I don't have time right this second to level the full shotgun blast across the river that is so deserved -- the river in this case being the Ottawa river and the land across it being technically owned by Quebec, though heavily subsidized by the Canadian federal government to keep the places there from turning into little ghost burgs. The Quebec government is so stingy with its border cities that it hasn't even completed a four lane highway that it started twenty years ago, which rolls along majestically through beautiful scenery toward Wakefield, Quebec, before vanishing into a rock face. The gravel is still piled where it should be completed, but in all likelihood the only way it will be is if the fat cats deep in the heart of Quebec get their way and separate, whereupon the border cities'll separate back to Canada, and start getting some tax dollars.

There are signs outside Quebec City that say "Welcome to the National Capital". Quebec has its own official sign language -- yes, that thing with the hands intended to help people who have defective hearing or speech to communicate with the rest of the world, or in Quebec's case, the rest of Quebec. It has its own immigration department and rules despite that the rest of Canada works through one federal office.

Quebec is the only province in Canada not to sign on to the Constitution, despite that the Constitution was pioneered by someone born in Quebec and who also instituted official bilingualism in Canada -- much to the annoyance of the western provinces. Recently, Statistics Canada suggested that Chinese is about to supercede French as the second most spoken language in Canada. However, the Chinese don't appear to be mailbombing in an effort to preserve their culture, which is, after all, considerably older than the French culture. The French may have been in Canada a few hundred years longer, but that isn't much on the geological time scale.

When Britannica.com offered a vacation giveaway contest this fall, the only places in the world that were exempted were Puerto Rico and Quebec -- Singapore was okay, Kosovo was okay, Quebec and Puerto Rico were not. Quebec is regularly exempted from lotteries, contests and coupons offered in Canada because if the Quebec government decides -- I shit you not, kids -- decides a Quebec resident has not been treated fairly in a contest because he is a Quebec resident, they will sue. They did this to such an extent that it was easier just to bar them.

Note 209, written near Riviere du Loup, Quebec, August 29, 1999:

The Quebec landscape encourages one to remember. The tracks of glaciers are fresh as sandcastles. Camping in their footprints as we are, no wonder we stamp our own feet.