Did you know Canada has two legal systems? It’s true. We use Civil Law in Quebec, and Common Law in the rest of Canada (this isn’t a joke, just a weird factoid). Common Law says “This thing was found to be illegal before therefore it will always be illegal going forward”, and Civil Law says “Who cares if it was found illegal before because this time isn’t exactly like that time so let’s judge it on its own merits.”. I think Canada is unique in having both legal systems within a country (most countries pick one and stick with it… Europe tends to be Civil Law, English-colonized nations tend towards Common Law).
Anyway, a couple Canadian jokes:
Did you know that Canada has only two seasons?
Winter, and July.
Every time I hear a mean joke about Canada, I go to the hospital and get my feelings checked for free.
A Torontonian finds a bottle and rubs it, and out pops a genie.
“Three wishes, you know the drill.”
“Okay, for my first wish, I wish for the most beautiful woman in the world to fall madly in love with me.”
“Come on dude, that’s almost impossible. Aim for something that might actually be possible.”
The man thinks for a long time, then snaps his finger. “I wish for the Toronto Maple Leafs to win the Stanley Cup!”
The genie looks thoughtful for a long moment and then asks “Would you prefer Natalie Portman or Beyonce?”
My primary gaming opponent is a lawyer. I didn’t realize or understand the difference between Common Law and Civil Law before we had a conversation about Louisiana. Louisiana is the outlier (having Civil Law and not Common Law) among US States much like Quebec is for Canada. Strange (or maybe explanatory) that these (the French speaking areas) are the outliers among the two countries.
I’ve known about civil law versus common law for a long time. As I understand it, civil law is basically Roman law 2.0. The history as I read it once was that the Normans set out to formalize the customary law of England after the invasion of 1066, and came up with common law—and a bit later on the old Roman legal texts were rediscovered and the rest of Europe adopted them. But no one in England was going to put up with changing over to a different system.
Anyway, Friedenberg discusses Québec going by civil law, but it didn’t surprise me at all; it’s what I would have expected. I think I had heard about Louisiana being a civil law jurisdiction also.
MI6, CIA, and KGB are arguing about who is better at counter intelligence. They decide to settle the matter with a contest and release a rabbit into a forest, and each of them has to catch it. The MI6 people go in. They place animal informants throughout the forest. They question all plant and mineral witnesses. After three months of extensive investigations, they conclude that the rabbit does not exist. The CIA goes in. After two weeks with no leads they burn the forest, killing everything in it, including the rabbit, and make no apologies: the rabbit had it coming. The KGB goes in. They come out two hours later with a badly beaten bear. The bear is yelling: “Okay! Okay! I’m a rabbit! I’m a rabbit!”
Seen today on the web: “I think they should remove the expression: ‘I avoided it like the Plague’ from the English language, because we are actually not very good at it”
