PopcornGate

Blanche, did you know that when the temperature drops below 50 degree fahrenheit, as it did in Texas, turtles become comatose? And did you know that 3,500 comatose turtles were rescued by save-the-turtles men and women and were sent for rehabilitation to San Padre Island’s convention center? They are slowly being warmed up.

Did you know that when water temperatures drop a turtle’s heart rate lowers, its flippers become paralyzed and its body will float comatose above the water, sometimes washing ashore. This state of hypothermic shock can put them at risk of predators, boats and even drowning. And now…they are saved. Like him or not, he was a force to be reckoned with. Rush Limbaugh died yesterday.

Limbaugh created his persona from scratch, becoming the number one conservative talk show host, with about 20 million listeners per show. Yes he pandered to QAnon and their ilk, but Ronald Reagan also loved him, so it’s clear Limbaugh was able to move with the times and saw where the audience and the money for advertisers was located.

He was also a fiercely proud American, loved and understand both the flag and the anthem and did not suffer fools lightly. We could never fathom how he was able to speak for three hours straight, with no callers.

Of late, because we were disillusioned  Trump, we stopped listening to Limbaugh. Nonetheless, he will be sorely missed by his tens of millions of followers.

You have to feel really badly for people living in Texas. Their present governor and  the one before him, completely dropped the ball in terms of the power in their state. There were so many mistakes made that one wonders if they got anything right. Aside from not having any power, it is not safe to drink the water and people were told to boil it before drinking and not to use it for cooking. That’s well and good unless you have an electric stove. If you do, you now have no water and no electricity.

Then the governor is telling people to go to warming shelters. Sounds like a plan until you look outside. The streets are icy and aside from people not having snow tires, the government doesn’t have any snow-cleaning apparatus. So getting to those warming shelters is virtually impossible.

The piece-de-resistance is this: Here in Quebec and in most US states, we have power-sharing grids. So if we have a massive power failure, we are able to get power from Vermont or New York. Texas dropped their power sharing contracts. So now, they can’t get power from any states around them.

Watch for this simmering story: Sleuths have purported seeing Ted Cruz, the rather outspoken senator from Texas who would love to be president, flying with his family to Fort Lauderdale and then on to Cancun. 

UPDATE: It appears the story is true and Senator Ted Cruz will be returning to Texas from the sun and warmth of Cancun to live in the dark and without water with his fellow Texans. And here we thought we was entitled…

Second update: Cruz in fact did to go to Cancun asking for a police escort to the airport. He then proceeded to throw his daughters under the bus saying they asked to go on vacation. He’s very special indeed.

And a final note about Texas. We have friends living in Houston and we will share their first person account, including today. Yesterday they finally got their power back, but before that my friend wrote the following, keeping in mind that Houston reaches 110F during the summer:

…My house has stone floors to keep it cool so you can imagine how cold it was. We had candles going everywhere.

…We now have power but very little water pressure. Too dangerous to use the hot water faucets as the heater will not fill fast enough so we were boiling water on the stove and bathing with that.

… All high rise commercial buildings have been ordered to shut to conserve power for the people, therefore I can’t get into my building.

…One of my employees had no water at all coming in as they turned it off for her whole city. She lives in La Porte, an hour from Houston.

…My son turned off his water heater completely because he has so many little kids and he can’t control them using the hot water faucet. If it empties and doesn’t fill fast enough it can explode.

Sadly for Texans, there’s no end in sight.

Mark Zuckerberg and his company Facebook are at war with Australia. Seriously. One thing we have to say about Australia – they are a small country on the other side of the world, but they have cahoonas. They are fighting with Facebook because the country is probably going to pass a new law which would require Facebook and Google to reach commercial deals to pay news outlets whose links drive traffic to their platforms, or agree a price through arbitration.

In retaliation for what might be coming, Facebook blocked all news content from being read and shared in Australia. This is very serious as bushfire warnings, flood warnings and Covid-19 warnings were all turned off by Facebook. As well, they are trying to get people vaccinated and without Facebook, it is very hard to get to everyone.

Although Australia is a small market, the law is being closely watched around the world by regulators, and could be a test case for a bigger global push to force internet giants to share more of their revenue with content providers.

It’s baaaack. Yes dearies, time to make sure that French doesn’t disappear in Quebec and the way to do that is attack the English language. Here’s a headline for those who have this fear: Like or not, English is now the global language of business.

So they can cap the enrollments at English schools from elementary to university, they can try to stop you from saying hi after bonjour, they can make English writing on signs almost invisible, but they cannot change the fact that the rest of the world is not with them.

We will reiterate: English is the global language of business and therefore, young French Canadians are going to speak English if they want to do business with the rest of the world.

Of course if they want to make poutine for the rest of their lives at the Orange Julep, then speaking only French is just fine.

We saved the most ridiculous story for last because if you read it first you would be shaking your head so much you wouldn’t be able to continue.

Papa Legault has decided that he feels terrible that movie theaters will not be able to sell popcorn and so he decided to use OPM – other people’s money, i.e. your money to subsidize the movie theater owners.

There are simply no words to describe the idiocy of this. If the theaters are open they should be fully open. Papa Legault has to stop micro-managing. Mommy and daddy can share a box of popcorn with their son Jean-Guy. Nothing will happen. No, Jean Pierre Baptiste is not going to lean over from his seat behind them and stick his hands into their popcorn.

Good Shabbos We’ll talk…