Saturday, March 22

Today I am in Chicago. I realized this morning that today is Colin Murphy's birthday. Colin was my high school boyfriend and why I remember that March 22 is his birthday but I forget to take clothes out of the washer and wind up leaving them there overnight, I will never understand.

So....I love Dan Savage, he of Savage Love, of The Stranger in Seattle and thanks to the miracle of print syndication, of my own Chicago Reader. For the uninitiated, Dan is a relationship columnist of sorts though with a rather in-your-face perspective on things. If you are looking for soothing words, Dan Savage is not your guy. I saw the following post in his column this week about his appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher, and had to share - be warned, this post is not for the faint of ideology:

While we’re on the subject of all things Canadian, I said something on Real Time that seems to have upset all those normally placid, easygoing French-speaking Canadians. While discussing the hyper-religiosity of the American electorate, I made this observation: “Australia got the convicts. Canada got the French. We got the Puritans. We’re stuck with them.”

“I was very pleased to see that you are putting French-Canadians on the same level as the Australian convicts,” writes JNR of Montreal. “As a matter of fact, a few of these convicts came from Quebec, from where they were banished after the 1837’38 riot. But please don’t compare us to the Puritans.”

For the record: It was a compliment, Quebec. What I meant, of course, was that Australia was lucky to get the convicts and Canada was lucky to get the French, while we got stuck with the fucking Puritans and their sex-hating, Jesus-freaking, GOP-voting descendants. In fact, I’ll prove how much I love French-speaking Canada by offering English-speaking Canada this deal: The sane people in the United States will happily trade you the Bible Belt for Quebec. We’ll take those contentious secessionist headaches off your hands, and all those bilingual street signs, if you’ll take the 22 percent of our country that still believes George W. Bush is doing a good job.

You get Mike Huckabee and Gary Bauer; we get Justin Trudeau and Antoine Vermette. We get all your hot boys with sexy accents from Montreal; you get all our slope-shouldered, slack-jawed yokels from Mississippi. Do we have a deal?