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Cake day: July 19th, 2023

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  • I was thinking the other day about how in my 80s childhood that we were taught to avoid “dirty old men”. Like nobody did anything about men preying on children, they just told you to avoid them. We had a neighbour growing up who had lost his teaching job for exposing himself to his students, and he also exposed himself to several other people in the neighbourhood, and did a lot of other creepy antisocial things (like abduct my cat and dump her outside of town, or put a sandwich bag over her head), and yet I was sent to piano lessons with his wife, where sometimes he would wander into the room in his underwear. If that was someone today he’d be on a sex offender list and in jail, but my parents thought it would be rude not to send me there for lessons.

    We also had a guy who roamed around naked in the woodlot behind the grade school. I thought it was an urban legend and then I saw him myself one day when I was crossing the bridge overhead.




  • And a thing young folks using cannabis seem to be woefully under informed about is that cannabis use can kick off psychosis/schizophrenia as well as something called depersonalization disorder where basically nothing feels real to you, as well as actually lowering your IQ. I lost a high school friend who smoked copious amounts of ditch weed in the 80s and 90s, who became a paranoid schizophrenic and eventually killed himself as a result. I’m not saying occasional use is a big deal, but chronic heavy use is really not good.


  • The 2020s iteration of Twitter with Space Karen at the helm, and the sharp rise in antivax beliefs with the advent of the COVID vaccine. It’s quite amazing to me how people that even get every other routine vaccine have completely false beliefs about it and don’t get that one. Weaponized disinformation is a terrible thing.

    My coworker told me two weeks ago that she was not getting any more COVID vaccines “because they’re pushing it on us”, and yet went and told Public Health that she has multiple sex partners so she could get the monkeypox vaccine. My head is spun over that.