Jessica asked for her name to be withheld from this article, so I'll just refer to her as Jessie.

I met up with Jessica in the TJ cafeteria. The first thing that I asked her was how Canadians felt about being the 51st state in the Union. This, after all, seems to me like quite an honor.

But she replied only with a strange look on her face. She was obviously struggling with the language difference. You see, Canadians don't speak American, they actually have their own dialect. Two actually. Most of them speak a language called English while many others speak French. This is rather strange, because Canada is in North America. The French and English have their own countries somewhere near Europe (YEE-or-up). But we'll leave that for the children's books to cover.

After a few minutes, however, we both started to become aclimated to each other's native tongue. This occurred when she asked me, "Are you really that ignorant?" I was finally reaching her. We now had a connection.

So I decided to ask her about the various sports that they played in her native land. She said that the two biggest sports were a game called "hockey" and another called "baseball."

With this bit of information, I decided to do some research by watching these two sports on television. The first sport, hockey, is very similar to our boxing. Only the "boxers" are replaced by entire teams, and the game is played on ice.

As a side note, ice is one of Canada's major exports. The next time you reach into your freezer to add a little chill to your beverage, you have those spunky Canadians to thank. Thank you Canada!

So after watching most of the hockey game, I switched my attention to baseball. Baseball is an unusual sport in which the players wear tight pants and scratch themselves. I'm not talking about the scratch that you and I do when we have a random itch. I'm talking about really digging in. Those baseball players have taken scratching to a new level.

The rules of baseball are quite straight forward. Nine members of one team jog out to the field and begin rigorously scratching themselves. Then, at random, one of these players will throw a small, white ball at a member of the opposing team. This usually startles the other player who was just minding his business scratching his crotch or what not.

The player who is startled by the ball will occasionally swing a stick at the passing ball, but this happens only rarely. The ball is then caught by a man that is not only scratching himself, but also squatting. Then another squatting guy will yell something like "Heeeeoooowwwwwwcck!" This, in turn, will often irritate the guy with the stick and he will look back in disgust at the squatting guy, step away and resume scratching himself.

Unfortunately, I didn't get to see how the scoring system worked since all of the games that i watched had scores like 1-0 or 0-1. I was unsure how to interpret this.

The important thing, however, wasn't how to figure out the score, but that I now had something to talk with Jessica about. Unfortunately, I was unable to set up another meeting time with her. It was probably because of the language problem again.

So I turned to the Encyclopedia Brittanica for the rest of my in-depth research. While reading, I discovered the following startling facts: