6. “Winnie the Pooh”

And that’s the story of why anyone would name a main character in a story Winnie the fucking Pooh.

Winnipeg is often used as a butt for jokes by Americans, being depicted as the destination of last resort for anyone in their right mind. To add insult to injury, The Weakerthans came out with a song where the chorus goes “I Hate Winnipeg,” which got kind of big.

You really have to be from the city to know what this is all about. I grew up on Gateway Road, just across the tracks from the city’s infamous North End. What you have to realize is that we’re just messing with all of you. Yes, the temperature is -30 for weeks at a time, we’re a seven-hour drive from fucking Minneapolis, and you spend the summers fist-fighting mosquitoes or the perennial overflowing of the Red River’s banks. But there’s a great arts scene, plenty of ethnic diversity (some of the largest Filipino, Eritrean and Icelandic communities in the world outside of their home countries) and, for my money, the best place in the world for an afternoon drunk: a hotel bar a few blocks north of Portage and Main. So when we say we “hate” Winnipeg, what we mean is that we secretly love it.