My daily bread

I haven’t contributed a recipe in a while, so here’s something I make almost every day.

Fluffy, tasty naan

Naan so delicious you'll want to just eat it by itself
Prep Time2 hours
Cook Time15 minutes
Total Time2 hours 10 minutes
Course: Snack
Cuisine: Indian
Keyword: bread, butter, naan
Servings: 3 people
Author: tony
Cost: $5

Equipment

  • 1 Cast iron pan

Ingredients

Yogurt mixture

  • 1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
  • 1 extra-large egg
  • 1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Yeast

  • 2 tbsp honey
  • 1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
  • 1 1/4 tsp yeast

Dry ingredients

  • 3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
  • 2 tsp table salt

Other ingredients

  • 1 tsp Avocado oil
  • 1 tbsp melted butter

Instructions

Blooming the yeast

  • Add the 2tbsp of honey into a small bowl.
    2 tbsp honey
  • Add the hot water to the honey and mix well to dissolve.
    1/2 cup hot water (40-50C)
  • Sprinkle the yeast on top, and mix it into the honey solution.
    1 1/4 tsp yeast
  • Let the mixture sit for 10 minutes while the yeast blooms. The yeast will rise to the top like foam.

Mix the other wet ingredients

  • Pour the yogurt in a separate bowl.
    1/4 cup plain kefir yogurt
  • Add the egg and mix together.
    1 extra-large egg
  • If you added the yogurt and egg straight from the fridge, you will need to bring up the temperature of the mixture to room temperature. This will prevent the butter from re-hardening into clumps when you pour it in.
  • Once your yogurt mixture is warm, pour in the melted ghee/butter and mix.
    1/4 cup ghee or melted butter

Prepare the dry ingredients

  • Put your flour in a medium-large mixing bowl.
    3 cup all-purpose wheat flour
  • Add the 2 tsp salt and mix well.
    2 tsp table salt

Mix the wet and dry ingredients

  • Once your yeast has bloomed, pour its contents into the yogurt mixture and mix them well.
  • Pour the wet ingredients into a little "well" in the flour mixture.
  • Mix everything together. Use a spatula at first, but when all the liquid has been absorbed just knead the dough with your hands. You need to get the point where the dough ball is slightly moist to the touch without sticking to your hand. Add additional flour if needed.
  • Put the avocado oil on top of the dough, just enough to make sure it stays moist. If it's very humid where you live you may not need to do that, but in my well-ventilated Montreal apartment in the winter it's needed. I use an avocado oil spray for this.
  • Cover the dough and let it rise for 1 hour.

Divide the dough

  • After the dough has risen, knead it lightly again to get the excess air out.
  • Divide the dough into individual pieces. How many pieces is really up to you, I used to make 8 pieces but now I make 6 because I like my naan relatively thick and chewy.
  • Cover and let sit for 10 minutes.
  • Warm your cast-iron pan while the dough is resting. Contrary to what you may have heard, this is done at a fairly low temperature, on an electric range use 3/10. My range uses a weird system that goes from "low" to 7 so I use small element setting 2.

Stretch out and cook your naans

  • For each of your little balls of dough, stretch and roll it out as large as your pan will accept. It's never going to turn out exactly round, but that's the beauty of naan.
  • Put the naan in the pan and let it cook for 90 seconds.
  • Flip the naan over and cook it for 1 minute. As a tip, I usually use that minute to roll out the next naan, it's pretty much perfect timing for doing this.
  • Brush the melted butter on the top side of the naan and let it cool for a couple of minutes.
  • Put your naans away into a container that doesn't let moisture escape. Your naans will be good for about a day, after that they tend to dry up and not be so good.

Notes

This is not a diet naan. I deliberately use butter because of the taste and texture. The original recipe called for vegetable oil which would be healthier but not as delicious. Any oil with a neutral taste should do the trick, I would recommend avocado oil if you're made of money. You may be tempted to use hemp oil figuring that its nutty taste will complement the bread taste, but I tried using it just to keep the dough moist and I found it distinctly unpleasant for reasons I don't quite understand.
I got the idea of using honey to bloom the yeast one night when I wanted to add a little sweet taste to the bread, and it worked so well I never bloomed the yeast with just sugar again. You will taste a difference between different honeys. 
It's important to use fine salt in the flour, as opposed to coarse salt or kosher salt. Fine salt distributes evenly through the flour with mixing, but larger grained salt doesn't, and that makes naans that have weird salty spots.

Rosemont Montreal Whisky

I’m no stranger to doing things “for a bit of a lark”, especially when alcohol is concerned. I don’t drink much anymore but I do cook, and it so happened that for about a week now I’ve wanted to make Poulet Vallée d’Auge but needed some Calvados as the recipe calls for it. Of course my local spirits store didn’t have it, so I thought I’d check out the web site, and it turns out that calvados is pretty expensive. Cheapest I found was something like $84 a bottle, and I didn’t feel like spending that much, so I looked for an alternative. I could have settled for a mickey of Cheminaud brandy but that didn’t tickle my fancy. I started to look at whiskys and this one caught my eye.

Rosemont Whisky bottle

Of course as someone who tends to like all things Montreal, this had my curiosity.

Surprisingly for a Canadian whisky, this is not a rye. It is made from 80% corn, 10% wheat and 10% barley from St-Constant, on Montreal’s South Shore. It’s not a single malt, it’s a blend, and it’s a bit pricey for a blend ($48.25 for a 750ml bottle). However, at this point I felt it was worth a try for the curiosity if nothing else. Frankly I was only picking up booze for cooking, and if this is sold at the SAQ it can’t be so bad that I couldn’t use it for cooking. The 3 years barrel aging had me a little skeptical, but again I felt it would probably do the job for the dish, and, well, a native Montreal whisky was worth trying. If only for a bit of a lark.

Buying this kinda reminded me of April 2013. On March 31st I had begun to walk the West Highland Way with my great friend Jay. I had spent months preparing for this, as much as I could do after my fire-related accident and skin graft. In fact I had prepared for this walk so well that I had greatly weakened my right heel, to the point where at some time during the hike it fractured. We weren’t able to do the whole walk and used a combination of a train and a lift from a very helpful man we met at the bothys near Ardlui who took us to Crianlarich to remove 30km from the route and, to be honest, compensate for my bad planning. The estimations I had made to determine where we were going to stay along the way were horribly, horribly off for the first two days of the hike. We took a train from Crianlarich to Tyndrum to shorten the trip and the 3 remaining days of walking went as scheduled… but the whole time my right foot kept getting more painful. I had picked up some diclofenac in Switzerland on the way in and I was taking triple doses just to deal. By the time we reached Fort William I could barely walk, but we were done with the hiking and heading to Ireland for a car tour so I just dealt with it.

Anyway, one thing we hadn’t done while we were in Scotland was visit a distillery (!), but there is one in Fort William at the end of the Way, the Ben Nevis distillery. At the time for some reason they weren’t doing tours but we went to the shop and I saw bottles of Loch Lomond Scotch Whisky. I knew I had to get a bottle of that. I taught myself to read at 5 with Tintin comics, and if you’re also a fan you’ll remember that Loch Lomond whisky is Captain Haddock’s drink. He’s always drinking the stuff. I wasn’t impressed by the “8 years aged” marking but it was quite cheap. And it was a bit of a lark. Well it was pretty awful and just tasted unfinished, but that didn’t stop Jay and I from drinking the whole bottle a week later in Belfast the night before we flew back to our homes.

What’s the point of this whole story? To be honest I kinda lost track of that early in the anecdote. This whisky (Rosemont) has me “feeling ways about stuff” and I feel that’s an important quality in a decent whisky.

And, well, Rosemont is a decent whisky. It’s quite smooth even when drunk neat. In fact, if I’m quite honest, it tastes a little light. However it does not have that “unfinished” taste that I detected in the Loch Lomond. It is not peated and reminds me of a highland kind of whisky. Strong hint of vanilla with a caramel finish, no unpleasant aftertaste. It has a relatively dark robe.

A glass of Rosemont Whisky, next to the bottle

This one has my seal of approval. This is not a mind-blowing whisky, but it’s also not priced like one, and if you’re looking for something Canadian that tastes pretty good and won’t break the bank, I encourage you to give it a try.

Montreal, QC

Further thoughts on the trade war

A few additional thoughts on the trade war.

First, we should simply send the US Ambassador back home and not approve any replacement.

For some reason people don’t seem to be keen on the idea of placing export duties on goods. It is a good idea because Donald Trump will just give exemptions from tariffs to companies linked to himself and his friends. By using export duties we make sure that there are no exemptions, and that we get the money. It sends the message that if Trump is going to hold tariffs over everyone’s heads, we’ll make sure that they hurt Americans first.

The money from export duties can be used to fund economic support measures that may be necessary to prevent economic harm for us Canadians.

One other measure I didn’t mention is that the federal and provincial governments should be forbidden from doing any business with American companies associated with Elon Musk — Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, Starlink, etc. as Musk appears to be looting and pillaging the US Treasury at this time, so any exposure to the entities linked to him may open us up for eventual ICC liabilities.

The pause in energy exports should be implemented soon, or subject to large export duties. This would ensure that we can still profit from trade with the USA without conceding anything, because that’s how you need to deal with a two-bit wannabe mob boss like Trump.

While we’re at it, we should also add Elon Musk to the list of “persona non grata” in Canada. We already have to deal with our own billionaire assholes, we definitely don’t need to import more.

How Canada can win the trade war

So Donald “frontotemporal dementia” Trump has decided to launch a trade war on Canada.

He is using fentanyl as a pretext in order to avoid having to involve Congress in this action, even though for the past 3 years US seizures of fentanyl coming in from Canada have added up to a few kilograms of the stuff. There is far, far greater cause for Canada to take action against the United States for the thousands of firearms that cross the border into Canada yearly. But that is neither here nor there.

There’s a trade war and Trump is imposing 25% tariffs on Canadian goods coming into the USA, except for oil which for some reason is only subject to 10% tariffs. This essentially cancels the previous North American free trade agreement which was negotiated by… Donald Trump.

Trump is a chaos agent who’s good at two things: breaking stuff, and running businesses into the ground. In other words, we’re not dealing with a rational force here. The doddering old fool has already said various times that he wants Canada as the 51st state. But of course that won’t be happening, and certainly not under Trump. I will personally pick up a rifle in anger to defend my country against Americans if it comes to that. And this country will fight until the last bullet has been fired. We would expect Americans to do the same if we invaded them.

Anyway, the point is that Donald’s goal is completely insane, and therefore we cannot rely on the tools with which people usually “fight” trade wars. You cannot negotiate with terrorists like Donald Trump, period. They are neither honest nor sane.

Therefore we, as Canadians, need to approach this with the idea that we need to squeeze the American economy until the Yanks do something about their crazy old fool. I don’t know, “regime change” or something.

Prime Minister Trudeau has already declared targeted retaliatory tariffs concentrating on goods manufactured in red states, which is smart, but is nothing near enough.

We need to go on the offensive and use our knowledge of current events in the USA to better target those industries that most need Canadian goods. And we need to pull the rug from under Donald’s feet.

As such I would suggest a multi-pronged approach to strike America where it would hurt the most, and make money doing it.

1- fight the US import tariffs with Canadian export duties. Trump figured that politically he can instantly kick inflation up 25% and survive. However if we impose 25% export duty on things going to the United States they will effectively rise in price by 50%, which is not tenable for the US economy. Also we get the first 25% of tax revenue, not the USA.

2- stop all energy exports to the USA. That includes electricity and oil.

3- implement 100% excise duty on any and all goods and services from companies where Elon Musk is CEO. That means Tesla vehicles, Starlink service, anything spent on X in terms of ad campaigns, etc. There are plenty of other EV manufacturers out there, and unlike Tesla they can build cars properly.

It’s only by fighting aggressively and proactively that we can defeat Donald and the Oligarchs. Let’s not waste this opportunity.

The emperor has no clothes

Dr. Philip Low, a former friend of Elon Musk who would seem to know him very well,  says it was definitely a Nazi salute.  But he offers a more nuanced explanation as to why.

Dr. Philip Low on LinkedIn

YouTube player

Elon Musk has always been a Neo Nazi.

Elon Musk “is aligned with the German neo-nazi party, opened the faucet of anti-semitism on the platform he purchased, follows neo-nazis, collaborates with neo-nazis openly, highlights neo-nazis, agrees with neo-nazi sentiment”. This has been made clear BY ELON in the posts that he’s made in Xitter, by his the moderation “policies” he’s brought to Xitter, and by his constant messing with the accounts of anyone who dares disagree with his fourth-reich ideas on the platform.
So why is anyone surprised by Elon literally doing a Hitler salute at the end of his speech on inauguration night? I’d like to say the signs were always there, but they’re not just signs, they’re fucking billboards.

Well, fuck.

Not sure what else to say really. Unless someone comes up with an explanation involving the very clever disappearance of literally millions of ballots from several states, “it is what it is”.

At least in 2016 you could argue that the people didn’t know what they were getting with Trump. That’s just bullshit in 2024.

Funny that I have a very American anecdote to illustrate what this feels like, but it’s 100% true. When I moved to the USA in 1999 (Fairview NJ) a buddy of mine came along to help out and visit New York. The day after we unloaded we get out early to go to the city, and my neighbor introduced himself. Now we both had beards at the time, and the guy opened by asking us if we were “from the House of David”, which I didn’t get right away… not wanting to antagonize the guy who lived above me I mentioned we were heading to the city, he said “what do you want to go to the city for, it’s full of [n-word]s and [sp-word]s!” I froze a little bit and realized that I really, really wasn’t in Montreal anymore and that this was the kind of new reality. I don’t remember much of what went on after, besides my handling it in my socially-anxious way of being very polite and then just kind of leaving.  I vaguely remember the k-word popping up at some point in the advice he gave us. It felt almost unreal TBH. The guy was very friendly to me — he saw me as a fellow white guy — but clearly our world views were divergent, to say the least.

Today I feel largely the same way about this election as I did about that introduction to my upstairs neighbor. I really wanted to think that Eddie (not his real name) was of another generation (IIRC he was in his mid-60s) and that this kind of shocking social attitudes would change over time, But judging from the campaign that we’ve seen from Trump, the vote tells us that no, there hasn’t been any progression. There has in fact been a huge regression. And it’s not “just” a racial thing either. It’s also a victory for misogyny, transphobia and hate in general.

It’s like if you visited a friend of the family you think you’ve known all your life, but then you find out that he was secretly a klan member the whole time.

Is there a silver lining to all this? There is for me, and it’s that I’m not an American. I know that the culture will cross borders like a metastasizing tumor, but at least I know that as of January 20th my life is not likely to change in a very direct way.  If nothing else, I don’t have to look on my neighbors with suspicion, although that may well come here as well along with the culture.

It’s a pessimistic view, but a realistic view. But, what do I know? My take on things as expressed previously was so wrong it’s practically embarrassing (but I’m leaving it up).

i want to believe poster, seen in "X-Files".
Me too, Mulder. Me too.

I really wanted to believe that America was better than this.

Sanewashing for fun and profit

Nothing brings out the rot in journalism like an election. Especially one with Donald “Felon” Trump, the Jason Voorhees of American politics. 2024 has been a banner year for journalism, in the way that 1865 was a banner year for Washington DC’s Ford Theatre.

First of all, Trump being the GOP nominee is nothing short of insane.  The guy is literally a convicted felon out on bail, running for President. He has been adjudicated responsible for a rape and keeps boasting that he was able to stack the Supreme Court just enough (including by the appointment of a guy who was credibly accused of sexual assault — who only squeaked by because Trump literally interfered with the FBI investigation into the assault allegation). And somehow some women want to vote for him. Also he literally led an insurrection where participants raided the US Capitol in order to stop the official recognition of the 2020 election AND TRY TO PHYSICALLY SEIZE THE VICE-PRESIDENT IN ORDER TO HANG HIM. But somehow none of this disqualifies him from becoming President. You literally would not be allowed to volunteer to chaperone schoolchildren with a record like that, but apparently you could end up having the nuclear launch codes.

A scented candle with the name "what the fucking fuck" and the slogan "smells like a good fucking question"

The question that’s been on my mind all year.
This photo courtesy of the Whiskey River Soap Co.  (not an affiliate link)

So that’s one factor. But, like a green teenager getting ready to watch his first horror film, let’s put the “unbelievableness” (to coin a phrase) of the situation aside and accept the Donald Trump candidacy as just what it is. Because to Americans it makes sense somehow.

Regina George in Mean Girls saying "stop trying to make fetch happen, it's not going to happen"
And by “fetch” we mean understanding American politics. But we all still have to deal with it.

Seriously, I believe that “it is what is it” is the most sensical explanation we’re going to get for that.

What is harder to accept at this point in history is the treatment Trump has received this year in the American news media. It’s frankly been so startling that a new term has been invented specifically to describe it. Journalists have been sanewashing the Donald Trump candidacy.

What is “sanewashing”, you ask? Think of it this way, when a company tries to manufacture some ecological credentials for itself that it does not deserve, it’s known as “greenwashing”. When another goes through some performative display of putting a little LGBTQ+ flag on the front door but also supports anti-queer initiatives, that’s known as “rainbow-washing”. And when Donald Trump delivers a pointless, rambling series of non-sequiturs in front of an audience, for example telling us how he’d rather be electrocuted than eaten by sharks (literally he did that during a campaign rally), and the press completely fails to point out how utterly insane his speech was, that’s called “sanewashing”.

Sadly this term was invented too late to be included in Webster’s annual list of new words for 2024. But boy, did the American corporate news media ever make that new word necessary. Because Trump’s campaign appearances have steadily been growing in sheer madness. The shark vs battery story was probably the mildest example of insanity in Trump’s 2024 speeches.  On one notable occasion he started talking about Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal  (movie and TV). He now desperately tries to make people believe that it’s a reference to people who come into the USA, but the first time he brought it up  what he was saying was “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner… But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

And how was that covered in the mainstream press? As much as they could the corporate press ignored that part of the speech. That Hannibal speech was on May 11th, and this was the headline of the New York Times article on that rally the next day: “Away From the Confines of a Courtroom, Trump Rallies Beachside at the Jersey Shore”.

From Zoolander, "I feel like I'm taking crazy pills"
Same here Mugatu. Same here.

Although this phenomenon can be seen happening throughout the corporate press in 2024, it must be noted that in the eyes of many the New York Times is the biggest offender when it comes to sanewashing. For some reason I cannot fathom, Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger has consistently been attempting to pick fights with the Democratic party in general this year, and really has done as much as it can to make Donald Trump look like a man who’s not in the throes of frontotemporal dementia. Or senility. Or tertiary syphilis. I mean, Trump still steadfastly refuses to provide his medical records so it’s really impossible to tell exactly what the fsck is wrong with him. Of course this also means that no condition can reasonably be excluded to explain his bizarre behavior.

The most egregious single example of sanewashing I’ve seen was after Trump’s speech on October 7th in which he literally said that immigrants were bringing bad genes to America. If you don’t know, that’s literally what the Nazis were saying in the 1930s. How did the New York Times cover it? “Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny”. I sh*t you not. That being said, this headline was so wildly inappropriate to describe what had gone on at the rally that it started a wave of backlash against the sanewashing phenomenon. And it forced a lot of people to take a long, hard look at Trump’s performance at his rallies. Not coincidentally, Trump has visibly been declining steadily since that time. Even Republicans can’t entirely sidestep the question “wtf is wrong with Donald” anymore — except the MAGA cultists of course —  and it’s leading to bizarre moments.

Like just a couple of days ago when, during a Q&A hosted by noted puppy murder enthusiast Kristi Noem (Governor of South Dakota), Donald decided that he no longer felt like answering questions, or giving a speech. So he had his sound guy play some tunes while he just stood there attempting to dance with moves that sometimes looked more like he was about to fall over. There were a couple of people in his audience who had heat-related emergencies, but Trump was just on stage “dancing” for almost FORTY MINUTES. And then he just left.

 

The New York Times headline? “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour”. Yes, an “odd town hall detour”. That’s kinda like saying that the “meat”  in Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge “raised questions”. Or, to craft a headline going back to the Lincoln thing, “Showing of ‘Our American Cousin’ ends early due to commotion in the audience”.

I could go on and on about this, but chances are if you’re reading this you’re well aware of many examples already. The real question is, why is the press doing this? The answer may surprise you! (or not, it all depends).

I post at Bluesky, it’s been my go-to social network since Elon took Twitter in the direction of full Nazi. Skeeters (Bluesky users) have the not unreasonable view that media outlets engage in sanewashing because they like Donald Trump and want him to win.

Meme with the kool-aid man busting through a brick wall.Text: "because they want Donald Trump to win the election"
Occam’s razor does seem to point to this conclusion

I think it’s not that simple, although I can see many of the arguments in favor of that opinion.

In my humble opinion, this is a byproduct of the corporate obsession with audience engagement.

Have you recently noticed how much Google search sucks nowadays compared with how it was about 10 years ago? You’re not alone. Journalist (and skeeter) Ed Zitron looked into what happened in the past few years at Google. According to him, the search experts were reaching a pretty extreme level of efficiency, which you would think is a good thing. But that’s because you’re not Google CEO Sundar Pichai. You see, Google’s actual money-maker is ads. So, if you’re a tech CEO with a serious case of consultant brain, you can only reach one conclusion — that if the user finds what they’re looking for on the first try, that’s a bad thing. There’s only one ad impression there. But if you have to make the user make several queries using increasing precision, then you’ve served 3, 4, 5 impressions. Isn’t that better? Let that sink in. This is Sundar Pichai’s legacy at Google — fscking up your search results so they can show you more ads and charge more to the companies that use Google ads. This is considered “greater engagement”. I am absolutely serious.

Remember when they warned you about social media: if you’re being offered something for free, then what you’re getting is not the end product. You are the end product. And you’re the one being sold by one party to another. That’s how social media companies make money.

Why am I bringing this up? Because media companies, including the news media, are doing the same thing. From a business point of view, they are using “engagement” to sell their brand to the public, and to sell ad impressions.

Ok you ask, how is that related to sanewashing Trump’s campaign? As with every election year in the USA, 2024 is seeing a huge boost in people watching news stations (OTA or on cable) and visiting news sites, many doing so several times a day, That’s great news for these outlets. They get to sell more ads, they get to keep their brands within viewers’ attention spans. But this only works as long as the Presidential race remains tight. Or, more realistically, as long as the Presidential race *appears* to remain tight. If one candidate is running away with the lead, the suspense disappears. People tune out of the news cycle. Engagement drops. Publishers are now unhappy. Revenues decline.

But given the premise of an improbably tight race, viewers will flock to their information sources, hit the refresh button like it owes them money, the brand remains uppermost in their minds, and lots of ad impressions are delivered. Publishers are now free to get back on the champagne while lighting large cigars with flaming Benjamins. And that’s why we’re being sold this idea of a an impossibly tight horse race. Sure, very rich owners (and upper management) of media companies probably stand to gain more in terms of tax cuts from a Trump presidency, but otherwise it’s really hard to make a case as to why media outlets somehow love Trump. The guy is talking about mobilizing troops against Americans just for disagreeing with him, and historically that eventually includes everyone who isn’t Donald Trump. Being in Donald’s good graces is something that’s as fleeting as an erection at a strip club when you’re really drunk. And while I was tempted to say that Trump is an entertaining character — a carnival barker in fact — and that journalists see coverage potential in that, the fact that they’re downplaying his “being entertaining” shows that they’re about as sick of it as the rest of us.

I think we’re being sold a lie. I don’t think the Presidential race is that close at all. I think that Harris will overwhelmingly win the popular vote, for a start, and that Trump will maybe get 40% of the vote. Certainly not significantly more than that. I believe that REAL polls — the private ones conducted for the political campaigns — reflect this, which is why Donald Trump is looking more like a corpse with every passing day. But American news organizations can’t tell us the truth at this time, because as with retailers at Christmas and pumpkin growers in October, news orgs rely on this time to make as much engagement as possible happen. There’s no chance of achieving that when the race is a blowout.

As a bonus, there is also a good and virtuous reason for the news media to make the race appear closer than it really is. In an election situation, if you feel that your side is winning big, you will simply not be motivated to go vote. After all, why bother with that when “your side” is going to win? However if the race is razor thin, which is what we’re being sold right now, there is an increased feeling that yes, one vote can make a difference, and it’s definitely worth taking time in your day to go to the polls. It’s certainly not a major motivation for news orgs, but it’s a silver lining to keep in mind as you keep looking at what has been a very frustrating year in news coverage for those of us in the reality-based community.

Anyway that was as close to a TED talk as I’m ever likely to give, if you’re still reading I trust y’all enjoyed that, and I hope you see the sense of what I’m saying.

The ultimate “fuck you” from the City of Montreal

Imagine this scene – it’s 11h30pm and you just got home, you were supposed to be about 500 miles away except for an incredibly frustrating car issue (more on that in a later post). So you park in the drop-off area in front of your apartment building because you need to take your daughter and your dog to your apartment before looking for a proper parking spot. So you wake up the little dear, leash the dog, grab as much luggage as you can, head upstairs, put the youngun to bed and make sure the K9 has food, take a leak, then get back there. You’re up there maybe 5 minutes before you head back down to find a place to park the whip.

Only when you get there there’s something on your windshield… a parking ticket. At 11:35pm on a Thursday.

And then it strikes you that there is a bunch of data entered on there and do a bit of math in your head, and realize that the parking warden must have seen you wrangling with the kid, the dog and the luggage, and then swept in, issued the ticket, and disappeared again like The Flash.

That pisses me off.

I’m not saying that people should be expected to help me out when I’m struggling with something, but when it’s clear that I’m just taking care of the fam and dropping people off it seems like bad faith for some asshole to just sweep in and deliberately kick me when I’m down. And if that’s the kind of people that the City of Montreal hires to monitor street parking, well, that just sucks.

I’m really curious to see exactly who it is that would be such a jerk, so I’m thinking that maybe I should establish exactly who it is by taking and posting photos  — I have a front-facing apartment so that shouldn’t be so difficult — and maybe one day confront this person and tell them about my concerns about how they’re doing their job.

Anyway I’m still pissed off. Maybe I should let my dog poop on the City Hall lawns and not clean it up… I really feel like I need to get some retribution here, $102 worth of it. That’s potentially a lot of poop.

This is a normal title for a political article in 2024

Yes, this is a screencap of the Rolling Stone web site, not altered.

Trump allies urge him not to be a "raging asshole" at debate
Standards are pretty low in 2024 presidential politics