Last weekend, while recovering from a mild concussion, I decided to tune into the Conservative Party of Canada’s leadership convention. So as not to strain my eyes, I mostly listened rather than watched the proceedings — which is probably a good thing, because actually seeing them might have caused my brain to short circuit, less from sensory overload than from a violent deluge of tweeness entering the retinas all at once. In the wake of Queen Elizabeth’s death, convention organizers reportedly toyed with the idea of rescheduling but opted instead for a “more somber” and “revised program that reflects the passing of Her Majesty the Queen.”

“Somber” isn’t quite the adjective I would use, but the planned “big confetti guns” were duly set aside, and the country’s late constitutional monarch was afforded a characteristically treacly send-off. Since the 1980s, Canada’s heavily Americanized conservative movement has steadily taken on most of the Republican Party’s worst features while somehow, apparently, managing to leave the actual republicanism out.

Though there were many highlights, the real coup de grâce for me came courtesy of the event’s surreally weird saxophone-violin rendition of “God Save the Queen.” Watch it for yourself, and you’ll see what begins as a blandly traditional performance crescendo into a postmodern finale of improvisation and synth accompaniment. Maybe it’s the recent head injury, but wailing jazz arpeggios radiating electronic fuzz connote “deferent sobriety” to me about as well as a rendering of “Ode to Joy” played on a farting trombone. To anyone still laboring under the delusion that the rituals of monarchy represent some romantic linkage to a more ordered and dignified past, well, I have a handful of magic beans to sell you.