Rudy Weibe, accepting his $25G cheque for winning the Alberta Provincial Meat Catalogue Publishers’ Ho-down, Rib-cook and Write-off (aka the Grant MacEwan Author’s Award), says the government should support writers more. Ooops. I did it again. I kid, but his point is well-taken, people.

Edmonton writer Rudy Wiebe won Alberta’s richest literary prize Tuesday and used the occasion to appeal for greater provincial government support for culture.

“The reason that we know about the Greeks and the Jewish people and their world, long before the birth of Christ, is because their societies fostered great writers,” Wiebe told a sparse gathering at the Royal Alberta Museum during the presentation of the Grant MacEwan Literary Awards.

“If we want to build an outstanding and memorable society in Alberta, we need to support our writers so that they can tell our stories.”

Now before all you globally warming cowpokes get your chaps twisted up over a joke, let me just say that Ontario as tight as a yuppie’s bunghole, Saskatchewan was made flat so the bored people in Manitoba would have a view, Quebec is what happens when cigarettes and acid wash jeans don’t go out of style, BC’s picturesque mountains aren’t snow-capped and ringed with clouds but rather covered in syringes and ringed with pot smoke, and if Newfoundland gets any wetter and colder I’m going to grow gills and just jump the fuck into the ocean and get it over with. Oh yes, New Brunswick is a rejected US state, Nova Scotia only remains in the collective consciousness because of a bank, PEI is the perinium of Canada, and all six people in the Yukon and NWT are only there because they licked the permafrost and have been yelling “A yittew hep!” since 1966. And Nunavut. Don’t even get me started. Oh, wait. I’m done. (P.S. I love you all.)