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Musings

A collection of 12 issues

Gender Ideology

Whenever I hear someone say they don’t want their children exposed to “gender ideology” in school, a very specific scenario plays out in my head. Some poor sap of a child, when students are talking about their families, mentions their uncle and his husband. The teacher raises a hand,

AI

What I really don’t like about the current AI craze is the fact that by its nature, AI in its current state is best used for confusing reality and make-believe. The predatory chatbots on employment search and dating sites, the glorious images of fruit platters and rustic cottages on

Welcome to our self-checkout, valued customer!

For your convenience, you can now take a job away from an underpaid, non-unionized cashier and do their job with no training and for no pay. Despite the obvious conflict of interest this imposes on you, valued customer, we trust that you will ring everything in at the correct inflated

Affirmative Action

Imagine, if you will, that you are driving your 4X4 across the desert to the fabled city of Xanadu, out of view in the distance. You have set your course and have been driving for quite a while. You realize that your steering is out of alignment and that you

The Enshittification of Loblaws

The enshittification of Loblaws, easily the largest supermarket chain in Canada, is well into the “squeezing with both fists” portion of our program. We all owe Cory Doctorow a debt of gratitude for his development of the concept of enshittification. Amazon is, of course, the poster child for this business

Hypertension

I have high blood pressure which I have had since my twenties. I had pre-eclampsia when I was pregnant. Over the years I have been on every kind of hypertension meds, and on none at all. When I was drinking, back in the day, doctors told me that alcoholism was

I am so white

When I was child, I was told I had Native Canadian ancestry, that some great-great-grandfather on my father's side had married a "lady of the land." When my daughter got married and decided to have children, I took a DNA test to find out if I

Second Language

I remember walking into my third grade classroom for the first time. We had just moved to a Northern Ontario mining town, well after the school year had already started. This was not unusual, even at this early age, and we would continue moving every year or so until I

Solitaire

I play Freecell when I'm bored. It's a good solitaire game -- with distinct opening, middle, and end games -- and some of the hands are very challenging. Only a few hands are actually unwinnable, and I don't think the computer will deal those

On Aging

I am afraid of becoming a monster—bloated and blind, with twisted limbs fumbling painfully towards remembered pleasures that cannot be seen and might not even exist anymore—like some kind of horror game mini-boss that must be put out of its misery before the game can progress. Everything hurts