Little Herouxville, a village of 1,300 in Quebec's Mauricie region, has been in the news worldwide since its town council adopted a set of standards aimed at immigrants, spelling out what is acceptable comportment in the municipality and what is not.

What grabbed the most attention is that the list includes a specific prohibition against stoning women in public and burning them alive and an interdiction against face covering, except at Halloween - measures clearly aimed at Muslims, even though the town is almost entirely old-stock Quebec francophone and there isn't a single Muslim resident.

"I have nothing against immigrants, I know a lot of immigrants. But at one point there has to be a limit to accommodating them. If they came here, it must be because they like the way we live.

"We took our religion out of everything, the schools, the government. Why should they try to bring in theirs?"

Supposedly, record-breaking cold is hammering the North, and the east, and West Virginia. Of course, it's not record-breaking. After all, large parts of the North were covered in glaciers not too long ago (geologically speaking). On the other hand, they didn't keep records back then. Mostly, folks stomped around in animal skins, trying to keep warm. Occasionally, they might mutter "Loogiedaveeper", and stomp all the harder. In the lingo of the times, loosely translated here, they were asking their gods to get AlGore to shut up and quit flying around in his private big bird, because they recognized that his contribution of CO2 was killing the planet. They hoped, at some point, to get warm enough to build a campfire, around which they could huddle while plotting new strategies for killing and eating any remaining wildlife in the desolate landscape. People back then were much wiser than are people today. They were one with the planet, while today, people cause all the problems.