In this morning's office banter, my coworkers mentioned that today they had to get Christmas shopping done, and that today the roads weren't being salted. I mentioned that today was the anniversary of the Montreal Massacre. There was a slight pause, and then my coworker said there might be a postal strike.

So, no awareness of the day 15 years ago that Marc LePine took out his academic failings on female engineering students, killing 14 of them for being 'feminists'. It was on the radio this morning (along with the unsalted roads). My coworkers are old enough to remember. They're women. We work at a university.

I can only assume that anything political, or mildly controversial, gets slotted in the 'irrelevant' part of people's brains here, alongside junk mail and music not advertised in the subway.