Can we also have balloons and street food and Harry Bains leading a sign painting class for workers and a Don Messer tribute band? We could turn it into a real Jubilee! Also,Ms Smith and co. would be so confused we could have them and over the souther border before they have it figured out!

small44 , it’s not just GenZ. Retired Boomers living on a pension, immigrants trying to earn a basic living, working class folks of all ages, creeds, colours et alia, are all having a hard time. My lucky find is that Dollarama, a Canadian company, has a lot of in-house brands and a lot of non-American imports. and i has enabled us – creaky old boomers who worked in social good professions rather than for profits – to find almost everything we need either from Canada or at least not from the US, and still afford to eat relatively healthy and pay the cat’s vet bills.

Giant Tiger is also a good Canadian company to patronise. If I can’t get it there, I won’t wear it.

A big problem is cost. For many of us, Canadian products mostly cost too much. Because they are smaller, and often local/niche, the manufacturers do not gain the economies of scale that the large US/multinational companies do. One of the depressing things about this experience for me has been Canadians scolding Canadians who, due to their low income, cannot buy most of the Canadian products that pop up in discussion here, on reddit, on Facebook. Sure, company X makes great real wool sweaters in Nova Scotia, but if those sweaters cost $C175 each, you can bet my immigrant, young, old, and/or working class friends won’t be buying them, any more than they will be buying that vegan Canadian toothpaste that costs twice as much per ounce as the mass manufactured US ones.

Perhaps with time, some of these companies will grow enough to be able to offer lower prices, but until they do, me, Shelina, Dilpreet, Édouard, Rosie et alia will be buying our furniture at that non-American mass manufacturer, IKEA. And we’d like to remind everyone that Dollarama has a lot of house products – alas, not toothpaste – made here in Canada, that are effective and affordable for working people.

Thank you for going to all that trouble. I am definitely going to be tea shopping now!

Yeah. And I will be appointed the Queen of the May – in perpetuity.

It’s the Sun, you guys. They’ve become famous for losing lawsuits over the lies they print.

Thank you! It’s got exactly the kind of thing I have been searching for! May your (kitchen) drawers never give you grief and may you always be able to find that little silver nubbly thing that rolls under the couch!

Japanese and Chinese myths and legends have excellent representation in games and movies: the Egyptians have representation and followers everywhere! The Celts and Germanic peoples contributed pretty much everything found in European fairy tales. The Middle East gave us their myths and their gods, and people from European/North American cultures know at least a few Hindu Gods and their tales, again, often thanks to video games. That leaves sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania, and the Slavic and Siberian myths ‘underrepresented’. Can’t say about middle and South American ones: I suspect they are better known in the Americas than in Europe, but I dislike them, so haven’t the background to be sure.

Um, I hope you are talking kitchen, since the other drawers are more the business of Petulia, that one the Seamstresses think is an actual goddess. Bah! No one ever chanted “How can it close on the damned thing but not open with it? Who bought this? Do we ever use it?” in her name!

Ah, but Pimento, mon frère (ou peut-être ma sœur), that would be so boring, and inspire no science fiction whatsoever! It would mean that humanity made things far more complicated than they needed to be because we just can’t wait for more evidence to start hollering that we’ve got it all figured out and my idea is the END OF THE DISCUSSION!

My mother’s wedding ring. My father was a monster, so it’s not because of the marriage it represents. It was the cheapest he could get, it’s thin and worn down and battered, and, of all the kids, she gave it to me. When I die, however I am disposed of, that ring goes with me, because… she gave it to me!

We use Wikipedia a lot, mostly to understand references from another country or culture, the rest to answer the question: “Who the hell is s/he…” The latter enquiries are often interesting, but rarely resolve the real issue, which is “… and why is s/he famous?” At any rate, we send a goodly annual donation, because without Wikipedia, we’d be even more out of touch than we already are!

Oh, NO!

Anyway…

Here’s to the death of a company that has always looked down its nose at working people, brown people not wearing at least pearls and diamonds, anyone under the age of, say 21, and insisted on spraying you in the face with the latest Vogue magasine full page ad perfume as soon as you entered. It’s been a long time since HBC was anything more than a shortcut to some other place.

There is a very low risk of getting H5N1 by eating the meat of infected cows or chickens, provided that meat has been properly cooked. The heat of cooking destroys the virus before it gets near us. However, you may have noticed that the prevalence of salmonella, e.coli and listeria infections has already been rising in the USA due to contamination of fresh produce that has, theoretically, been through the proper protocols for consumption. Now imagine just how much more salmonella, e.coli and listeria there will be on produce without the inspections and regulations that existed this time last year. Remember Typhoid Mary? She killed between 5 and 50 people (records were not well kept in the early 20th century) simply by being an asymptomatic carrier of disease in an era when kitchen staff not only did not wear protective clothing, but did not wash their hands between tasks. This is the kind of unregulated, untested food growing, harvest, processing and shipping the USA will face again, and several countries are setting up regulations will prevent American food from entering as a result.

I wonder, is this a result of the trade war, or because the US Administration cut all the quality assurance, health and safety regulations and personnel? I mean, would you import food that could be spoiled, contaminated with bacteria from handling, cross contaminated with allergens, or padded out with inedibles like nanoplastics, sand or styrofoam? I mean, there are a lot more reasons than just tariffs to avooid buying US farm products right now.

We’re at the same stage, and devised a loose hierarchy of values to apply (ymmv):
1.) Canadian/not American, because the danger of economic/conventional warfare is acute and deadly for every living thing in Canada; 2) No Loblaw’s/Weston company/products: we haven’t forgotten. 3) Minimum possible plastic: a little extra cost, if we can afford it, to not infect the planet further, is worth it; 4) Downsizing: we’ve been giving a lot away, often from a table out front – about 70% gets taken by local students or an ODSP recipient who resells it. Friends call to see if we have a spare, or want to get rid of, our <insert item>, and a locally-run thrift store not only sells certain goods, it sorts and directs other items AND tells us what will get dumped, so we can look for alternative disposal.

It can be a lot of work, but on the plus side, doing the research online has forced me to brush up my language skills, which is apparently the best way to prevent cognitive decline at my advanced age. And, when we finally shuffle off the mortal coil, we won’t leave a lot of stuff behind to bedevil any heirs we might have!

Canadian English, a jumble of Parisien and South Ontario French avec un levain de québécois, Bangladeshi Bangali, and old fashioned Cadre-speak.

I agree about the waste, not to mention the plastic. But I can’t be too critical, as I use interdental brushes for gum care and plaque control, and ain’t no bamboo interdental brushes with replaceable heads!

Ooooo. You know, that would have been painful, had it not been so entirely off base. Thanks for the laugh…

Um… if you look at the post again, you will find that the doctor in question is a PhD, admittedly in neuroscience, which does produce results used by medical doctors. But there is no indication the woman in question has ever, or will ever, practise medicine in a clinical setting. For that matter, there is only the inference from the mention of a US podcast that she is even American, mmm?

But, then, I infer from your userrname that you are male, and from your post that you are American. So I am not, at this point in history, terribly surprised if you have jumped to a wrong conclusion about the actual content of a woman’s doctorate.

Signed, another woman with a doctorate that has nothing whatsoever to do with practising medicine in the USA, although you’d never know it from the number of Americans who immediately tell me their symptoms upon introduction. (Ah, yes! I think Napoleon died of something similar on Ste. Helena. Or possibly he was poisoned. But then French history is not my field, either.)

What! A right to serve the public at the expense of the cryptobros? What a quaint, old-fashioned idea!