My experiences traveling, including to Quebec province, is if you’re in a touristy area you can get by with the native language or English; however, if you go to the smaller cities/towns where not so many tourists venture you had better know how to speak the local language…& that’s also where the memorable experiences come from.
My (planned) rant for the day - If things had worked out differently, today would have been a milestone anniversary. I am much better off without her & the one who I plan to grow old with far exceeds her (though ‘don’t be a piece of shit’ is not exactly a high bar to overcome) but we’ll never get to 50 years married, not without odds worse than winning Powerball of us both living years into the triple digits.
My (improvised) rant for the day - Came home to an email, a friend & former teammate was killed in an accident yesterday. Just a total shock.
I’m sorry too. As I get older, it’s getting more common for me to learn of people I know dying. And this isn’t just the usual “people getting old/sick and dying” you expect, but sudden and unexpected deaths. It sucks and I hope you’re doing okay.
Yeah because this sign is clearly much too complex for the Anglophone mind to comprehend.
Going to the category of “danger” (that would be “danger”, in English) the first few signs with words I came across were
“Arrêt” (on the red octogon that’s universally accepted to signal the concept of “stop”). It means “stop’.
“Sortie” which maybe you’d have to lean what it means, but the word also exists in English to mean an outing, and it refers to a highway exit, so context cues can help you out
“Moyene” and “maximum” on the same sign with a picture of a truck on slope and some persentages. “Average” and “maximum” in English, but I’ll grant the first might be a headscratcher.
“Bus” and “taxi” which are French for “bus” and “taxi”.
“Accotement”. This one I’ll grant isn’t obvious (it means “shoulder”) but unless you’re driving a bus or taxi as also indicated on the sign, you don’t really need to understand it.
“Corridor Scolaire” with a picture of people carrying books. I guess it’s a huge leap to figure out it refers to a school zone.
I stopped at page 12. Clearly the driving public is in grave danger with all those foreign words.
I feel like this rant tumbled right out of the 1980s.
A couple months ago my GF had told me that a prior BF of hers from last year, so 2 BF’s before me, had recently died of a heart attack and been found a few days later at home. The guy was ~65, fat, sedentary, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, smoker, drinker, terrible diet, you name a form of body abuse and he was into it. Well he got his wish and won his war on his own body.
But it was still pretty shocking to her when she got the news. She’s a couple years older than he was. And in much better shape & health. But still, when your younger friends start dropping, it hits extra close to home.
GF called me tonight. Her immediately previous BF was found dead in his apartment today. Also seemingly a heart attack. Age 62, this guy took better care of himself, but was from a family with a rich history of early death from heart attacks. He was on a bunch of heart & BP meds.
She still really liked the guy but their lives just didn’t quite fit together, so they reluctantly broke up. Now she’s really bummed that he’s gone.
And now I’m afraid to become her ex-BF. Not that I want to be ex- with her, but if I did I’d sure be worried about sudden death about 6 months later.
But exactly the same argument could made that within Quebec, it’s the English minority that is struggling to survive and is being subject to discrimination. You might argue that the English minority have a whole country, or indeed, a whole continent, that they can move out to. That is, in fact, exactly what many of the French nationalists want them to do. Much as “undesirables” have always been encouraged to get out, throughout the course of history, and as we’re seeing right now in the US.
That kind of bigotry and balkanization is not OK, not good for anyone, and has always been contrary to Canadian values. To the English minority, Quebec is their home, and they have as much right to it as anyone else. Parents should have a right to educate their children in whichever official language was the primary language of their childhood. In Quebec, English parents don’t have that right. Bigotry is never OK, even if one perceives some ostensibly noble motive behind it.
I have no problem with the idea that more Canadians outside of Quebec should strive to be bilingual and better understand the francophone part of our shared heritage. As a kid growing up in Montreal, I was fluently bilingual, though my French has become very rusty now. But I do have a huge problem with bigotry, and history has shown that when you’re passionate about protecting what you regard as a favoured culture, religion, or race, you can not only rationalize bigotry, but may be unaware of it even when you’re practicing it.
Re the above: that’s it, I’m done. If someone wants to start a GD thread about this whole issue (I don’t) then feel free to do so, but this is really derailing this thread and I apologize.
A person I am qute fond of but moved away several years ago, died yesterday of pancreatic cancer. I have lost so many close friends to cancer in the last few years. Or cancer related illnesses.
I used to look forward to August,I no longer have family to celebrate with and so many friends have passed as well as family. This is painful right now.
What a terribly sad post. I’m very sorry to hear the news about your friend. Many cancers are survivable, but my understanding is that pancreatic is one of the worst.
Two of my previous rants have combined to come back to haunt me.
Rant #1 was about my sensitivity to heat in my capacity as a cranky Old Fart, so I keep the house cooler than many others would, certainly cooler than the economy-minded would. Rant #2 was the lengthy series of heat waves we’ve been experiencing all summer – hardly does one end when the next one begins.
And now, rant #3 is, going through some recent bills, my electricity bill for the last couple of months! JFC, am I single-handedly funding an entire nuclear power plant?
Our last electric bill set a record, too. And it hasn’t even been scorchingly hot this year, yet.
My rant: some yahoo in the neighborhood has been driving an actual drag racing car in our streets. I’m not using the term “drag racing car” to describe an everyday noisy sports car. Mr. brown saw it for the first time last night and said it was a car designed to drag race. It’s so loud that the windows rattle and you can hear it coming from a quarter of a mile away. We’ll try to report it to the police, but I doubt anything will be done.
It got dark last night, just before the end of the irkday. I turned on lights in the place three hours before sunset. I grabbed my phone & looked at radar & quickly decided someone needed to go out for a walk then. When we turned around (facing west) the sky was about 16 shades between charcoal grey & black. It thunderstormed/rained/poured for the next three hours. Why couldn’t it do that when I was chained stuck at the desk for irk instead of for when I had plans to be outside afterwards?
Also not appreciative that Momma Nature scared my baby gurl with the loud noises.
Please clap for all of us who can’t be there. I’m feeling old today.
He can kiss Darryl Hannah both before and after the show… and then point and laugh at all of us who only ended up holding a failing Democracy and smelling the stink of His Orange Fat Assedness Donald Trump.
I’m on the home stretch for my federal grants, and, well, I’m sick of grants. Especially putting in budgets and budget narrative justifications. Gotta get done though. I just seem to spend at least as much time entering shit into the system than I do on the narrative. It’s fucking tedious.
I have a new mini-rant from literally seconds ago.
I noticed my Outlook flashing on my task bar. Which is weird. This is my home PC, I don’t schedule things on it. That’s what my work computer is for. So I click on it, and I get these calendar reminders that say:
Hot Live Horny thoughts of you keeping me awake all night Live Video
There’s some link to a web site with a random gibberish domain, and the “organizer” is some Russian email address.
I was wondering where the fuck this came from, and checked my email account. There are two “invitations” in my spam folder. Outlook, in its infinite fucking wisdom, decides that I absolutely MUST have this shit flashing in front of me, because I’m going to miss this meeting! For shit that is already in my junk folder.
Russian hacker bots are gonna be Russian hacker bots. I am not mad at them. I’m mad at Microsoft for being so stupid that it is treating these things as legitimate despite the fact that Outlook already identified it as junk and put it in the junk folder. If it knows it’s shit, why is it going to display that?
