It's interesting to see how many Americans here are saying that they don't need a passport because "they only go to Canada". I'm Canadian, and I have a passport solely because I visit the U.S. Even before a passport became mandatory last-yearish, it was always strongly recommended as being harder to find fault with should one encounter a border guard in a bad mood, and that's on both sides - I know people who made it through to the states with no ID but who were then refused entry back into Canada!
p.s. On % of Quebecers speaking English - very much depends on where you are. Western/central Montreal, ~90%; Eastern Montreal, ~60%; Abitibi-Témiscamingue, probably more like ~30%.
Steve C. @ 143: My cats definitely have an awareness of time. If I come home later than usual I find them agitated and unhappy; if I am not in bed at my usual time I get cattitude (as they are waiting to curl up on top of me). They've also shown some awareness of weekends vs weekdays insofar as when they expect I should and should not be home. And when I was giving them a treat hot dinner once a week they would pester me for it on that day, but no other.
Fidelio, my boy cat drools when he gets really happy - have you ever heard a drool-purr? Burbly and prone to leaving small wet spots.
Both my cats talk but I blame my boyfriend for that - they were very quiet beasts until he started to encourage them to talk back to him. Now the girl has conversations of the "mek mrrek mrrrr mek mak mak mek!" variety, and the boy says "meow" - by which I mean he doesn't actually meow, he makes a noise that is a fair imitation of a person saying "meow".
They do both have names, incidentally, but I tend to use "boy" and "girl" in stories because people sometimes find their names confusing - the boy is named Dog and the girl is Mouse.
Pyre @ #9: My two cats were rescued many years ago from a wild pack that lived in an abandoned building near my office. While they are now ridiculously domesticated, the boy cat still has issues about his paws being touched, and will get well-nigh feral when I cut his nails unless I'm very careful. I suspect something to do with the gang that used the basement of the aforementioned abandoned building as a dumping ground for stolen goods and suspicious mattresses. It angers me to think what they might have done to him... he and his sister were only five months old when I took them home. Grr. Grr.
I forgot, I have a 2 to Pierre Trudeau via my sister, who was granted a long personal chat with him in year before he died. So a 3 to most of the grand world of politics.
Barbara @ 747: no worries. It was actually a beautiful excerpt, and very apropos to the discussion.
And for those who have never considered suicide and can't get their minds into it, well, that excerpt is an absolutely perfect framing of one sort of suicidal state of mind - the craving for release.
Barbara @ 739: "I think your book may be the 1969 Scholastic / Disney edition of Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly, in that edition titled King of the Grizzlies."
Barbara, right on the money. And now I'm rather conflicted, because I want to thank you for your undoubted kindness in tracking it down for me; on the other hand, I made the mistake of reading the excerpt and now I am really a complete and utter mess and can barely see the keyboard. Kind of like you brought me to look at the thresher that chewed off my legs as a child, if you know what I mean. It's... yeah, I don't have or want to have words to explain what that brought back for me.
But, I'm sure your heart was in the right place. So thank you.
Susan @ 666 (aiee): "We appear to have overtrained our attendees; we figured after last year we would be low-key about it and raise maybe $2000. Instead we had $5691 plus assorted foreign currency. Fans being fans, this was then subjected to nit-picking. The number wasn't a nice round number. Solution: throw in $9 more to make $5700. That was entirely too round; donate $1 to make it less so. And that was entirely too close to the current year by Jewish reckoning, so donate $67 more to bring it to $5768. "
This made me laugh, only because I do that all the time when partially paying off line of credit and credit card balances so as to leave nice interesting numbers in the account.
Viorica @ 594: "The book wasn't Les Miserables by any chance, was it?"
No, I was around nine or ten at the time and didn't manage to get access to grownup books for another couple of years, via a kindly librarian who gave me access to the adult section even though I was three years under the limit (like another person in this thread, I'd read everything in the junior section).
I've tried to find the book again but never managed to name it exactly; it was a thin children's book based on a Disney movie about a brown bear who has to grow up all alone and gets beaten up a lot before he awakes from hibernation one spring to find he's pretty badass, at which point he becomes a bit of a bastard. The crying bit was when he's old, and pretty badly injured from all the fights, and he goes to this little valley that's basically swimming in natural toxic gases, and lies down to go to sleep... jesus, I'm tearing up just describing it. Go, enduring power of the written word.
Bacon of 3, due to a D-list actress I worked with once who has had small speaking parts in a few big movies. Actually, maybe even a 2 due to another acquaintance who had small speaking parts in pretty much every big movie for a couple of years back in the 90s.
A political 3 to a variety of heads of state due to meeting the head of the Office de la Langue Francaise at a launch for a product we made for them (me > head of OLF > PM of Canada > lotsa Important People).
I am jealous of many of the 2s in this thread.
dcb @ 575: "I'd really like to work out how not to cry when I'm frustrated etc."
Ehh, be careful what you wish for. I got so desensitized at one point that I completely lost the ability to cry at all. This isn't as handy as it sounds when you really do need to be able to blow off accumulated internal negative energy at safe moments. Crying is great for relieving internal pressure.
It ended up resolving itself in an odd way: I was reading a book (in a safe place), and there came an incredibly sad chapter with the main character dying all alone, old and sick... and I just started bawling for this character, for the first time in years. Thereafter whenever I needed to cry I would read that bit of the book, and eventually just the relevant page became a reliable trigger.
Unfortunately, this hair-trigger sensibility to sad things in books became quite deep-seated, and now I cry like an idiot whenever I read anything even a little bit sad. Movies too. Can't turn it off.
Serge @564: well, maybe I can claim that I drove past your house on my visit to Quebec last month. Drive-by validation?
Serge: Quebec? Montreal? I'll have to see if I can get you to prove my existence someday. Though I rather like being a figment.
"I'm afraid to ask how it is that it often happens that you find yourself with friends who quit programming to become Mounties "
I'm always meeting taxi drivers who gave up programming to drive a cab. They all seemed pretty happy.
#491: I agree with everyone else that this is very much a controller/potential abuser profile. Also, the lower her self-esteem, the more likely she is to accept this kind of domination, so reinforce her value as much as you can to keep her core strength up. Compliments are good but won't go very deep - encouraging her to do things she's good at works best in my experience, more points if this elicits objective positive feedback from external sources.
Talking him down to her will often help to reinforce the us-vs-them mindset that these controllers cultivate, so really I'd focus on giving her activities that let her use her own skills and which he is not involved in (so he can't take credit for success). I learned this lesson the hard way, helped a friend do a midnight move out of an abusive boyfriend's apartment, and discussed all the warning signs I'd seen... she moved back in with him a month later.
Got to help make her strong enough to see her own value and that she really is worth more.
David @ 477: "If you demonstrate that every time they beat you up, they will take at least some damage themselves, they're likely to lose the taste for picking on you. Of course, that won't help much against a "recreational fighter"."
I've heard that too... didn't work for me. When I tried fighting back one day I just got labelled as "that crazy girl who fights boys". Made things worse in some respects.
Ah, school... so glad it's far behind me. But it's somewhat comforting to hear that so many of the excellent and interesting people here had the same sort of miserable time, and turned out so very well.
Serge... please... I was in a very amateur production of Oklahoma. I still have nightmares.
Lindra @ 406: god, you just brought high school back to me... every day I am thankful that I had the most incredible principal. She expelled me in autumn of my last year, ostensibly because of skipping school; but with the hindsight of years I saw she did it to save me from the bullies. She let me come back to do exams in the spring, which, high school being high school, were easy enough with a week of cramming beforehand. Because of her I not only survived, but graduated and was able to eventually go on to college.
I wish everyone in that sort of situation could be so lucky.
EClaire @ 394: "My favorite part of that was when she said the exchanges became "sexual for a 13 year old" and yet she continued. So, how is this not subject to child predator laws? Seriously? Because that seems.... predatory?"
Seriously... and knowing how insecure Megan was, I have no doubt in my mind that any introduction of sexuality came from fakeJosh. Can't you just see three Mean Girls giggling in front of the computer and egging each other on?
On the original topic: The Smoking Gun has gotten hold of the police report... the police report filed by Lori frelling Drew after it came out locally that she was behind the Josh character.
"Drew approached the sheriff's department last November, after "the neighborhood...found out her involvement in Megan's suicide and her neighbors have become hostile toward her and her family." Drew, the report noted, wanted the neighborhood tension to be documented in case any of her property was subsequently damaged."
Apparently she went "banging on their door" to talk to them, despite being advised to leave them alone, because it would have made her feel better.
I'm not going to trust myself to type anything else. Assume full disemvowellement and disemconsonance.
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