Late last August, tears falling into my farewell hamburger from Frite Alors!, I inched my way out of Montreal and into the murky borderlands of Québec. My summer in Canada was over.

I made up this list to cheer myself on the ride home:

Dorval

Dorval (YUL) is Montrea…

Vermont is up to its old October tricks again, but I've been hurt before. I'm not falling for the pumpkins this time. No amount of fog-on-pond in the morning, red maple trees, or fresh cider is going to distract me from what the state so desperately wants me to forget: winter is coming - bleak, dark, and populated by middle-aged people in reindeer sweaters.

The saddest Sunday of the year …

I've set up a little web service for identifying language. If you paste in some text (the more the better), it will tell you what language it's in. Not rocket science, but perhaps useful to somebody.

There's an API for people who like to do things programatically.

Note that I'm logging all the queries, so you don't have to email me and say "I pasted BLAH and it gave me the wrong ans…

Every time I open a can of шпротный паштет fish paste, I get to missing my cat. шпротный паштет ('shprotnyi pashtet', Russian for 'sardine pâté') is a gray slurry with the texture and appearance, but not the odor, of freshly mixed concrete. It is made of industrially mashed and homogenized sardines from the former Eastern bloc. As best I can determine, it comes from Latvia and is sold in an att…