I have two words for you: ice cream.

I rest my case.

They are thinking that they have made billions of dollars, so why stop now?

Yes, Quebec’s health system seems to be one step below the rest of Canada. That’s why it’s very odd that The Pontiac has no orphan patients. And the doctors don’t seem to be overworked. When I have called my GP, I can usually get an appointment within a week.

Oddly enough (because in many ways it is the red-headed stepchild of Quebec regions), everyone in the Pontiac region of Quebec, west of Gatineau/Hull, has a family doctor. We were assigned one within a month of receiving our provincial health cards.

In Sesotho, a language of Southern Africa, there are no swear words, however there are insults that (I was told) may cause someone to want to fight or even kill you.

Those insults:

• I’m not your mother
• You are like a cat that jumps across a ravine and scribbles up the other side

I also have RockSmith and a bass guitar. However, for 3 years I have been playing in local groups (the last year has been a community open mic where up to a dozen musicians sit around and strum together) and having a lot of fun. The thing is that these are almost all elderly people, self-taught, so they are not trying to become rock stars, just to enjoy playing music together. Playing music I have never heard before has been very good for developing my ear.

I go through periods of playing RockSmith a lot, and then not playing it at all for several months. Discovering user-created tracks that can be added as DLC has been fantastic.

Given that she, and her entire band, have been proven to use recorded tracks instead of performing live at their concerts, I don’t see that this is a big departure.

The other thing I would mention is that even if you learn standard Japanese anime is going to have a huge amount of slang and idioms.

The good thing is that, as in most modern Japanese, it will also have a huge amount of English loan words. The pronunciation may be slightly different, but you can recognize things like “hambaagaa” or “paypaa”.

Of course, sometimes it can go too far, like when I lived in Japan in the 90s and on days when they encouraged people not to drive themselves, it was a “No mycaa dayi” (“No my car day”).

Do you have any idea how much more expensive flying used to be? When I was small, in the 1960s, people might take one overseas flight in their lives. Some never did.

A quick search indicates that a round-trip flight between New York and London in 1965 cost about $3,500 in today’s dollars. Now it averages $800.

Not that I disagree that airlines are nickel and diming people and keep pushing to see how far they can go before it hurts their bottom line.

Let me know when you find a movement that is not kinetic!

people they’ve given no other choice or recourse

I don’t know, I find I also have the option to not consume media that I can’t pay for or justify ethically. For instance, the only streaming service we have a subscription for is The Criterion Channel.

For about 1 year my two sons and I played Rock Band, mostly The Beatles, everyday when they came home from school. At least an hour each day. We played other versions of Rock Band, but the Beatles was easily our favorite.

It directly led one of them to learn the piano and eventually get a master’s degree in composing, and the other to enjoy playing in bands and performing in musical theatre.

I read a column recently in my local paper by a farmer whom I know.

He argued persuasively that the problem with GMO crops is not that they have been genetically modified, but that the modification is often to allow them to resist high concentrations of pesticides. So the food that you are getting has been exposed to massively higher amounts of toxic chemicals.

Makes sense to me.

I’m currently reading in 3 languages, but a bit more narrowly than you.

When I was a young teen, and reading SF&F books voraciously (sometimes a book a day, or more if I had them), I ran across the Perry Rhodan series.

Finally something I wouldn’t run out of! It started in Germany in 1961, and published a novella weekly since. (They haven’t missed a week, and are currently past issue 3,000.)

The first 150 or so were translated into English and I scoured used book stores until I had all of them.

Now, 50 years later, I spent a week in Germany and bought issue 3323 in a railway station bookstore. My German was never great, and is now worse, so Google Lens has helped me get through it.

When I came home I did some searching and found all the English translations as e-books. I’ve read a couple dozen of the early ones and they are pretty dreadful. My 14-year-old self was not very discerning.

I also found e-versions of the German originals up to about #2000, which I could read laboriously, and French translations of the first 1,000.

The latter is a game changer because my French is good enough to read with only occasional dictionary lookups. Reading with Google books allows me to tap as word and see the English instantly, so it’s quite convenient.

I probably played Max Payne 2 from start to finish three or four times. It’s superb.

Where we are, these things are stupidly expensive. Almost twice the cost of normal oreos. Is there something there you see something no there’s nothing

The main thing is dealing with deductions for charitable giving, tuition, rent payments, etc.

That would explain why a pencil, which contains a “lead” (actually a polymer or graphite now) is Bleistift

Well, not terribly subtle, but if you are fighting with your spouse and they complain that you never say anything nice about their family, you can respond with:

“Well, I have to say that your in-laws are better than my in-laws”

If you are in Canada, there is a drop-in alternative to SodaStream CO2 cylinders. It’s called Indigo, and I have found cylinders in Giant Tiger and Home Hardware. They are also significantly cheaper both to buy and refill then SodaStream.

I don’t know if Indigo sells the machines themselves, or only the cylinders, but since I already had a SodaStream machine, it didn’t matter.