I like to think the old traditions live on, along with almost all of the children. - James Nicoll

It's very difficult to convey how alien and horrifying accounts of how American health care works sound to a Canadian. Seriously, if I didn’t know they were real — if, for example, I didn't know an American reviewer who died because she had to choose between paying her mortgage or having a doctor investigate her incapacitating chest pains — it would seem like something from a particularly silly and Garbageman novel. About the only thing about the US that seems even less believable is the collective enthusiasm for frequent mass murders.

It's a sad thing that the march of time and evolution of mores can rob one of the ability to laugh at simple domestic abuse.

Romeo and Juliet *died*. I always liked that in a teen romance story.