This post was written from a blackberry because my husband is obsessed with his new toy and thought I should give it a try. This was a pointless endevour. My thumbs are sore and I never want to type with this shitty keypad ever again.
On ne permet pas ici l’anglais. Vous êtes seulement Français autorisé! Pourquoi? Puisque nous avons dit ainsi. Ne l’aimez pas, merde dure, anglaise!
That’s right. English is not allowed, even if those are vintage posters that are adorning the walls of your pub, strictly up as decor and nothing more. Sounds crazy right? What nation in their right mind would allow for such a law to exist? Is it France? Any one of those more oppressive nations that find freedom of expression to be detrimental to public health?
No, this is in Canada. This is specifically in la belle province; Québec. This little law is found in the The Charter of the French Language. The same set of laws is also referred to as the Québec Language Charter.
The specific article in question from the charter is article 58, which states:
Public signs and posters and commercial advertising must be in French.
They may also be both in French and in another language provided that French is markedly predominant.
However, the Government may determine , by regulation, the places, cases, conditions or circumstances where public signs and posters and commercial advertising must be in French only, where French need not be predominant or where such signs, posters and advertising may be in another language only.
This article of the language charter was cited by the OLF (Office de la langue francaise) watchdog against the Montréal pub, McKibbins Irish Pub, that received a complaint because it hosted a bilingual menu, bar service and displayed imported vintage posters (from Ireland) on the walls that were strictly in English.
The watchdog ruled that this pub was in violation of article 58, despite that the posters were not advertising any product.
Montréal by all rights is also a bilingual city and it has a sizeable English speaking population. To have bilingual menus shouldn’t be punished. Businesses wishing to cater to different language groups should have the freedom to do so.
Those who don’t, have to answer to the Quebec Language Police. Is this an exaggeration? Not by any means. This group does exist. That is the colloquial term for the OLF. While they aren’t the same as the religious police (see: Mutaween), they still have no place in a democratic nation. They have no right to tell someone they can’t use English. They can ask that French be presented along side, which in this case it was.
If Québec wants to enforce this kind of narrow-minded thinking, then it should just declare its independence from Canada because it insists on violating the citizens’ Charter (see: Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom) rights, the second article of which guarantees the right to freedom of expression, thought and belief.
2.b - freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication
It is bound to happen to most of us sooner or late. It will happen to you. You may not know it now, but it will happen and when it does, it will irritate you to no end. Am I talking of death or tax? No, this is the other thing in life that can be considered inevitable: Windows XP turning on its user!
It happen to me! And why did this horrible thing happen to me? What could I have been possibly doing at the time to deserve having this happen to me? Was I looking at a website I shouldn’t be looking at or was I doing something else equally as naughty? What could I have possibly done to incur the wrath of Microsoft, who feels it necessary to treat legitimate users like common thieves?
What did I do to deserve this? I was only trying to plug my MP3 player into a USB port on the back of my computer and I unplugged my USB mouse. Now, when I plugged my mouse back in, I found it wasn’t working and I tried to reset the wireless receiver for my mouse as well as the mouse. Upon failing to do so, I got a pop-up window telling me that it was an unrecognisable USB device, so I rebooted.
Upon rebooting back into Windows, I encountered a window telling me that “significant changes” were made to my hardware so I had to reactivate Windows. I had known about this kind of thing (see: Namaste, Microsoft)but until tonight, it had never happened to be before. Alas…
Mind you, I haven’t had this install of Windows up for long. I recently got a better desktop (Athlon Dual-core 4200+) than the one I had before, which was an Athlon AMD 3200+ , and I had to upgrade from my old, loyal faithful 60gig IDE drive since my newer machine had no way for my IDE drive to work. So, on my first SATA drive, I installed my copy of Windows XP Pro (Vista is too buggy for my liking and takes way too much file control away from me) and I had no problems with my legitimate product key. This was back in December of 2007.
Now when Windows Activation pops up, after your first boot, it kindly informs you that you have 3 days to register your product. It registered successfully. Fast forward to today where my itsy-bitsey little itty-witty action of unplugging my wireless USB mouse triggers a ’significant change’. So, now I can’t even use my legitimate key.
I wasn’t even touching any part of the MoBo. It was something as meaningless as a mouse. Mice break all the time. Why should Windows think that this is a ’significant change’? Do they want to inconvenience their clients; their business clients whose last concern is that replacing a mouse would amount to a loss of productivity because they have to reactivate Windows in order to continue business? Or do they reserve this “privilege” for home users who are likely to only buy a Windows (genuine) product once every few years?
Microsoft is nothing else knows how to make the Windows experience nothing short of aggravating. Thanks to this, I, or rather my husband, (since I’m at work tomorrow), has to call Microsoft’s ’support’ desk to resolve this. Too bad I’m going to miss the fireworks.
When faced with life or death, most people unless they know that death is inevitable will choose life because they know that they have families that love them and wish them good health. To lose a family member hurts and those who are faced with this know it and display the will to live and to once again laugh and share in the merriment of life with their friends and family.
One British woman, Lorraine Allard, decided that she would rather not. Instead, she refused to accept medical treatment for a disease that decades of research and sacrifice have long since learned how to fight and nearly cure. The woman foolishly chose to not accept chemotherapy, and carried to term an unborn foetus at the cost of her life.
Either way, there was still going to be a ‘death’.
If she had accepted the treatment the doctors felt she needed, the cancer wouldn’t have advanced into the stage where it would be incurable. But, she didn’t listen to the doctors when told that she would have to abort the barely development foetus in order to be able to receive the life saving treatment that would have made the difference for the children she already had and depended on her.
Accept a medical abortion in order to allow her to fight back at the bowel cancer that had spread to her liver or bring another child into an over populated world? These were the choices.
She didn’t accept the treatment and carried the foetus as long as she could before an early labour was induced, allowing her to deliver the foetus naturally at 26 weeks, giving the child a mere 50% chance at survival.
Some forums on the internet have people praising her for a ’sacrifice’ and speak a though she were brave for her choice. As though she was truly a model human. The media (such as FOX, Daily Mail) have used positive words to describe her actions. They have chosen words that convey a noble action when the action was anything but brave.
It was foolish. Simply put, it was foolish. She left behind a husband who now has to bring up four children alone. At the time when her doctors suggested that she abort the foetus for medical reasons, she had three daughters, two of whom are old enough to remember this, to know that their mother would rather die than fight back against cancer and live to see them grow up.
Her son, the one born at the cost of her life could very well have issues over this if he cannot accept or handle the fact that he “killed mom”.
The daughters who remember could very well grow up to resent their brother, who they will associate with the death of their mother.
People are free to make their own choices, and if those choices are foolish, the rest of us are free to mock those people for such choices. This woman made such a choice and people shouldn’t be praising her for dying and leaving the man who loves her without the mother of his children to face the world.
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