[Snowyman]

This is perhaps the dumbest most pointless anti Canadian rant so-far.

Henry David Thoreau nicely summed up Americans' indifference toward our country's little buddy when he wrote, "I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada. … What I got by going to Canada was a cold."

What Thoreau said was

"I fear that I have not got much to say about Canada, not having seen much; what I got by going to Canada was a cold. "

Typically writers like Labash conveniently bend or omit the truth when writing a trash piece. At least Thoreau was honest enough to admit he hadn't seen much . And in a "A Yankee in Canada" honest in his observations. That's the difference between a great writer and a poor one like Labash , who already condescending with his little buddy bs , deliberately misquotes Thoreau to add a little legitimacy to his foolishness . Unfortunately many of the posters here do the same. Perhaps I'm wrong in assuming that unlike Labash , they're smart enough to know better .

[beaver fever]

I read Waldon's Pond many years ago. I was an impressive and unique conception of the practice of philosophy. You could say that Thoreau was America's first Socratic philosopher.

As far as I know, like Socrates, he never strayed farther than thirty miles from where he was born, he spurned wealth and believed our immediate surroundings sufficiently provided all the physical and spiritual necessities of life.

He was modest and constitutionally incapable of thinking ill of other people.

He most certainly was incapable of sarcasm and guile unlike the Labash's of the world whose eye balls are firmly fixated on the back of their own skulls.