/*To fix a bug under IE that cause some of the menu element to be cut:
Also add html>body so that IE6 doesn't read this instruction because
the text was cut at the top*/
html>body #menu ul ul li a .threeLines div div{
     margin-top:-12px;
}

Holy god. To fix a display bug on a bad display platform, we are writing a ridiculous selector and then assigning it an illegal property. I am bowled over.

There’s a famous New Yorker cover cartoon describing how New Yorkers see the world: toward the bottom of the page, closest to the viewer in perspective, there’s the Hudson, then a little bit farther back New Jersey and then, the dreaded “flyover country,” inside of which Chicago is a poor stranded island of something.

In my life here in Montreal, at least, the New Yorker is wrong. Because at least here in Montreal, there isn’t Flyover Country; maybe we’re too far away from the Prairies, or the interminable farms of the Midwest. There’s the farmland of eastern Ontario, of course, and the soybeans and corn around the Monteregian mountains, but this isn’t stuff you see from up high. No one flies from Montreal to Toronto or Quebec, so it’s more of an interminable, six-hour daze from here to anywhere else, not the sort of thing you can minimize.

And the cities? They’re signposts, tags, name-description. The people I know are all city dwellers, but on the vast sheet of North America, we’re the exception to the rule. We’re lucky enough to be from this corner of this continent, where you can walk down the street to buy detergent, and we bump into people every day. It’s easy for us to indulge ourselves into thinking that Boston is the city full of ‘bros’ and New Yorkers are less well dressed than Montrealers, but who are we kidding? Montreal or Pierrefonds, Boston or Brookline, New York or Scarsdale, Toronto or Markham, whatever! This is North America, the largest, most homogeneous part of the world that has ever existed, a place where six hours is a short drive, a place where differences in culture express themselves in gradients and not borders.

Urban-dwelling North Americans, from this part of the continent, act flippantly when it comes to cities. (I’m no exception; last weekend I dropped everything to rideshare off to a fanciful weekend in Toronto.) We talk in terms of local culture in a way that I’ve never heard Spaniards or French people talk, despite the fact that Lille and Bordeaux are dramatically more different than Ottawa and Boston. And I wonder if it’s not just because we’re on the defencive.