Recently, I had occasion to take a road trip out to Hairy Hill, Alberta. I, of course, know exactly how to fit in in any small town in Alberta; so I thought I would share some tips with all of The Redneck’s patrons. The majority of these tips should, most likely, serve you well in all small towns anywhere in North America.
The first thing you want to do is to make sure you’re decked out in your finest rockabilly clothing. It’s also a good idea to act very touristy. For example, ask everybody for directions to main street, or ask how to get to the hairy hill (even if you’re not in Hairy Hill at the time).
One thing you can be assured of; any community in Alberta that is officially village sized or larger, there is always a bar of some sort (often times attached to a hotel where no one ever actually stays). I recommend you go in, order a bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion, 1959 and then start making redneck jokes. This is guaranteed to make the regulars in the bar stand up and “take notice” of you.
If you’re there with friends you could start playing fun drinking games. Every time you hear someone say “I reckon”, or talk about their tractor or if you see a guy with a belt buckle bigger than his wife’s purse; you have to take a drink. But if anyone actually says he or she has to “go home and slop the hogs“, you have to slam your entire drink.
In no time at all you will have a crowd of people around your table who will be clamoring to introduce themselves to you. You will be repeatedly asked if you would like to either “step outside” or possibly even “to dance”. I heartily recommend that you accept all of these offers. You will come out of the experience with memories that will last for a lifetime (assuming the brain damage isn’t too severe).
Of course you should be aware that travel to small towns is not recommended right now due to an outbreak of the H2N3 Virus; more commonly known as the Weasel Flu. Symptoms of this flu include extreme lethargy: most people who come down with it just sit on the couch watching television and eating cold cereal all day long. They also have problems speaking, quite frequently using improper grammar and sentence structure (I.e. they may say things like, “I eated all my cereal.” or they may just stick out their tongues and make a wordless noise). However, if you ensure that you wear a surgical mask over your mouth and nose at all times, it will filter out 98.9% of the virus.
So a little while ago my Aunt Pollie was telling me that her law firm has just been swamped with land deals recently. It seems that a vast number of people are wanting to move out to Saskatchewan. Really, who cam blame them; the vast stretches of land that are utterly unobstructed by any sort of features like hills or trees (it’s a well known Canadian fact that all of Saskatchewan’s trees long ago migrated to British Columbia). That sort of thing is really appealing to anyone who has recently undergone elective brain surgery.
There are a number of Saskatchewanians who believe that their province is starting to become the new Alberta. The oil and gas industry is starting to take off, land is abundant and people are starting to want to go there and get a piece of the pie. However, if Saskatchewan does become the new Alberta they had best get ready for an influx of foreigners who can barely speak the English language. Yeah, pretty soon there won’t be anybody left in Newfoundland at all. Next they’ll have to designate some podunk little town as New Fort MacMurray. Maybe North Battleford can be their Newfie Reserve. Lard T’underin’!
Just to assist any of our southern neighbours who may not be familiar with the subtleties of Canadian culture, perhaps this will help. Alberta is in many ways similar to Texas, Newfoundland would be our New Jersey, the closest thing to Saskatchewan might be Nebraska which probably makes Nunavut the equivalent to Delaware.
If you saw my other post on HHO hydrogen generators, you know we like to build our own homemade fuel cells. This stuff isn’t rocket surgery, folks. Even us rural Alberta rednecks can make a functioning HHO hydrogen generator from common hardware store items. Having said that, there is the potential to make a dangerous explosive device by accident. In fact, we did make an explosion accidentally. It happened in Aron’s house, on the kitchen table. The generator we built was working great, until it exploded and blew both ends off the housing. Fortunately, nobody was hurt and only the generator was damaged.
What we think happened was that a loose connection inside the unit made a spark, which ignited the hydrogen. Since then, we have modified our design to contain no connections of any kind inside. The anodes are one solid piece of material from the outside all the way to the end inside.
You can find lots of links to hydrogen generators,where you can get plans for them and even finished units at HHO Hydrogen Fuel Cell Generators. I have also started building a new website to put all of our HHO hydrogen exploits.
You can find it here: Do It Yourself Hydrogen HHO Generators