Yogurt and Narwhals

Madame offered me a yogurt tonight at dinner and I noticed that the name on the label was 'bifidus'. "Hee!" I exclaimed, "that's a disease!" I was telling them how in English it's a disease of your back when I realized that I was talking about spina bifida, which is different. Bifidus digestivum (which is trademarked) is the main ingredient in Activia yogurt.

And - if you're lactose-intolerent, you can still have yogurt. The enzymes that are still alive break down the lactose for you.

I've been trying to work on my vocabulary lately, and I did the n's today. One of the last words I had was nunavut, and the English word given as a definition was, sadly, nunavut. That seems like shoddy dictionary work. I wiki'd it and found that it's a province way up north in Canada. To the left is their coat of arms, which includes what looks like a moose and a narwhal straddling a circle full of symbolism. The scroll at the bottom has the Inuit motto for Nunavut, which is Nunavut Sanginivut or "Nunavut, our strength".

With the help of this page on the Nunavutians, one learns that the blue and gold divided by the horizon represent the riches of the land, sea, and sky. On top, there is the niqirtsuituq, or North Star. Apparently, this is a big deal in upper Canada since they are so deprived of landmarks that they rely on the sky for navigation. It also represents the leadership of the elders. The circles represent the sun. Very important, yes, since their winter is abominably long and dark.

The stone statue thing is an inuksuk, which means 'like a human', but I think means 'not like a human at all'. Used to provide some sort of terrestrial markers. Next to it is a qulliq, or a stone lamp. It represents light as well. So they're pretty much advertising that you can get lost easily and it's always dark.

They continue on with the description, saying that the igloo on top is to show the Inuit's perseverence through such harsh and forbidding conditions. Then the crown to show that someone, somewhere, wants to include them in their kingdom.

What is carabou (it's not a moose, sorry) in Inuit? Tuktu! Fun! What is narwhal? Qilalugaq tugaalik! Not so fun! They stand on combination of tundra and sea, and according to them, three varieties of Arctic plant life are included. It looks like purple flowers, crappy moss, and grass.

So the Nunavut people use their coat of arms as a warning, almost, to describe how unbearable their life is.

More information on Nunavut. They have the highest cost of living in the entire country, given the fact that everything they use has to either be flown in by plane or shipped by boat. Two liters of milk cost $5.75. More info on the man-notman statue - they use it to scare caribou (tuktu!) into traps. One of the wildflowers noted above is the purple saxifrage. And did you know? Canada has more land mass than China.