Lost childhood media: "Mon ami, mon ami" song

 I have a song stuck in my head, and the only lyrics I can remember are "Mon ami" repeated over and over.

 

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon ami

Mon ami, mon a-mi 

The tune of this "mon ami" song can be heard here.

 

I am confident I've gotten the tune right, but less than 100% confident that the words I remember are "mon ami", or that "mon ami" are the only words. When I sing it to myself in my head it's in an anglo accent, which suggests, I first heard it before I started learning French in Grade 4.

 

Ring a bell for anyone? 

Books read in April 2026

 1. Equal Rites by Terry Pratchett

The fake Yelp review SEO problem

 A long time ago, almost certainly pre-pandemic, I stumbled upon a little hole-in-the-wall place that had an above-average grilled cheese sandwich, worth coming back for.

I recently found myself thinking about that sandwich and wondering where I found it and if the place was still open. I could visualize it (counter service, maybe in a food court or subway station or tunnel or similar indoor location) but my memory couldn't zoom out to see where it was or remember what it was called.

 

So, just on the off chance the algorithm would be on my side today, I googled grilled cheese near Yonge and Eglinton.

 

And got a Yelp page claiming to list the best grilled cheese near Yonge and Eglinton.

 

There were 10 restaurants on the list, which surprised me - restaurants around these parts tend to go for more elevated menu items. Some of them struck me as places that would never have grilled cheese (dessert cafes, sushi restaurants, etc.). However, the Yelp page quoted specific reviews explicitly mentioning grilled cheese, and some of them explicitly stated that the words "grilled cheese" appeared on their website, so I decided to click through and look at the menus.

 

Zero of those restaurants had grilled cheese on the menu. Zero of them. 

It was all SEO nonsense.

 

How does this help anyone?? How is it useful to Yelp to provide such clearly fake reviews, therefore rendering it so conspicuously unreliable as a source of reviews? How is it useful to the restaurants to have people looking for grilled cheese visit their websites - or perhaps even go there directly - when they don't have the grilled cheese we're craving??

 

If this had never happened to me, I'd still think of Yelp as "a website with reviews", and might still visit it or click through on search results from time to time. Now I think of it as a site with too high a density of falsehoods to be worth clicking through on, and it if it comes up in my search results I'll disregard it, even if it seems to have exactly what I'm looking for.

Books read in March 2026

 Stolen in Death by J.D. Robb

"Women don't want you to solve their problems, they just want you to listen"

This post is based on a common gender-based conventional wisdom, but I've been thinking about it and I think it applies to everyone of all genders.

 

Conventional wisdom is that women don't want men to solve their problem, we just want them to listen.

 

Although this conventional wisdom leads to the desired behaviour, I think it's imprecise.

 

I think the actual reality of the situation is people don't want to have to do all the emotional labour of being patient and polite (and sometimes even performing gratitude) with someone who thinks they're solving our problem when they're actually restating the obvious as though we never thought of it while contributing nothing new to the conversation.

 

This is especially true since a subset of the people who go around restating the obvious don't seem to believe you that the single most obvious potential solution didn't work.

 

Examples:

 

Me: All the youtube videos said it should just pop back in, but it doesn't.

Him: Did you try?

Me: Yes, and it didn't work. That's why it's a problem.

 

Me: They won't honour my warranty

Him: Did you tell them you have a warranty?  

Me: Yes, and they wouldn't honour it

Him: Did you show them the warranty confirmation you got when you bought it?

Me: Yes, and they said they couldn't honour it. 

Him: They should be honouring it! It's a warranty!

Me: Yes, that's why this is a problem.

 

 

An actual, real-life solution to the problem that will actually work in real life is always welcome! 

 

However, putting extensive time, energy and emotional labour into not solving the problem and not getting any further (and, possibly, not being believed) is not welcome, and makes for frustrating, unwanted conversation.

 

One aspect of this that might in fact be gendered is that people sometimes react differently to men and women doing the same thing, as demonstrated by that twitter thread where a man and a woman switched email signatures. 

So your male interlocutor doesn't see the potential negative outcomes of his suggestions because he's never experienced someone reacting negatively, whereas you have a lifetime of experience with how people might react negatively or see you as a difficult person.

Which actually might have a multiplier effect - your male interlocutor unconsciously sees you as less credible as part of this established societal gendered pattern, and the fact that you don't see why his idea would be as flawless as he thinks it is reinforces this perceived lower credibility, which makes him even likely to believe you about the push-back that you'd receive but he won't. Which leads to him complaining to his buddies that women don't want you to solve their problems, which reinforces them seeing women as less credible. Which means that next time a woman has a problem where their proposed solution won't work, they won't believe her. And the vicious cycle begins again.

 

 

When, in reality, all anyone wants is to not have to deal with the frustration of someone who thinks they're solving your problem while contributing nothing new. And this frustration, ironically, would be reduced if they'd actually listen.

The girl mice have bows on their tails - that's how you tell that they're girls

I have a memory of being a preschooler looking at a picture book that included cartoonish/anthropomorphicish mice, and noticing the girl mice have bows on their tails - that's how you tell they're girls!

 

Does this ring a bell for anyone?

 

The mice wouldn't be out of place in Disney's Cinderella or in Richard Scarry, but it isn't Cinderella or Richard Scarry. (Also, in those books, the mice are wearing full outfits of clothing that you can use to tell their gender.)

 

They were less anthropomorphic than Mickey Mouse, but they almost certainly walked on two legs instead of four. They likely lived in houses, cooked food in kitchens, went to school, etc., but I remember them as living in "the olden days" rather than modern times. Their tails were very skinny - you could draw the tail with a single line.

 

I don't think the book explicitly stated that bows on the tails meant the mouse was a girl - I remember the emotion of figuring that out for myself.

 

Anyone happen to know the exact thing I'm talking about?

Things They Should Invent: Set it and forget it emergency kits

Years ago, I bought one of those solar crank emergency radios. The instructions said that the battery will charge in sunlight, and if it isn't charged you can charge it by cranking it. So I sat it in an area that gets sunlight and forgot about it.

Years passed before I had a power outage, and when I did, the radio didn't work. Sunlight didn't power it. Cranking it didn't power it. It seems that, in the years that elapsed, the battery lost its ability to hold a charge.

 

 

When I first heard of 72-hour kits, I bought a bunch of bottled water and canned food. I put it all in the cupboard and forgot about it.

 

When I next moved, I dug out my supply of bottled water, and discovered that the water bottles were all kind of soft and collapsed. It turns out the plastic in the bottles wears out even if it's just sitting around doing nothing!

 

Googling around the idea, I also learned that canned food can go bad. People on the internet speaking positively of the longevity of canned food are like "Oh, it lasts forever! Like, maybe even as long as 5 years!" 

Okay, but my life expectancy is far longer than that! Am I supposed to keep throwing out and replacing my emergency kit???

 

 

Googling around the idea, I discovered that the idea is that you use up the canned food and bottled water for your naturally-occurring everyday use before it goes bad, and replenish it. But the thing is, I don't really use canned food and bottled water in my regular life - I'd have to go out of my way to eat and drink it when I don't even want to!

 

Similarly, you're supposed to test your emergency radio regularly and replace it (or replace the battery if, unlike me, you've stumbled upon the convergence of a radio where you can get at the battery and a battery where you can find an actual replacement, not just something that claims on Amazon to be a replacement but is the wrong size)

 

 

Someone really should come up with an emergency kit with actual longevity, where you can set it and forget it without adding "constantly monitor your emergency kit" to your ever-growing to-do list!

 

 

One thing I have tried is storing water in glass bottles. I used screw-top wine bottles that I washed in the dishwasher in a sanitation cycle, and specifically chose bottles that had contained red wine in the hopes that it they didn't get perfectly clean, it would be visible. 

 

I drank some of the water after a few months and it seemed fine, no ill effects or weird tastes, but obviously I have to wait multiple years to see if it lasts multiple years.

 

Another thing I realized during my last power outage is, canned food aside, I normally have 72 hours of food in my home anyway. 

 

I usually have one or two perishable meals of leftovers in the fridge, which could be eaten cold right away before they go bad. I keep a couple of loaves of bread in the freezer that could be taken out and thaw, I usually have a variety of fruits and vegetables that are kept at room temperature in the supermarket (even though I keep them in my fridge for space and health reasons), I have a few bottles of meal replacement shake for if I get a reflux flare-up - basically, with no particular effort, I have 72 hours worth of food that's within the scope of what I'd eat anyway.

 

Last power outage when I realized my emergency radio had died, I looked around for if I had another radio around, and realized I still have my high-school walkman in a drawer. It takes AA batteries (which I keep on hand anyway, and could easily take out of a remote control during a power outage), and gets a better signal than my emergency radio or my bedside clock radio. So I'm not replacing my emergency radio, and instead just using my walkman for as long as it survives.

 

 

Thinking about what I already have around the house that would serve me well in an emergency gets far better results than making an artificial emergency kit, not keeping up on the additional chore of maintaining it, and then finding myself without an emergency kit in an emergency. Maybe advice surrounding 72-hour kits should focus on this?

 

But it would also be useful if there was a way to make universally set it and forget it 72-hour kits, so anyone, regardless of their needs, can just buy or assemble the kit and never have to think of it again.

Books read in January 2026

1. Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

2. Radicalized by Cory Doctorow

3. Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm by Charlie Mackesy