It's Saturday! Here's what you should be reading, assuming you're able to rouse yourself from your mid-December non-workday vegetative state.

I can't even make an estimate of the number of times I've had a Canadian tell me they pay more attention to Washington D.C. than to Nathan Phillips Square, Queen's Park, or Ottawa. It's true that the lack of corruption and evangelical craziness in Canadian politics makes it pretty boring in comparison the goings-on south of the border, but as Maclean’s reminds us, that's not a bad thing.

There is a kind of meat-based food called porketta that is apparently delicious, but to try it you have to beat a roomful of foul-mouthed old people at bingo, at a pub called the Beef 'n Bird. Is this the central conceit of some kind of post-apocalyptic sci-fi novel, where food is scarce and its distribution is strictly controlled a cabal of elders? Nope, just another weekend in Sudbury.

You know who Jack Chambers is, right? No? The Walrus says you—and the media—should feel bad about that.

Everybody knows Buffalo has made some planning mistakes, but seeing aerial imagery of the city in its present-day configuration compared with a turn-of-the-century illustrated street map really lays plain the place's transformation from a thoroughly modern boomtown into a cluster of abandoned parking lots and highway overpasses. When people talk about a need for increased density in downtown Toronto, this is what they're trying to prevent.

And a final entry for your Saturday reading list: when is Canada going to stop fucking over its legal immigrants by refusing to acknowledge their professional certifications? New research pegs the economic cost at $30.7 billion annually.

Blog image from this map, via Atlantic Cities.