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So, Stacey was over last night and we were working on stuff, stuff which diverted into an impromptu creative writing exercise that created an imagined controversial and religious-themed southern Manitoba art installation, and thus, an imagined Mennonite name. Stacey told me about how her mom went to high school in Winkler and was the only non-Mennonite in her class. This personal history blossomed into a present-day game where our friend Cam would play a game with her called Shout Mennonite Names!, getting her to announce random Mennonite-sounding names (first and last) on request.

Naturally, this game took on a life of its own. That life included Cam’s boyfriend, Steven Cochrane, making a generator website of the same name.

The site came about in February of 2009 when my boyfriend (who lives in Winnipeg), told me about a game that some of his friends had devised, in which players take turns shouting plausible-sounding Mennonite names at one another. I can only assume that they came up with this in February of another year, when the Winter Crazies were at their peak.

Not being from Manitoba (or, indeed, any other place with an unusually high concentration of Mennonites), my own knowledge of Mennonite nomenclature was far less intimate and far less ingrained than that of the company I keep. I could muster a “Menno Wiebe!” or a “Harry Dyck!” but after that I was more or less tapped out. Still, I wanted to play along, so I wrote a simple PHP script that would randomly combine entries from two lists of common Mennonite given and family names.

The above is from the “What?” section of the site — be sure to read it, because Steven’s work is done with due dillegence and references. He’s got sources.

I myself am not Mennonite, though my ancestors literally lived in villages neighbouring Mennonite ones in Russia. Close, but no cigar. In modern-day Manitoba, being Mennonite is no longer necessarily a religious affiliation — it’s an ethnic one, though of course the Mennonite religion is still alive and well, with several denominations and hundreds of churches in our province alone. I’m trying to quantify why a site like this is so fundamentally entertaining, but I can’t. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown up in a place where the name “Dyck” (pronounced “dick”) is so commonplace as to not be worth a snicker, where two people named “Friesen” can get married and no one assumes they’re anything but very distantly related. It’s a peculiarity of Manitoba, and I enjoy it.

I haven’t posted in awhile because July got seriously out of hand. In the sense that I had to work way too much and on top of that I got sick. So I had little time for extras, and the video scrapbook is also on the light side. If you’re wondering, as a Winnipegger, where the Folk and Fringe Fest footage is, well, I can explain. I missed Folk Fest this year due to the wedding you see in the video, and I got sick during Fringe. It wasn’t my most thrilling month ever (hours spent at computers doesn’t make for gripping footage, and frankly neither does the buckets of rain we had). But this video does have: pretty people, pink balloons, fireworks, chocolate cake, sidewalk chalk, road trips, babies, flowers, water towers, and candy.

Another exciting development is that the soundtrack has diverted from its usual hipster Brooklyn origin to something closer to home — Saskatoon’s Volcanoless in Canada. Sometimes I just like the sound of a good prairie rock band with a killer singer.

Summer time means lots of weddings and, accordingly, lots of wedding socials. (If you’re not from Manitoba and don’t know what I’m talking about, see here.)

Over the weekend I attended Stacey & Joël’s social at the Crescentwood Community Centre. I didn’t actually take any photos — I only took video shots with my June scrapbook in mind. Here’s the happy couple dancing:

That same night, my friend Cynara was attending a non-wedding social that was (partially) in her honour in another part of town. She and some other social-goers took this photo, which, it has been suggested, might well-serve the Wikipedia entry linked above.

The rye bread, the cheese cubes, the mustard, the cold cuts.

I haven’t gone to near as many wedding socials as most. This partly has to do with my religious upbringing and also to do with the fact that apparently my friends are not (yet) the marrying kind. That said, anyone who’s spoken with me on the subject knows I have myriad opinions on the subject of what I call the Wedding Economy. That term, for me, does not refer to the increasingly consumer-based nature of the wedding, the thousands of dollars in debt, the expensive dresses and over-budget extravagance, though I’m not a fan of that, either. What I’m talking about is the understood material transfer that takes place when one attends a wedding. The expectation that your gift is basically payment for an ticket invitation to the party. And of course, nowadays, that “gift” is usually expected to be money, with everyone putting in small-to-medium font in the bottom corner of the invitation, “Presentation.”

To me, this feeling of commercial transaction that has come to underlie all wedding invitations is uncomfortable (at best — distasteful at worst).

I don’t write this a an indictment to anyone reading who has had a wedding or even put the dreaded P-word on the invite. I’m just saying I hate it when social interactions run parallel to monetary ones, which it often feels that weddings do.

In Manitoba, where wedding socials are essentially fundraisers, the proceeds going towards the ceremony/reception, a house down payment, a honeymoon, what-have-you, there has been some backlash against the concept. It comes quite understandably, I think, from people who have felt obligated to attend many, many socials over the years and thus have been rather exhausted by the Top-40 playlists, the endless parade of silent auctions, the watery cocktails and yes, the sweaty cubes of cheese on the buffet table. There’s also been backlash against couples soliciting businesses for wedding social silent auction prize donations.

Still, the wedding social is a part of the Wedding Economy I have less issue with, on the basis that the obligations involved are less murky. Ten dollars usually gets you in the door, to enjoy DJed music (of varying quality; always check before you go. Stacey hired the city’s premier party DJ), to drink inexpensive liquor (something in which I no longer partake, but hardly begrudge anyone who does), and to eat the oft-maligned but no-less-delicious social spread (the rye, the meat, the cheese). As for the silent auction — hey, some people get off on that. I, never being much of a gambler, don’t, but I also do know people who have won freakin’ Wii gaming systems at socials, so there you go.

I forgot to post these here. Over the Easter weekend I was visiting my parents in Morris, a town that is surrounded by a ring dike (what Americans call a “levy”) that protects the town from the Red River floodwaters that often get out of hand at this time of year. This is one of those times. I made two videos; the first is just me voicing over some footage and the second features my brother and his girlfriend surveying a rather dramatic landscape on Easter Sunday.