(Editor’s Note: BB readers, if you’d prefer not hearing/seeing about Montreal, there should be plenty of Burque content in coming days, thanks to the help of others not currently inhabiting French Canadian cities. If you’d like to be included in the group “others,” drop a guest column to Better Burque. Operators are standing by.)  

Montreal –

Better Burque is like that “News For Wombats” skit on Monty Python, we pretty much avoid the generally political unless it specifically applies to non-motorized transportation issues. Hence, I’ll keep it brief and just report that, yes, Canadian disdain for the United States ratcheted up over the weekend.

Mental illness takes such a toll on families. Even international ones.

And to keep our minds off all that, and to introduce the concept that Scot will be up in what is very much the Texas of Canada, right down to the near-universally loathed Quebecois-accented French, for the next few weeks, here are some photos I took yesterday while on Day 1 of what should be 28 consecutive days of Bixi bike share.

More to come later from the alleys of the second largest city of French speakers in the world. Fortunately, I can’t understand what these French speakers are saying about the good ‘ol U.S.A. Probably something about mental illness, I suppose. I can report that the French is accented in a manner that makes one think the speaker is perpetually pissed off about something, the U.S.A. included.