I am reupping this annual missive to the Canadian May Long weekend for several reasons. One – I am tired and need to be a reposter for a bit but I know you all like this annual reminder. Two – I am nowhere near the office. If you must know, I am in the thriving metropolis of Beaver Utah, a place my business partner was at no less than a week ago. Word to the wise – do what I did – the EAST side of the highway is way better. Third, I am a creature of habit. I can’t not blog. Oh, why am I here? Repatriating a car after a quick and wonderful getaway with my (much) better half. And no, she declined the three day, 2200 kilometre return trip.
May Long. The best weekend of the year for us Canadians. Any number of reasons. Primarily it is the first long weekend of the year where we aren’t typically house bound. Secondly, because of history.
What history you ask? Well let me edumacate you.
We used to call it Victoria Day in honour of the birthday of Queen Victoria who ruled the Commonwealth for what, 250 years prior to Queen Elizabeth the Second and just after the 1500 year reign of Queen Elizabeth the First. I’m sure there was someone else in there, I seem to recall a few Georges, maybe Charles the Waiter. But I digress. Victoria Day. She was important.
Except in Quebec, where antipathy to the monarchy has always necessitated a need to celebrate a different day so it became rebranded there as Dollard Day (not to be confused with Dollar Days at Zellers, a defunct department store which has now been reborn as a hip and retro-styled nouveau Dollar Store, complete with 1950s style cafeterias serving mashed potatoes and ham), a celebration created by Lionel Groulx in the early 20th century to honour a dude named Adam Dollard Des Ormeaux, a French settler and explorer who ambushed and massacred the Iroquois just west of Ville Marie, which ultimately became Montreal. Oh, and he died in the battle.
Recognizing that celebrating this “martyr” was not consistent with, well, sensitivity to First Nations, the Quebec Government rebranded it as the much less nationalistic and provocatively named Fête nationale des Patriotes or National Patriot’s Day, celebrated exclusively in the “nation” of Quebec. While the “patriots” they celebrate are the precursors to the constitutionalists who collectively sought to bring about freedom from British Imperial rule, the true champion is Louis-Joseph Papineau who ultimately led an armed rebellion in 1837/8 (ironically the first year of the reign of, you guessed it – Queen Victoria). So as always, it is about Victoria.
And yes, everyone in this weird story is a Metro station or neighbourhood in Montreal, even Victoria.
At any rate, I digress. Here in the world at large, our collective memories have faded and as political erectness has become the flavour of the day, the whole thing morphed into “The May Long Weekend” and “the weekend after all Canadian teams have been eliminated from the Stanley Cup playoffs” before eventually simply being branded as “May Long” which of course is Canadian shorthand for busting out the grill, going camping, planting flowers and gardening, leaving work early and otherwise whiling away the days on a patio/deck/whatever enjoying the first warm and sunny weekend of the transition to summer. We even have a beer themed nickname – May Two-four, which is ironic since this year, it is really May 24, even though the actual day is May 20, 2024. It’s all so confusing.
Regardless, I am racing home because I can feel the onset of summer, can’t you? I mean it’s not like the province isn’t at this very moment alternately on fire and flooding while in a drought! At least it’s not snowing. Wait, that might actually be better. And also typically happens. I’m away, my family says it may as well be snowing.
Yeah, that’s how it works here in Calgary. The odds of having garbage weather on this particular weekend are extraordinarily high. So much so that people count on it. In fact, we laugh uproariously at those poor suckers from Toronto and Vancouver who have moved to Calgary in search of affordable houses and have gotten fooled by the last few weekend’s incredible weather and planted annuals that will more than likely die a frosty death.
To be honest, the weather for this particular Canadian weekend is in fact so predictably unpredictable that you could probably base a Cryptocurrency on it.
In fact, maybe I will.
And I will name it Vicpatriotcoin. In honour of Queen Victoria.
This is all timely and topical (and an annual lazy tradition on a day when I should by all rights be starting a four day weekend), in particular with the US teetering on the verge of a self-inflicted sovereign default because of an arcane law that requires Congress to raise the cap on sovereign debt every once in a while to pay for tax breaks to rich people and mega-corporations – oh, and government programs too.
For this reason, I have done the work to find all the new and trendy cryptocurrencies/altcoins/shitcoins that will accompany the aforementioned Vicpatriotcoin and help you avoid the evisceration of your life savings that relying on Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy to avoid disaster will cause. Or maybe investing in the coins will destroy your life savings. That’s a risk you take with fake wannabe money.
As always, all of these coins are available for trading on Stormont’s exclusive new Crypto-trading platform “gimmeyourmoneydummy.net”. Deposits are currently being accepted, but we ask that you send them in cash, preferably in a discreet manila envelope.
Vicpatriotcoin
Deriving its name from a famous Canadian holiday weekend with predictably unpredictable weather, this coin provides users with the ability to transact across a dedicated blockchain network. As a uniquely Canadian coin, there is a limited amount of coin available, but this crypto isn’t obtained by mining as most coins are, rather the code for the coin is written under the cap of every second beer produced in Canada in the three weeks leading up to May Long. It is expected that the warmer the weather or the more panicked Leafs fans become, the more beer will be consumed and the more coins will be uncovered. It is entirely possible that the entire float of this currency will be in circulation by Monday.
EggCoin
First minted at the end of 2022, this stablecoin derives its value from the, at the time, scarce food product. Not to be confused with the weird ChickenCoin that was all the rage a few years ago, this coin had a spectacular run at the start as the value of the assets supporting it (eggs) surged as bird flu ravaged the producer market and people started panic buying eggs and getting into fistfights at Costcos. Unfortunately, the market seems to have recovered and egg prices are currently collapsing, taking the value of the coin with it. There remains some hope however as the US contemplates copying the Canadian system of egg quotas in order to hold prices artificially high, which seems like a good plan, with inflation still out of control and all.
Gascoin
Gascoin is newly issued coin that seeks to trade off the scarcity of gasoline in various markets in the United States. Using Minecraft as a way to unlock these coins, users enter a secure virtual world through a portal and are required to mine for and pursue a group of highly elusive villagers, creepers and endermen. Each of these “mobs” will be carrying a garbage bag which may or may not contain gasoline. When they corner a mob with a bag, they have to use redstone blow up the bag. If it contains gasoline, it will have a larger explosion which will unlock a coin and code that the user can then save to digital wallet. Once 100 coins are collected they become tradeable on the exchange. The amount of Gascoin available is as yet unknown so you probably have to play the game forever.
Crudecoin
Strangely not based on oil prices, the Crudecoin derives its value solely on the basis of how ridiculous my blog can be on any given Friday. As newly issued coin (just today), Crudecoin will have the dubious honour of being priced to perfection on issue. I don’t see how I can top this one, so I suggest that if you are going to short any of these products, this is the one. If anyone is interested, I can also do this as an NFT, so you will have your very own personalized version of the blog.
DaniCoin
This one is relatively straightforward. To unlock these coins, investors are required to mine the internet to uncover any one of the many bizarre and questionable utterances from the current Premier of Alberta – Danielle Smith. Where once it was felt that there had only been a fixed number of coins available, it appears that with some special bending of time and space that the supply of coins may in fact be infinite, which is at once both terrifying and strangely awesome.
NenshiCoin
Much like the Danicoin, this coin also derives its value from the utterances of what many seem to think will be Dani’s foil in the next election. None other than Naheed Nenshi, Calgary’s purple mayor, who is running for the NDP leadership. These coins become unlocked every time the UCP digs up and shares any statement made by Nenshi while he was mayor that positions him as either a pragmatic centrist or union-busting thug.. Buyers should be wary because the downside here can be severe as any time he goes on the defensive, a coin gets cancelled. Also, any gains in the value of the NenshiCoin are taxed at a rate 38% higher than any other coin.
Bitucoin
The brainchild of none other than Murray Edwards of “so many billions in profits at CNRL” fame, bitucoin is a new entrant into the commodity “themed” altcoin market. To unlock value in bitucoin, miners must travel to northern Alberta and get into an “excavator” which they use to “dig” through dirt and scoops giant piles of black, sticky goo into giant transport trucks that then take the goo to a “processing facility” where it is heated and separated into bitucoin and tailings. The bitucoin is then measured as a virtual barrel and then transferred via the exclusive bitucoin blockchain known as the “pipeline” until it hits the users virtual wallet as a “barrel” of bitucoin. The supply of bitucoin is finite and as a commodity-modelled crypto the pricing will be volatile, but we are confident that the virtual/crypto version will ultimately be much more valuable than the physical one.
WIngcoin
Building on the concept of scarcity in the physical supply chain, the Wingcoin was introduced a few years ago as a result of an announcement by a number of poultry processors in the United States that they were running out of chicken wings. While completely unthinkable, it is a reasonable outcome of our bizarre North American obsession with crispy chicken sandwiches. Wingcoin’s value is benchmarked to the Biden administration’s recently announced Strategic Chicken Wing Reserve (SCWR) which is a 200 million pound store of frozen chicken wings held in a secret location in an ice cave in the far north of Alaska. Wingcoin miners are able to unlock coins by participating in virtual chicken wing eating contests with prizes awarded based on a heat absorption measurement derived from the Scoville Scale. Once coins are unlocked and put in a virtual wallet, they can be exchanged for single plates of wings at participating restaurants. The value of the coin thus rises and falls with the price of a plate of wings. With a lull right now in sports bar attendance (NHL and NBA drawing to a close, NFL still months away) the supply of wings is high and value is depressed, the time to buy Wingcoin is now.
ESGcoin
This isn’t technically a coin, it’s actually a series of NFT’s (Non Fungible Tokens) that are AI-drawn portraits of famous and important people who are constantly and piously telling all us small and not famous or important people what we need to do to protect the environment, reduce carbon emissions and save the planet. Each NFT also has a secret “hypocrisy” code attached to it that when you mine and unlock it will reveal a second level NFT that shows how many multiples of the average human’s carbon footprint each of these climate warriors actually has, including such things as private jet usage, yachts, jetsetting to useless climate conferences and, my personal favourite, using their new found climate status to hang out with celebrities and other famous climate hypocrites.
Eloncoin
This coin is only available to Twitter users who have paid to have a blue check. Users get the coin by sending Elon money and the value of the coin is set by Elon based on his mood on any particular day. That’s it. That’s the scam. I mean the idea. There are 44 billion of these coins in existence, but only 20 billion are thought to be actually worth anything.
Trudeaucoin
There is no longer any value in this coin. Ss if there ever was.
Natgascoin
Not to be confused with Gascoin, this coin derives part of its value from the tears spilled by investors in the most ridiculous commodity in the world – natural gas. Available in many different forms and prices depending on where the miner is located, there is no rhyme or reason to its pricing, it’s just worth what it is worth so suck it up buttercup. Every once in a while the value will spike, to tempt buyers, but the Natgascoin will always disappoint so it’s an almost perfect short. There is no business case for Natgascoin.
Stucoin
This is the purest of the new cryptos and distills cryptocurrency and NFTs down to their truest form.
Here’s how it works.
You send me money – the amount doesn’t matter.
In exchange, I will send you a code. That code will unlock a Stucoin that you can store in a virtual wallet or on an exchange. If you ever want your money back, you need to find someone to buy three Stucoins by sending me money (the amount doesn’t matter) and I will repurchase your coin at 1/3 of that amount. You may or may not recover all your money – it all depends on how convincing you are about the Stucoin value. Meanwhile I get rich by doing nothing. It’s awesome.
There you go. Long weekend silliness.
Don’t forget to send me money.
Now I’m going home.
Have a great weekend.
