The actual border between the U.S. and Canada is much stranger than people realize
The border may look like a simple, mostly straight line, but it's got some weird quirks.

The border between the U.S. and Canada has some funky anomalies.
Canada has been the United States' friendly upstairs neighbor for over 150 years, with people on both sides of the border enjoying good relations and a mutual flow of tourism and trade. But the border that separates us is a bit…odd, and not just because President Trump's confusing second-term commentary about it: "If you look at a map, they drew an artificial line right through it, between Canada and the U.S. Just a straight, artificial line. Somebody did it a long time ago, many many decades ago. Makes no sense."
The border itself was formed before Canada officially became a country, when the 49th parallel was negotiated with Britain to become the boundary (without consulting the indigenous tribes that lived along it, which caused no shortage of confusion and displacement). But what appears to be a "straight, artificial line" is not actually straight (and no more artificial than any other manmade border). It's actually a kind of wobbly line with some dips and blips and sticky-outy-places and islands-in-dispute that the average American and Canadian remain largely unaware of.
Long before the leader of the free world began pontificating on the Canadian-U.S. border, CGP Grey created a video that shines a light on how strange it actually is.
Check this out:
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
The 5,500-mile-long border is the longest border between two countries in the world, and there's a 20-foot wide space along the border that's been deforested as basically a "no touchy" zone to delineate where it is. The border line looks straight on a map, but the actual, official border is actually 900 zig-zagging lines that twist and turn by as much as several hundred feet. The uncharted wilderness that made up most of the border when it was being established explains why the line is not perfectly straight. However, as CGP Grey points out, the hundreds of monuments marking the international border are in "about as straight a line as you could expect a pre-GPS civilization to make."
There are some strange anomalies along our border, including an island in the Northeastern U.S./Southeastern Canada that both countries believe belong to them. Machias Seal Island has a fascinating history as it's been a disputed territory since the origination of the border, with Canada and the U.S. holding different interpretations of what defines the parameters of the border. But thankfully, it's a peaceful dispute—or at least it has been so far.
- YouTubewww.youtube.com
Another weird anomaly on the Canadian border is the little rectangle of land that juts out from the top of Minnesota into the province of Manitoba, mostly over a lake. Oddly enough, that's a result of the erroneous way some maps that were used to plot out the border were made, which eventually led to a dilemma over how to connect the border in that area. Known as the Northwest Angle, or as locals call it, the Angle, this remote area of land and water actually marks the northernmost point in the contiguous U.S.
Another place where the 49th parallel caused an issue was with Vancouver Island, as the line cut off the southernmost tip of the island. That was easily solved by just going around it, but there is a tiny piece of U.S. land that gets cut off on the Canadian mainland, Point Roberts, which creates a bit of a strange reality for the 1,000 or so Americans who live there. Basically, residents can't drive anywhere else without crossing the border, including the kids who go to middle school and high school around the crook of Canadian land that connects the peninsula to the rest of Washington State. Not the end of the world to cross the border a few times a day as long as our countries remain on good terms.
There are several other places along the Canada-U.S. border where one country contains a little bit of the other, creating a fun little game of figuring out why certain places are the way they are. But again, as long relations between our countries stay friendly, those little quirks just constitute a fun part of our mutual history and are not a cause for conflict. Let's do our best to keep it that way.
- Canadian IGA grocery store sells organic produce and honey from its own rooftop garden ›
- Canada just passed the “Free Willy” bill, making it illegal to keep dolphins and whales in captivity. ›
- A wild goose was taken to an animal hospital. His mate knocked on the door to find him. ›
- The American island where residents speak a dazzling blend of Southern and Old English - Upworthy ›






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Resurfaced video of French skier's groin incident has people giving the announcer a gold medal
"The boys took a beating on that one."
Downhill skiing is a sport rife with injuries, but not usually this kind.
A good commentator can make all the difference when watching sports, even when an event goes smoothly. But it's when something goes wrong that great announcers rise to the top, and there's no better example of a great announcer in a surprise moment than when French skier Yannick Bertrand took a gate to the groin in a 2007 super-G race.
Competitive skiers fly down runs at incredible speeds, often exceeding 60 mph. Hitting something hard at that speed would definitely hurt, but hitting something hard with a particularly sensitive part of your body would be excruciating. So when Bertrand slammed right into a gate family-jewels-first, his high-pitched scream was unsurprising. What was surprising was the perfect commentary that immediately followed.
This is a clip you really just have to see and hear to fully appreciate:
- YouTube youtu.be
It's unclear who the announcer is, even after multiple Google inquiries, which is unfortunate because that gentleman deserves a medal. The commentary gets better with each repeated viewing, with highlights like:
"The gate the groin for Yannick Bertrand, and you could hear it. And if you're a man, you could feel it."
"Oh, the Frenchman. Oh-ho, monsieurrrrrr."
"The boys took a beating on that one."
"That guy needs a hug."
"Those are the moments that change your life if you're a man, I tell you what."
"When you crash through a gate, when you do it at high rate of speed, it's gonna hurt and it's going to leave a mark in most cases. And in this particular case, not the area where you want to leave a mark."
Imagine watching a man take a hit to the privates at 60 mph and having to make impromptu commentary, straddling the line between professionalism and acknowledging the universally understood reality of what just happened. There are certain things you can't say on network television that you might feel compelled to say. There's a visceral element to this scenario that could easily be taken too far in the commentary, and the inherent humor element could be seen as insenstive and offensive if not handled just right.
The announcer nailed it. 10/10. No notes.
The clip frequently resurfaces during the Winter Olympic Games, though the incident didn't happen during an Olympic event. Yannick Bertrand was competing at the FIS World Cup super-G race in Kvitfjell, Norway in 2007, when the unfortunate accident occurred. Bertrand had competed at the Turin Olympics the year before, however, coming in 24th in the downhill and super-G events.
As painful as the gate to the groin clearly as, Bertrand did not appear to suffer any damage that kept him from the sport. In fact, he continued competing in international downhill and super-G races until 2014.
Alpine skiing is a notoriously dangerous sport, with a reported injury rate of 36.7 per 100 World Cup athletes per season, according to a 2018 study. Of course, it's the knees and not the coin purse that are the most common casualty of ski racing, which we saw clearly in U.S. skiier Lindsey Vonn's harrowing experiences at the 2026 Olympics. Vonn was competing with a torn ACL and ended up being helicoptered off of the mountain after an ugly crash that did additional damage to her legs, requiring multiple surgeries (though what caused the crash was reportedly unrelated to her ACL tear). Still, she says she has no regrets.
As Bertrand's return to the slopes shows, the risk of injury doesn't stop those who live for the thrill of victory, even when the agony of defeat hits them right in the rocks.