Per my comment, it is a crisis in Vancouver and area, where I live, and which hasn’t seen appalling numbers of fatal opiod overdoses in recent months: breaking all records. And this after a well-publicized harm-reduction program, including a safe-injection site which had fought and won a long court battle to stay open…

That wouldn’t explain why there are so many opioid (fentanyl) overdoses in Vancouver, a port city where heroin has always been readily available.

That didn’t occur to me but — since I live in Vancouver — I did grumble “it doesn’t rain *that* much here...”

Same here — birds of a feather, and all.

And who among us — of a certain age and background — can’t say the same?

Aye, but joost try tellin’ that t’yooung people nowadays... they won’t believe you.

Faced with Trump, any self-respecting Infinite Improbability Drive would realize it wasn’t so Infinite after all, and probably curl up in a little ball, sucking one or other of its 47 thumbs, and whimpering.

LOOX-ury, I tell you. Aye; try hookin’ up via dial-up BBS, at 600 baud. Just as your crush has finally started to type hir name out — first amber letters starting to appear on the near-burnt-out screen — someone downstairs picks up the phone, and KABLOOIE, or rather

Did you know that in its original version, the hit song by Blue Oyster Cult was “Don’t Fear the Beaver”?

Big Maple didn’t have that kind of reach — or vengeful nature — until the hostile takeover by Big Sugar. It’s sort of like the NRA, which used to be a sensible, moderate organization.

One of my favourite characters in the whole series. Only ever says “ook” (or very occasionally “eek”), but what with inflection, tone of voice, facial expressions and gestures, he makes himself understood perfectly.

For some reason, I’m now thinking of the Librarian in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books.

I will. Thanks! I love stuff like that. In fact, eventually I became a geologist.

I didn’t think of hills as dinosaur graves — quite a thought, though — but I did come up with the theory of plate tectonics, or “continental drift” as we said back in the day. (At which time, I should add, we didn’t say “back in the day.” And not just because we were, in fact, back in the day).

I’m a member of an environmental working group that includes a couple of Canadian regulators and several scientists. We’ve been getting some help and advice from some US EPA researchers. Since Trump took over, and appointed Pruitt to head EPA, we haven’t been able to get hold of them. True.

I agree; re-criminalizing abortion, at least, would have been political suicide. (To quibble a bit: right now, there’s no abortion law to repeal. He’d have had to draft one).

Yeah, when a politician does the right thing — or anyway refrains from doing the wrong thing — I’m usually prepared to accept it, without grumbling overmuch about whether it was for the wrong reasons.

When Harper got his majority in 2011, I felt sick. For one thing, I was sure he’d try to bring back the death penalty. But I never heard a whisper about it, in 4 1/2 long long years.

Small-town Ontario boy here, but it sounds like we’re of similar vintage. I probably saw a few around age 10 or so myself. I don’t remember being scared, but likely found the tracts very strange (as they were and are).

Definitely not a regional USian thing. We saw them here in Soviet Canuckistan.