Montreal’s Taxi Bureau is a huge embarrassment. Inspectors are stalking and intimidating people they suspect of using Uber. The other day, these idiots cornered a famous Italian chef who was visiting the city.

Montreal was hosting the huge C2 conference for the past 3 days (and my sister attended, by the way, because she is an important business woman), and the Taxi Bureau decided it was a good thing to do some Uber-hunting among the visitors from all over the world.

Montreal is the best city in the hemisphere but it does tend to go nuts in a regulation frenzy. As you might remember, the city has already outlawed food trucks and fireplaces. And words like chowder and lasagna.

Here is a link but it’s in French.

So I no longer can make my favorite dishes that take hours to cook and many flavors to develop. These dishes need attention and dedication but they have lost to a smiley, blue-eyed competitor with huge cheeks who needs me more. 

As a result, I started using the slow cooker. I made two different kinds of pot roast in it (on different occasions, obviously). It tasted very good, especially the one where I cooked the roast in red wine. Here is the problem, though. The food ends up looking sad and boring. Everything ends up being the same color. Does anybody know how to combat this issue? Is there an obvious solution here that I’m blanking on?

Today work email and social networks brought the following insights from my hugely Liberal colleagues:

1. Evolution is just a matter of opinion.
2. Rauner is the hero of the people of Illinois.
3. Rauner is the best.
4. Rauner is totally the best.
5. Women who abort are still immoral.

I’m sure there are people on campus who espouse other points of view. Maybe I will even hear from them at some point in time. I mean, it’s only been seven years. That’s no time at all for raging liberalism to manifest itself.

And now please excuse me, I need to go listen to some recordings of Bernie’s speeches to make myself feel less alienated.

P.S. This is a sarcastic post, in case anybody is wondering.

I’m starting to think that all of these apocalyptic  (and largely fake) articles about drug-resistant bacteria, swine flu, killer bees, etc are a marketing device. People who think the end is near are more likely to make ill-considered purchases. If horror is inevitable, why not just go and buy XYZ while one still can enjoy it?

A constant low-grade anxiety is very conducive to unbridled shopping.

Feedly is great because it shows me articles from all the websites I follow in the same standard black-letters-on-white-background format. I don’t have to deal with weird color combinations, strange fonts, flashing images, ads, or anything at all other than black letters on a white page. I don’t even know what people do to their websites. Which is just as well because it often is not that good.

Whenever Klara arrives at her changing table, she looks up and to the left. She sees something there that makes her very happy. She laughs, makes happy faces, and babbles for as long as we let her, staring at a mysterious interlocutor N and I don’t see. She doesn’t do that anywhere else in the house. It’s just this particular spot between the ceiling and the wall of her room where something very attractive to her but unseen to us is located.

We have arrived at a conclusion that there must be a portal to another dimension in that spot that only Klara has access to.

I wonder, are the folks who are ranting against “immoral” aborting women on campus email contacting their representatives in the Congress and urging them to pass the measures that will stop the spread of the horrible Zika virus? The virus that is destroying the actual lives of actual babies?

No, it’s not true, I don’t wonder. I know the answer. They don’t give a shit about babies. Fucking hypocrites.

There is a long article in the NY TIMES about a bunch of pouty, entitled men who are bored out of their heads and are excited over the possibility of inflicting Trump on the rest of us in order to punish us for not providing them with as much luxury as they believe they deserve. It’s really scary shit, folks. One can try to break through conviction, belief, opinion, anything. But there is no arguing with pouty entitlement.

I go to my work email, and what do I discover? A few colleagues noticed a goose with a broken wing on campus and decided to help it. Other colleagues asked for advice on how to protect a goose nest that they saw around campus. All was well and good until a couple of people decided to pollute the discussion with moaning about immoral women destroying “unborn life in the womb” and asking if this is what American soldiers have been dying for overseas. No, I don’t see the connection either. 

This is work email, mind you. It’s one thing to discuss working conditions on campus (of which conditions geese are a huge part, as you know from my previous posts). But I would be pilloried if I sent out any pro-abortion messages to the university community (and rightfully so because the work email exists for other purposes). In the meanwhile, we have to sit by quietly as we are publicly berated for being immoral women and for supposedly disrespecting soldiers because we believe we have the right to decide what occurs inside our own bodies. For fuck’s sake, is that the liberal academia I’m hearing so much about?

Of course, I sent out an email in response insisting that I not be exposed to this sort of propaganda in the workplace. I’m very angry right now.

Instead of addressing the director of the university press where I submitted my manuscript as “Dear Greg”, I addressed him as “Fear Greg.” Twice. I don’t think I need to get back in touch with my analyst to interpret the meaning of this slip.