For some reason that has never been clear to me Dave Barry Does Japan, written on a two-week publisher-paid holiday to Japan with his family, sums up what Japan feels like better than any other book about the Land of the Rising Sun. He captures the weirdness, the earnestness, and the similar-but-differentness in a way that I never could when talking to friends and family about the place I lived, worked, and raised a family for seven years.

In Quebec, it is actually illegal for a couple to have the same surname (unless they already had the same name, I presume) when they get married, without a special exemption.

And writing by Ian Flemming, not Ian Fleming?

It's written this way in the article, 11 times!

I downloaded the trial version, and it is indeed gorgeous. We have a funny (to us) video of our cat utterly engrossed in the fish swimming around the dual monitors.

But yes, my screens go to sleep after 10 minutes of inactivity, so a screen saver is essentially worthless.

Montreal would like to have a word with you. In 2018 they banned the use of fireplaces and inefficient wood-burning stoves, and banned all wood burning during smog alerts. There are apparently over 50,000 wood burning units in the system.

I made a sous vide cooker with a temperature controller (~$20 on Amazon) that controlled an electrical outlet. The sensor went into my slow cooker, and turned it on when the temperature was low, off, when the temperature was high.

Here are some examples

I also miss "Reveal Codes" mode in WordPerfect. Without that, you never know if there are some leftover formatting codes in your document that are just waiting to sabotage the entire layout.

My son got his high school graduation diploma during Covid lockdown, despite doing almost no work in his final year. For example, he received a pass (exactly 50%) in English even though he didn't submit any work or write any tests. They simply weren't going to fail anyone.

It just so happened that when the pandemic began he was going through a great deal of depression and anxiety issues that Covid exacerbated. He had the intelligence to pass Grade 12, but not the ability at the time. He also hasn't gone on to post-secondary yet (and may never do so).

I am one of the people who have just discovered lemmy.ca, so you can count at least one! I'm also hoping that things pick up there.

Language Transfer, the people who brought you an amazing, free language-learning system (best I've ever used, and I speak 5 languages), also has an Introduction to Music. Try it and drop Mihalis a donation if you find it useful.

I remember about five years ago, when my Dad was about 85 got a call at the dinner table. He expressed his gratitude that the person had called to warn him about a virus on his computer.

He kept the guy going for about five minutes, until he mentioned that his computer was running Linux (that I had set up for them, to avoid most of the malware) so he couldn't find the Windows menu.

We've never know my Dad for pranking people, so this was astonishing, and hilarious!

If you take 709,000,000 lb. and 70,000 killer whales, that is slightly more than 10,000 lb./whale. My entirely average killer whale is only 4,617 lb., so this entire article is suspect. What do the rest of you killer whale owners think about this?

My 2-year-old son sometimes sat on my lap as I played Doom. I have a recording somewhere of him exclaiming "Doom!". I would let him push the spacebar to shoot at demons. Interestingly, as he grew he was never afraid of ghosts and monsters -- unlike his peers. My hypothesis is that he understood that they could be fought and defeated, so they lost some of their potency.

"An optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds. A pessimist fears that this is so."

I definitely heard this song on the radio back then. All of us disco-hating tough guys loved it!