First, thank you for showing up to this impromptu spaces.

As often happens, these are, you know, created on the spur of the moment because something has pissed me off.

And so here we go, get ready for the latest installment. Before I do that, let me just mention a few things.

Number one, I just returned yesterday from a 10-day trip to Alaska. It was a 10-day, I mean,

it was a cruise with Northwood University. I was the featured speaker at one of their events and there were several other events that

happened on the cruise.

It was my first time in Alaska, a beautiful state.

It did take us 55 plus hours to return to Montreal, number one, because we had to wait for

17 hours for our flight out of

Juneau, but then that flight was delayed, which meant that our flight from Seattle to Montreal

would have, we missed it. We had to wait 24 hours for the next one. Bottom line, it ended up taking

55 plus hours to return from June. I could have gone to Australia

and back in the time that it took me to come home from Alaska. But otherwise, it was a great

trip. I did want to mention very quickly, because it'll be relevant to today's discussion,

something that happened during my trip to Alaska. We stopped at Sitka, which is a town that at

one point was owned by Russia and then the US government bought her over. And we started walking

around. We ended up at this store that, you know, part art, part jewelry,

started chatting to the folks in there.

And then it turns out that the owner of the place is a fourth generation Alaskan,

but originally of Palestinian descent,

when he found out that we were from the Middle East, we started speaking in Arabic and so on, and then he found out that my wife

had her eyes on a ring, a pretty expensive ring. I mean, it wasn't a $30 ring. And so after we had

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