A regular commenter on my Montreal news blog this week:

I work with tourists every day and it’s interesting to see what different people from different places notice about Montreal. Today I had three women from Vancouver who couldn’t believe how little homelessness there is in Montreal, whereas an older couple from a small city in Germany were aghast by the amount of homelessness we have. New Yorkers find the Metro to be pristine. The British can’t believe how many trees are on our residential streets. The Swiss find our streets to be extremely dirty, the Americans wonder how we keep them so clean. People from Melbourne love all the benches. One thing that most people seem to agree on is that Montreal is very vibrant, yet at the same time quiet and laid-back.

In a neighbourhood fruiterie yesterday a woman asked me to reach her down a can of drink from the top shelf in a cooler. She wasn’t tiny and not apparently disabled, but I’m only 5’2” myself. However, I was easily able to reach the thing she wanted. 

She laughed when I observed this was the first time anyone had ever asked me for that kind of help. It was unexpected.

but I like plants with multicoloured leaves. These are a couple of the coleus plants I bought for a pittance at the market in June and they've thrived – but in a few weeks they’ll be dead. They’re not native plants – the first hint of overnight frost will do for them.

I was not allowed to wear flip-flops as a kid. My parents had old-fashioned ideas about kids having to wear solid, heavy Oxford shoes at all times lest their ankles or feet become crooked, or something like that. I didn't have any orthopedic issues or injuries, either.

I don’t know how common the heavy shoes idea was (I’ve never read of anyone else coping with wearing socks and heavy shoes all summer, on parental principle) but both my parents bought it unquestioningly.

The only summer I was able to circumvent this was after grade 2, the year I made my first communion, when I took to wearing the white shoes from the quasi-bridal communion outfit. They were light and slipped on and off easily, so convenient, and I wore them until they fell apart. But they must have looked odd along with the tomboyish shorts and t-shirts I tended to wear.

The other footwear fight I had with my parents was an absolute proscription against being barefoot. If they so much as spotted me slipping to the bathroom from my bedroom without slippers on, they would hit the roof. Was this because of some association between bare feet and beatniks, as they persisted in calling counterculture people well into the 1970s? I don't know what other reason they might have had, and if I could ask them now, they would deny it had ever happened.

Editing to add: Google AI replied, when I asked about why it was believed that children should wear heavy, solid footwear:

Historically, it was widely believed that children should wear solid, rigid lace-up shoes at all times because parents and medical professionals thought a child’s developing feet and ankles required external structural support to grow straight and strong. From the late 19th century through the mid-to-late 20th century, letting a child walk barefoot or in flimsy shoes was thought to risk permanent physical damage.

There was more, but this is the gist. It also adds:

Modern pediatric podiatry has completely overturned this consensus.

Vive les gougounes!

I was just rabbit-holed into the Wikipedia articles on Fidonet, UUCP and other proto-internet systems, and it made me remember again a big thing I can’t remember – the reason I originally got a modem.

I didn’t need one for paying work and I didn’t yet have any friends who were online, such as it was at the time. I was a typesetter and starting to work with early page layout programs but nobody I knew was a programmer or even an amateur hacker. Moving files around was done with floppies, nobody was uploading or emailing files around yet. I didn’t tend to splash out on tech gadgets, either.

But with the modem I discovered BBSes, and through them, I met a circle of local folks who knew about Fidonet and “doors” and who were into Pyroto Mountain. 

One of these people offered to get some of us UUCP connections, and that was my first actual email address @ozrout.uucp.  Then I stumbled into Usenet and we all know how that went.

But why did I initially want a modem and what was I expecting? I have a good memory for so many things in my life, but not this. It feels like a weird gap as I’d expect if someone had done a Jedi mind trick on me.

Chatting yesterday with someone in an organization I do some work for, and he starts telling me that his son is getting married soon, congratulations and so on, and then goes on to say how happy his mother is, because the lad is marrying his cousin, who's also her grandchild. 

I know this is not unusual in many cultures but I realized I was at grips with an ingrained cultural taboo. I was relieved to find out that my acquaintance was not himself married to a cousin, but to a woman from outside his culture entirely. Hapsburg outcome avoided.

I'm designing and typesetting a big book of Marxist commentary.

On second pass, they edited a mention of Taiwan to “China’s Taiwan region.”

I commented to the publisher, “That’s planting a flag, for sure.”

He responded, “Taiwan has always been part of China.”

It took all I had not to reply “Yes, and Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia.”

One of these days I’m going to gather together a lot of my people and collectively sue McDonald’s for bringing the “Mc” prefix into disrepute.

When I was a kid, we lived in a neighbourhood where the closest grocery store was an A&P.

It had a feature no other grocery chains had at the time – in fact, one that was unusual here till decades later: a coffee grinder. It was up front by the doors, so you were greeted by a rich aroma of fresh-ground coffee and a slight drift of coffee grounds around it on the floor.

The coffee was sold, I've since discovered, in three levels of quality. The best stuff was packaged in a black tin with the name BOKAR in gold in a striking Art Deco typeface. I found this fascinating and mysterious – my parents never bought BOKAR, not having any method of brewing coffee besides instant, and instant coffee smells like a wet dog to me.

We left that area just after I turned 9, and never went to an A&P anywhere else, but I've since realized I was deeply imprinted by both the coffee and the lettering. I didn't start drinking coffee till my late teens when I discovered espresso with some of my more bohemian friends, around the same time I started work as a typesetter.

My life has been spelled out in decorative letters and coffee beans.

I live under a flight path. Installing Flightradar 24 has interested me in seeing which planes make the most outrageous noises overhead (Airbus 300s and Embraer e195s) but I also learned something else.

Flightradar 24 has shown me that, in general, most planes passing over before noon are landing, followed by a relative lull after noon, then mostly takeoffs in late afternoon and evening.

What always puzzled me before was that the overall sound always goes down the scale as a plane passes over. But now I know it’s irrelevant to whether the plane is going or coming. Going down the scale strongly suggests that the plane is landing, but no. It’s dopplering, coming or going.

I also need a word for the uncanny moment when a plane briefly casts you into shadow – it happens here quite often. Aeroclipse?