My wife and I have lived in Montreal twice, the first time maybe 10 years for her and 3½ years for me. We loved our time there, which wAs ended due to my military career requirements. So we always dreamed of going back until I had a job opportunity that I couldn’t refuse that would move us back to Montreal.
We returned, thinking that the whole sovereignty and language issue was essentially dead. Instead it was dormant and came back with a vengeance, and the provincial government focused on torpedoing Montreal because of its open-mindedness and diversity. We also got an idealistic and very impractical mayor followed by covid lockdowns.
The political toxicity (the premier and his government make shit up, twist data in order to pursue his petty, xenophobic agenda) and the spectacular municipal incompetence made the place untenable for us.
Though I am not really bilingual (a French language instructor informally assessed me as a low intermediate French speaker) I practice it as much as possible.
My wife and I have lived in Montreal twice, the first time maybe 10 years for her and 3½ years for me. We loved our time there, which wAs ended due to my military career requirements. So we always dreamed of going back until I had a job opportunity that I couldn’t refuse that would move us back to Montreal.
We returned, thinking that the whole sovereignty and language issue was essentially dead. Instead it was dormant and came back with a vengeance, and the provincial government focused on torpedoing Montreal because of its open-mindedness and diversity. We also got an idealistic and very impractical mayor followed by covid lockdowns.
The political toxicity (the premier and his government make shit up, twist data in order to pursue his petty, xenophobic agenda) and the spectacular municipal incompetence made the place untenable for us.
Though I am not really bilingual (a French language instructor informally assessed me as a low intermediate French speaker) I practice it as much as possible.
I wonder if more parents adopting a “pre-release name” (great term BTW) might result in far fewer kids going through life with a stupid or embarrassing moniker.
Parents could get their dose of ego trip & whimsy out of the way early and label the kid for real in a more sober frame of mind.
I once forwarded a humorous list of proposed kids names (must have been when Moon Unit was under construction, as we didn’t have the intertoobz until after Dweezil came along). One friend responded in horror, thinking I was serious.
This caused me to wonder about the origin of your screen name. But you haven’t posted it, at least not in this thread.
I’m guessing you IRL surname is Zappa or something close to it. Or maybe the famous Frank is your father (Skywalker style) and you’re really Moon Unit.
Yes, I made that up. (I hope I didn’t just start a hoax; I didn’t expect you to take it seriously, but I did enjoy reading about Solomon “Nobody calls me Solost - the internet is full of lies!” Deressa.) I didn’t really have a detailed idea about your origin story, just a vague notion that it was the name of someone (or perhaps some philosophical tenet) I would know about if I had the time and energy to read as much as I’d like. Still, there was a forehead slapping moment when I saw the real story in a previous thread. Well, ok, I don’t think I literally slapped my forehead, but I probably should have.
Um, yeah. I thought it was obvious! Both kids’ pre-release names were those of members of the Zappa family, and I’m their mother, so somehow Mama Zappa seemed a good choice.
I am not, to the best of my knowledge, related on any way to the actual Zappa family.
I think I’ve mentioned this before, but I registered here as Raginghormonal because I was going through menopause and it seemed a good fit, but I had the impression that most people imagined a teenager going crazy with hormones, so I changed it to my current name because I give off a vibe of someone who would not enjoy a raunchy joke and nothing could be further from the truth.
As I wrote in other threads, my name is a Dog-Latin variant of Pardelluchs (which is pronounced exactly the same as Pardel Lux in my languages), which is the German name for the Iberian lynx (Lynx pardinus), an animal I like very much. It was on the brink of extinction about 20 years ago, when I took the name and the avatar, fearing I would outlast it. The situation has improved after a massive and very expensive program to save them (see below), but they are still very much endangered. Wikipedia can tell you more.
And as I wrote then and copy&paste is easy: when in 2002 there were only 94 Iberian lynxes left in the world they were all captured to start a conservation and breeding program . They were de-wormed and washed. They will get their worms back, no problem, they get them with the diet. But the lynx lice that were their specific parasite are probably gone for good. They will still occasionally get some lice from other animals, from the rabbits they mostly eat, or from birds. But the lice won’t like it very much and will jump ship as soon as they can. Lice are so attached to their favourite hosts that they can be used to confirm or refute other theories about when humans and chimpanzees diverged or when humans first arrived to America.
They will still get ticks, though.
