Saskatchewan, however, is looked down on by the rest of Canada as the land of hicks and endless dust. But - it is one of the few places left where you can attempt to lead a civillised life. Of course ask me again in January and I may have a different answer. Which leads us on to the most important aspect of life in Saskatchewan:

The air takes on a soupy, crystalline form and cars and heating vents belch steam and so the whole place looks like a set off Blade Runner.

Then people's parents start going on about how they had to walk to school for 2 miles every morning and shelter in snow banks or else rip open caribous and shelter inside their steaming innards to make sure they didn't freeze before first period.
(Oh no - that was something else).

The extreme weather also leads to bizarre phenomenons - like the one that happened 3 Xmas's ago. All of Regina woke up to see hundreds of thousands of tiny snowballs all over the place. It looked as if a horde of elfs on acid had been running around all night rolling up snowballs for us. It was weird.
Apparently, however, it was a fluke combination of a warm front and a soft wind.

And the Summers are full of dust, small tornadoes, hailstorms and mosquitoes.

Saskatchewan is also weird in that it seems to keep getting visited by almost Biblical plagues.

Take this year, for example, after the spring thaw Regina was taken over by hundreds of thousands of aggressive voles. Cats were bringing home 20 dead voles a day until they got sick of catching them and then you could see the interesting spectacle of voles running around in front of cats who would just sit there and watch them.

Peoples lawns were covered with vole tracks and down by the creek it looked as if the world was being taken over by voles.

Then, after all the voles were murdered or went back to wherever they came from, we were overtaken by a horde of canker worms hanging off all the trees. People were covered in canker worms - especially runners.

Trees were being devoured by them.

And then after the canker worms went we were hit by unbelievable hordes of woodticks and of course there are always clouds of mosquitoes.

Variations of this and other infestations seem to happen every year. There is little doubt that Saskatchewan is an ongoing meterological/biological soap opera. And lets not even talk about the hole in the Ozone layer that's opening up over Estevan!

Up until 1944 people had been screwed in Saskatchewan since the advent of European settlers. Louis Riel got mightily screwed in 1885 and then the settlers from Northern and Eastern Europe got amazingly screwed during the Depression - Saskatchewan had an annual negative per capita income during the worst years of the Depression.

Then in 1944 Tommy Douglas and the CCF came in and started building roads and schools and industries and introduced Medicare which is now uniform across Canada.

Right now, however, Saskatchewan's social net is as much at risk as anywhere else.

Younger people are mostly as directionless here as anywhere else and they like to cruise country roads at 80mph and drink bad beer made by local cooperatives.

People are also incredibly nice and friendly although farmers do have an unfortunate tendency to vote Reform but that may be because they are always being ripped off by "them back East."

Life in Saskatchewan costs less than pretty much anywhere else in Canada. And you hardly ever get traffic jams and mall crushes. And the prairie is really wide and awesome and beautiful.
Regina, for some reason, has more restaurants per capita than anywhere else in North America and lots of festivals and all that crap and the RCMP barracks: which means you are likely to see big sweaty men with no hair running around everywhere looking in pain. What more could you ask from life than that?

• The world's longest bridge over the shortest span of water: Regina's Albert Street Bridge over Wascana Creek
  
• The longest hallway in the world: the corridor from College West that spans the whole Univeristy of Regina Campus
  
• The longest continuous running symphony in North America; and
  
• A crown investment corporation that has bigger profits than Ford or Westinghouse.

Saskatchewan also has the dubious pleasure of supplying 80% of the world's uranium.
Saskatchewan also has amazing biosphere diversity - we only lack rain forest. (Interesting facts courtesy of Rob "I wasn't being sarcastic - really" King.)
Here follows some pictures of Saskatchewan's "biodiversity" ....