockey team shirt under his coveralls.[nice inside joke!]

Allow me to be the humble Canadian who says, “Thank you!”

Frazz12 hrs ·

You know you’re on to something when, if America wants to make you the butt of a joke, the joke is that you’re so gosh darn polite, deferential and just plain nice. That’s the kind of joke I want to be the butt of, but that role went to Canada.

And I have to say it was well cast, at least from my perspective. To be fair, my perspective is skewed. Even though I live right next door to Canada, it’s still on the other side of an international border that can be a pain to cross. So if I meet a Canadian, it’s not so likely to be totally random. It’s likely in the context of an event or something that’s bringing already like-minded, similar people together. So chances are we’re already 90% friends before we even meet.

I know. If something seems too good to be true, maybe it is. And Canada does send us wave after wave of prodigiously poop-producing geese. And a petroleum company whose pipelines have already royally messed up the Kalamazoo river, and whose pipeline under my beloved Straits of Mackinac makes me a little bit nervous in the sense that a flock of Canada geese can make a waterfront a little bit unsanitary.

But that’s about as negative as I can get. If you were expecting an extended rant about our royal neighbors, well, at the risk of sounding like those neighbors: Sorry.

Every summer, Canadians perform a ritual channeling all of their hate, anger, and bad manners into the geese, then send them south.

Nice Habs jersey

This is a bit far afield for a comic on geese, but some of the comments above have contrasted the US and Canada, including as regards the metric system,

Wikipedia has one of its typically thorough articles on US metrification: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States

Ironically, the system used by most Americans is generally called the Imperial system, after imperial England. Also ironically, the US was one of the first countries to adopt a decimal currency (1792), rejecting the British system (pounds, shillings, pence, farthings), but continues to resist a decimal system of weights and measures.

The 13 original colonies used a mix of systems, including Dutch and English. Although the US Constitution allowed the federal government to establish a uniform system, it did not do so until 1832. [Jefferson wanted to adopt the metric system in 1793 but he was thwarted when a ship carrying metric artifacts from France was blown off course in a storm and captured by pirates,]

From then until now the metric system has slowly crept into many aspects of American life, including trade, commerce and science, but all attempts to force a conversion have failed.

There are many anecdotes relating to system confusion, like air planes having too little fuel for an intended flight. According to wikipedia, “The use of two different unit systems caused the loss of the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999. NASA specified metric units in the contract. NASA and other organizations applied metric units in their work, but one subcontractor, Lockheed Martin, provided software that calculated and reported thruster performance data to the team in pound-force-seconds, rather than the expected newton-seconds.”

Honk, eh?

I worked in a nursing home that was across from a pond. Every afternoon ALL the ducks and geese would come across the street… totally doot up our front walk and porch… then go back to the pond!