People can’t leave toilets alone. They keep fussing with the concept of a toilet, arriving at the most bizarre iterations. At a restaurant in Quebec City today, I saw the most insane set-up so far.

You enter the toilet through a door and see that it has some stalls with doors. In the same space where people are waiting for their turn to enter a stall, there are urinals. Here’s what it looks like:

The restaurant is popular, and there’s always a group of women of all ages mulling in front of the stalls, waiting their turn, washing their hands, looking in the mirrors. Can you imagine a man who’d whip out his penis and start using the urinal right there? Why wouldn’t the women call the police? We were at that restaurant with my 16-year-old niece. Who but the most unhinged pedo would use the urinal? Thankfully, everybody at the restaurant was normal and nobody used the urinals. But imagine how bad the situation can get if just one weirdo comes there to eat.

Even without the open-air urinals, the set-up is dumb. Men don’t want to hang out with women in front of the toilet stalls. Women don’t want to emerge from a stall and see men hovering around. As a result, there were no men at all in the vicinity of that toilet. I have no idea what men do for their needs but that restaurant has no accommodation for them.

Just so you, folks, understand what I’m dealing with, here’s a real-life story. I have two people at my department who really love a certain classroom. They love it so much that they refuse to teach anywhere else. Every year they drive everybody nuts with their demands to be assigned that particular classroom.

The problem is, they also want to teach at the exact same time. But there’s only one classroom they both insist on having. So today they came up with a plan and unveiled it to the administration. Here’s the plan:

1. They will both teach their different courses in that classroom at the same time.
2. The classroom is to be split by means of a “portable room divider.”
3. An additional teacher’s table with a computer should be brought in.
4. An additional screen should be placed on the wall.
5. And the pièce de résistance of the whole proposal – prepare for it – the windows in the classroom should be boarded up. Don’t ask why. I didn’t because I’d rather not know. Based on my experience, no joy happens when you start asking why.

You realize, I hope, that many other people teach in this classroom, so apparently, this entire set up should be taken down immediately after this one joint session. And then put up again. And then taken down. And then … And so on in perpetuity.

Welcome to my life, my dear friends.

I haven’t been to Quebec City and completely forgot (or never noticed) how much it resembles San Sebastián, my favorite city in Spain.

I could have come here the whole time instead of traveling so far for the same thing.

I’m at my niece’s dance competition in Quebec City. Her team is winning, so we will head over to the showcase in a couple of hours. I’m very fortunate in that her dance is hip hop because it’s the only music I like.

We’ve seen some extraordinary teams today. There are choreographers who are seriously talented. My niece’s team is the best but it’s a very tough competition.

I strongly believe that people drop last names of Russian authors because they think this makes them sound more intellectual. Here’s an example:

Overall it's solid but I just do not think Beloved, Madame Bovary, or The Great Gatsby belong in the top 11 novels of *all time*. Like, if you've read Chekhov or Dostoevsky, you simply would not put put Gatsby over them, you just wouldn't. pic.twitter.com/SOmfPIXrDV

— Claire A 📚 (@CoffeeandIrony) May 17, 2026

Chekhov most certainly didn’t write any novels. But “Claire A” doesn’t know this because she never read anything by him. Or, I would guess, by any other author on the list.

As for Madame Bovary, there wouldn’t have been any Anna Karenina without it. It’s a novel that inspired half of the European literature of that era. Not that a silly airhead who loves “Chekhov’s novels” would know any of that.

Pío Moa is insanely biased in favor of Francisco Franco. But mainstream narratives are even more insanely biased against. One would think that half a century after Franco’s death we could all calm down and discuss him without foaming at the mouth. But that’s not happening, and one has to scratch one’s way to some semblance of knowledge about the actual facts by reading different accounts and finding the middle ground between the extremes.

The glaringly obvious thing that nobody in Spain is ready to discuss is why the country was stuck between Franco and Stalinism and had to make that choice in a civil war. Why did things get so extreme? Why is the reaction to these events so overinflated almost a hundred years later?

Extreme forms of attachment to the past are an avoidance mechanism aimed at hiding from the present. This is true for societies as well as individuals. In Spain it’s not possible to discuss the civil war and the dictatorship in a dispassionate manner. People freak out and start spluttering. Pío Moa might be wrong on a bunch of things but at least he’s trying to have a normal conversation.

This is what they call a shrimp salad in Chicago:

One isn’t spoiled for choice in airports but this habit of offering a mountain of unshredded and unwieldy greenery is beyond my comprehension. How is a person supposed to stuff it into themselves? And why are the actual vegetables so marginalized? Are they the conservative minority of this dish?

I love airport exhibits because they are often very philosophical. An airport is a typical liminal space where you are in between different parts of your life, and this makes it the perfect place to think.

The Lambert St Louis airport has a photo exhibit that follows a real-life mystery. A cache of old photos was found at an estate sale in St Charles, MO. It featured a couple that, in the 1950s, traveled the world in a way that few people traveled back then. The photographer who found the cache placed them online and asked people to help him find out the identity of the missing couple. Who were they? Do they have any descendants? And why was the evidence of their unusual lives discarded like this?

Internet sleuths pored over the images and finally identified the adventurous couple. The final image of the exhibit features a terse message that solves the mystery.

“Hi. I’m their niece. I sold the photos at an estate sale” the message states.

The exhibit offers a very definitive answer to the question that rages on social media these days. Is it worth giving up on progeny to be able to travel more? The sadness of Harry and Edna’s discarded existence is answer enough.

I watched Tucker Carlson’s discussion about AI with Kevin O’Leary. I use AI very little and wouldn’t notice it if tomorrow it disappeared completely. Plus, I’m amenable to Carlson’s argument that data centers are ugly and loud. But in this discussion, I believe O’Leary won. Not that he’s extremely bright or anything. One thing he said was so patently ridiculous, I thought I’d never stop laughing. O’Leary clearly has sinusitis and speaks like an elephant with a clamp on his trunk. To illustrate the beauties of AI, he explained that he recently got a full-body scan that is now much cheaper because of AI. The scan revealed to him that he has a sinus infection. Which anybody not completely deaf and blind could have told him for free.

Still, Tucker didn’t manage to vanquish even this level of discourse. He spent an inordinate amount of time developing the favorite argument of Michael Moore that tax breaks for large companies are bad. Or that Google is not more moral than China. Compared to this accumulation of silliness, even O’Leary with his AI sinusitis sounded more intelligent.

It was a close match with O’Leary holding a slight edge.

I don’t understand why every airline in America — public and private — doesn’t have @Starlink. It’s incredible. You can make FaceTime calls with better reception anywhere in the world 35k feet up in air than most reception on ground. WiFi on planes is infuriatingly bad. Still.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 15, 2026

Only an absolute moron and a decided enemy of humanity communicates by any means that bypasses writing from a plane. Aside from that, it’s a surefire way of losing faith in humanity if you are forced to find out the kind of stupid things people talk about on their FaceTime calls.