Fragile Bird

Women are used to sexual freedom, indeed, and I agree with you, Kissd, that there will be a big increase in unwanted pregnancies. But things will change after a few years of suffering, I think it could go back to the way it was before the pill came out. People have always had recreational sex, just not in the amount our generation enjoyed. Out if curiosity, are you male or female, and how old are you? I suspect reality will hit hard for females.

If they get birth control pills banned, a helluva a lot of recreational sex will vanish. Pregnancy + no access to abortion is a grim combination.

Trump is famous for being the first president in a hundred years who didn’t have a dog.

I don’t know what you guys have in the US, but there are no “watch repair shops” that I’ve ever seen in Canada. You go to a good jeweler, the kind that sells watches. They usually have a repair person on staff.

I’d give them the benefit of the doubt. They’d had previous German Shepherds without a problem. The stories say they brought in trainers, and when a professional trainer can’t break the biting habit I don’t think you can lay that at the feet of the owners.

I have a rant about shopping carts. I feel I should conjure up @Ser Scot A Ellison at this point. I am so annoyed at my fellow Costco members. Not only do some leave their carts lying around in the parking lot (not as much as regular grocery stores) but they leave so much trash in the cart. I don’t think I should have clean up pizza slice plates and food sample cups and empty boxes. Very annoying!

“Everything happens for a purpose!”

I see the London, Ontario court hearing the case of the truck driver who ran over the Muslim Pakistani family, killing four of them, back in 2020 has found it to be an act of terrorism. That’s a first in Canada for white violence. It carries an automatic sentence of life in prison with no hope of parole for 25 years. The judge refused to use his name in court. He’s only 23 now and I assume time in custody will count towards the 25 years, so he could potentially get out of jail at the age of 45. I sincerely hope not, but time makes people forget things. The name of the family was Afzaal.

Bloody German Shepherds have been completely ruined by stupid breeders in North America. For decades they’ve been bred to be aggressive, for the security dog trade. I see from stories the dog has had lots of training sessions. The Bidens had the same issue with their previous German Shepherd, Major, the dog having been banished from the White House. I think Commander has been banished now as well. One of the stories says the White House tours had to be stopped at one point to clean up a puddle of blood near the gift shop, for crying out loud. The Bidens love the breed, having had other German Shepherds in the past. It’s unfortunate they’ve had bad luck with two dogs in a row. Decades ago you saw people in the park around here with German Shepherds but they’ve completely vanished now. In my local area there were some bad incidents with the breed and dogs were put down. The only trace of them is cross-bred mutts that have obvious GS looks. Oh, and that slender look was bred for, and the breed became notorious for hip dysplasia. People stayed away from the breed because no one wants monster-sized vet bills with the end result of advice from the vet to put the dog down because it’s in such pain.

Bring it in to a good jewelry shop to get an estimate of what repairs would cost. You can then decide if you want to spend the money on it. The jeweler should easily be able to tell you its value. Hell, the shoe repair guy I go to for watch batteries and leather straps if something gets worn out, has a sharp eye for value. The watch’s mechanics scream out value to anyone with experience, not to mention the gold band.

I have dinner with friends almost every Sunday night, and I usually bring the salad (and a bottle of wine, and sometimes a cake I bake, and often I bake the birthday cakes). The Great British Baking show has been in reruns on tv here, and in a bread episode contestants made focaccia, add ingredients on top please! One of the ladies had been on holiday on an island in the Mediterranean, Crete or Cyprus or some such place, and had been served bread with roasted red grapes, fennel and feta. I thought that sounded like it would be tasty in a salad and did that a couple of weeks ago, to great success. We talked about other cheeses and we decided it would be nice with a blue cheese too, so my Sunday salad will have the roasted, seedless, red grapes, slivers of fennel and a nice, crumbled, Danish blue.

I was just rereading this, and I wanted to mention a couple of things I came across on the internet regarding porridge. I assume oatmeal? I chop up half an apple and add it at the start of cooking, and later sprinkle some cinnamon on it. And the other suggestion I came across was with regard to adding some protein to that breakfast by stirring in a tablespoon of peanut butter at the end. Weird, I thought, but not bad at all.

A whole week without chocolate! I can’t remember the last time I did that. Week two starts today.

You wouldn’t believe how relentless the Florida commercials are on Canadian tv.

I simply can’t understand how many Canadians still go to Florida, even with everything going on. Travel to Florida by Canadians dropped dramatically due to Covid, leaving Floridians crying in their beer. Before Covid they got 4 M plus visitors a year. The low point was less than 500,000. In mid-2023 Florida crowed that numbers in the fourth quarter of 2022 were almost at pre-Covid levels, with a million visits. Ron desatan announced visitor numbers were up sharply, but 91% are from the US, so, meh. Americans don’t seem bothered about what Florida does. More interesting to me is the fact fewer Canadians are interested in visiting the US. Once upon a time the number was close to 60%, the most recent survey I saw said the number is about 48%. I’m surprised it’s that high.

I’m not going to be foolish enough to say I will never set foot in the uS again, but there are states I will definitely not visit. Like Alabama and Florida.

I just haven’t been posting even though I’ve been listening to a lot of books. Recently I decided to re-listen to the Hamish Macbeth books, or at least the last ten or so. Once I got into them I decided to re-read the whole lot. There are 36, but they’re short, most about 6 hours, and it’s like eating candy. For those of you who haven’t read them, they are all titled “Death of a ….”, a Liar, a Bore, a Policeman, a Witch, a Perfect Wife etc. M. C. Beaton, of course, also wrote the Agatha Raisin series. I used to really enjoy them, but Beaton likes to torment her characters and I got tired of poor Agatha being so silly in her personal life. The tv series is good, though, and funny. Coincidentally PBS started running the Hamish Macbeth tv series, which I’ve recorded, but the series is god-awful bad. Only Hamish retains his name, every other character is renamed. Even his mutt Towzer is transformed to a Westie named Jock. Scotland, ya know, he has to have a Westie named Jock. I vaguely remember a controversy about the series, I wonder if Beaton ordered them to change all the names because the writing diverged so badly from the books. And 6’5” Hamish becomes not-even-5’7” Robert Carlyle, which is even worse than Tom Cruise playing Jack Reacher. They didn’t even bother giving him the bright red hair that is Macbeth’s trademark, though he does capture a certain sardonic look I imagine Hamish gets, but not Hamish’s brilliant smile. The books are police investigation/murder mysteries, but they’re not like the classic murder mysteries where you get enough clues to guess the murderer. Facts are presented as uncovered, and you can be really misled. And there’s a detective, Blair, who hates Macbeth so much, he does really evil things, up to trying to have him murdered, yet never really faces any consequences for his actions. Very cartoon like, but fun, and the same tactics are used in Agatha Raisin. Beaton died a couple of years ago, and there’s a prologue in book 34 by a fellow named R.W. Green, who started ghost writing for her. They had lengthy discussions about the character, and apparently even into her 80s Beaton was full of plot ideas. I’m not sure when he started to help her, but his name appears on 34, Death of a Green-Eyed Monster, and 35, Death of a Traitor. I have put a hold on book 36, Death of Spy. Green has smoothly picked up the baton, doing a much better job than some of the other ghosts who’ve picked up, say, Agatha Christie. I found the Poirot books to be awful. I haven’t looked up the Agatha Raisin books, perhaps Beaton found a writer to carry on there as well. Hamish follows in the fine tradition of the character that never ages, having appeared in the mid 1980s, remaining in his 30s in 2024. The first 15 books are read in a fairly rough manner by Shaun Griindell, though he smooths out in the later books, and then by Graeme Malcolm, who has a more sophisticated delivery. Unfortunately Malcolm has aged, unlike Macbeth, and I now find his voice is too old for the 35-ish Macbeth. Still good, though.

Have I lost my mind? I could have sworn I responded to this post. I can’t believe a steakhouse would have the nerve to tell their clients to cook their own steak. I expect to be served a meal when I go to a steakhouse, not a hot plate and do-it-yourself instructions.

This thread has been deeply disappointing. There’s a legendary Hat thread that was here before my time, where people introduced themselves to other board members. You had to post a picture of yourself, wearing a hat.

There’s a Canadian brand of cough medicine called Buckley’s, that runs an ad campaign that says “It’s awful, but it works!”

Bloody hell.

There are things you can eat that are low calorie and filling. Lots of vegetables. A good serving of cauliflower, boiled sweet potatoes, a salad with chopped red or green peppers, carrots, radishes, cucumber etc. Add a can of tuna to the salad.

Five days down, 35 to go. I help run our coffee service after mass on Sunday, and we serve Tim Horton’s timbits with the coffee. Americans call them donut holes, I think. We also sometimes have cookies and cake, and today we had chocolate cake. No cake for me, or chocolate timbits. And it turns out there are a couple of us who’ve given up chocolate for Lent. I mentioned this to our parish priest, and he laughed and said they never told him as a kid that Sundays aren’t included in the prescribed sacrifice days. If you’ve given something up (giving up meat is a fairly common sacrifice) you’re allowed to eat that item on Sundays. If I ever knew that I’d forgotten it. However, as I said, while I’m doing this during Lent I’m not doing it as a religious thing, so I am not going to eat any chocolate on Sundays in any event.

I have to say this is unfair. In the scary old days you could be locked up in the insane asylum very, very easily. There are notorious stories about families being unwilling to look after ill members of their families and just having them committed. Especially disobedient women and mildly mentally ill people, or people of low intelligence like children with Down’s Syndrome. There were so many institutions because there were so many unwanted people. To this day there’s a terrible stigma to admitting you have mental health issues. Many of the homeless today are people who would otherwise have been locked up in an asylum. The shame is that people don’t want to spend the money on mental health care, and not that we don’t have more asylums.

You Brits always do weird things!