Mrs R and I were just watching season 11 of Murdoch Mysteries (great show, by the way), and the titular character (a detective who is based out of Toronto) ran into a woman who was from Winnipeg, who spoke very disparagingly about Winnipeg. It was almost as though the show runners were winking at the audience.
So: Is giving Winnipeg a hard time a thing nowadays?
Not in the Chicago area it isn’t. The only thing I know about Winnipeg is:
“When we got to Winnipeg
I checked into school
I wore white bucks on my feet
when I learned the Golden Rule”
I remember seeing a Second City sketch in Toronto where the quintessential rube in the city was from Winnipeg.
I believe the Prairie provinces in general are considered the Canadian equivalent of the Great Plains, so Winnipeg is the rough equivalent of Omaha.
I’ve been to Winnipeg once. I went there (from Minneapolis) in February 1979 to watch an eclipse of the Sun.
Never been so freakin’ cold in my life! After hours on the road, half of which were in total darkness, it was just THERE in the middle of nowhere, lighting up the horizon like some nuclear wasteland.
Winnipeg is the capital city of Manitoba, a chunk in the middle of Canada that is almost as big as Texas (though in the shape of a tall rectangle) but a whole lot colder. It’s famous for being too cold in the winter, but fairly hot in the summer by Canadian standards.
Murdoch Mysteries is old-fashioned, right? Before modern transportation, Winnipeg meant a long long train ride, temperature 40 below zero, a big stockyard, and nothing to do. Old-fashioned Winnipeg was probably sort of like if you took old-fashioned Omaha and plunked it in the middle of Alaska. 
I’m from Regina, Saskatchewan. We gotta have SOMEBODY to make fun of, and they used to be our major competition for the highest per capita homicide rate.
It’s famous for it’s two seasons: snow and mosquitoes.
I took it to mean Winnipeg = rednecky, rube-type place.
And hey, another Murdoch fan!
Oddly enough, I just heard this song for the first time yesterday:
http://www.metrolyrics.com/one-great-city-lyrics-the-weakerthans.html
If you really want to understand the city, watch the “documentary” My Winnipeg. 
(Now I’m going to have Don’t Be Denied as my earworm of the day.)
At least it ain’t Wullerton! [ptoo!]
I am from Winnipeg (GO JETS!), and I love it with all of the heart you give to your home town, but it’s not an easy city to get used to or around in. The streets are named, not numbered, the downtown core is not very pedestrian-friendly (although the Exchange is definitely getting a reboot thanks to Hipsters). The winters are bitterly cold (seriously, we have broken records for the most consecutive days below -30), and yep, lost of mosquitoes.
BUT…the summers are hot, even the nights and there are tons of beautiful beaches and lakes. The people are pretty friendly, and there are winter festivals and parties almost every weekend in the winter, some that celebrate the cold (Festival du Voyageur). There is a HUGE multicultural event in August each year (Folklorama) and summer parties/fairs and music fests all over the province in the summer.
It’s not for everyone, but it’s a pretty amazing place (and still better than Regina). 
One word sums up Winnipeg-slamming: Mosquitoes. :eek:
My major memory of visiting my Winnipeg-dwelling great uncle can be summarized in that word … mind you, the time we visited, it was in the summer. Never saw Winnipeg in winter.
Does Winnipeg tout it’s relationship to Winnie-the-Pooh?
I’m not sure being known as “the pooh” is a good antidote to Winnipeg-bashing. 
Having lived there for five years, the people are nice but it isn’t a very pleasant place to live.
I’ve got to hijack a bit, I joined a friend in Chicago and we drove to Brandon (through Winnipeg) for that same eclipse. He read in an astronomy magazine that the City of Brandon was throwing open it’s arms to amateur astronomers everywhere and figured we’d, at the very least, be able to spend the night before in the student center at Brandon University. As it turns out, the open invitation was to sleep in his Chevy Luv pickup in the parking lot that night. To repeat your line, Never been so freakin’ cold in my life!
We probably made the drive the day before you did but I swear there was not a single other person on I-29 through North Dakota
Great eclipse, however, the clouds dissipated about an hour before totality.
As I recall, the day of the eclipse (Sunday) was actually pretty mild. Once it was over, though, it got cold again in a hurry. The customs agent who stopped us at the border on the way home couldn’t wait to get back inside his booth.
And yeah, we had clear skies for the eclipse too.
One other funny story: Before my car left Minneapolis, we all agreed to stop in Alexandria for dinner. “Fine,” I said. “Just so long as the place doesn’t have a six-foot-tall red neon sign outside that says ‘EAT.’”
Six hours later, after passing the giant statue of the Viking, we’re rolling up Alexandria’s main street in the dark, and guess what we saw ahead of us? Yep, you got it!
Turned out I had eaten there in 1972, on my way to language camp. I wonder if that had stuck in my mind somehow for seven years.
And no, we didn’t see a single car on the road north of Fargo either. The glow on the horizon as we neared Winnipeg reminded me of the Isaac Asimov story where large parts of the Midwest were forbidden zones centuries after a nuclear war.
A Canadian accent was coming thru as I read this, eh.