Quotulatiousness

November 29, 2013

“This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard”

Filed under: Cancon, Law — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:38

Brian Lilley is against a new bill that would provide the police with the power to demand that drivers submit to breath testing even when there’s no evidence that they’ve been drinking:

It’s the latest attempt to crack down hard on the ever-shrinking problem of drunk driving. The news release touting Bill C-556 states that, if passed, it would, “amend the Criminal Code to allow police officers to perform systematic random breathalyzer testing regardless of whether or not the driver shows signs of impairment.”

That means police don’t need a reason to give you a test.

They don’t need to see dilated pupils, smell booze on your breath or even have you admit you had a beer while watching the game.

The bill would give police a big increase in power and that’s not a step I want to take.

No one supports drunk driving, no one that I know anyway. And attempts to deal with the issue have largely been successful.

Statistics Canada is clear — drunk driving has been on the decrease for years now.

“The impaired driving rate generally declined from the mid-1980s to 2006, when it reached its lowest point in over 25 years, at 234 incidents per 100,000 population,” reads a report from the agency.

Back in the mid-80s there were roughly 600 incidents of impaired driving per 100,000 of population; in 2011 the Canadian average across all provinces and territories was 262 incidents per 100,000.

[…]

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees all Canadians are protected from unreasonable search and seizure.

This bill would shred that protection.

This bill isn’t a slippery slope. It’s a steep hill greased up with lard and those in favour of ever expanded police powers are just waiting for Parliament to step on it.

Canadians need to say no to drunk driving and they need to say no to this bill.

November 17, 2013

QotD: Mixed drinks

Filed under: History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:45

If, as Philip Larkin observed not so long ago, the age of Jazz (not the same thing as the Jazz Age) ran roughly from 1925 to 1945, the age of the cocktail covered the same sort of period, perhaps starting a little earlier and taking longer to die away finally. The two were certainly associated at their inception. Under Prohibition in the United States, the customer at the speakeasy drank concoctions of terrible liquor and other substances added in order to render the result just about endurable, while the New Orleans Rhythm Kings or the Original Memphis Five tried to take his mind further off what he was swallowing. The demise of jazz cannot have had much to do with that of the cocktail, which probably faded away along with the disappearance of servants from all but the richest private houses. Nearly every cocktail needs to be freshly made for each round, so that you either have to employ a barman or find yourself consistently having to quit the scene so as to load the jug. Straight drinks are quicker and guests can — indeed often do — help themselves to them.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

November 6, 2013

“Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:41

David Warren explains why Toronto’s Mayor Rob Ford had to exist:

… every left-thinking person in the Greater Parkdale Area had been teased to apoplexy by the contemplation of this gentleman. This because he was: 1. fat, 2. colourful, 3. rightwing &, 4. freely elected by a large margin over some gay leftwing establishment darling. (Some other reasons have accumulated since then.)

Turns out, the police have recovered some video in which — it is alleged — our peerless mayor is shown doing crack with local low-life. Whether smoking or snorting or otherwise ingesting, we do not know, & neither apparently does our splendid mayor, who now says he was actually too drunk to remember the occasion. Dear Mayor Ford: among our living national treasures.

[…]

Quite frankly, we tried mayors who were not crackheads. They didn’t work out. Also, the last one didn’t drink enough. That’s why we elected Ford. He’s doing great: slashing through the city bureaucracy & privatizing everything he can. He even holds the civic unions in subjection: not one has dared to strike. And ho, he’s trying to build subways. Anyone who has attempted to ride a trolley across this town will understand our need to tunnel. So what is the problem?

As our good, excellent mayor told his Police Chief: bring on your video! Ford says he’s curious to see it himself, & that the rest of Toronto would surely also like a chance to catch it on YouTube.

Gentle reader knows I am a traditionalist in most things, & a loyal Canadian. Our very first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, was a magnificent drunkard, who managed to hold office for nearly twenty years. There is an Arabian Nights of anecdotes that our primly officious historians have been too shy to tell. Verily, half of Macdonald’s Cabinet were awash most evenings, & the debates in Parliament were enlivened thereby. Almost all the damage ever done to this country was by sobersides.

Update: Take it away, Taiwanese animators!

October 15, 2013

QotD: Duties of a good host

Filed under: Quotations, Randomness, Wine — Tags: — Nicholas @ 00:01

Up to a point (i.e. short of offering your guests one of those Balkan plonks marketed as wine, Cyprus sherry, poteen and the like), go for quantity rather than quality. Most people would rather have two glasses of ordinary decent port than one of a rare vintage. On the same reasoning, give them big drinks rather than small — with exceptions to be noted later. Serious drinkers will be pleased and reassured, unserious ones will not be offended, and you will use up less chatting time going round to recharge glasses.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

October 3, 2013

Everything old is new again … this time it’s mead making a comeback

Filed under: Business, USA, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 07:50

BBC News Magazine looks at the rise of modern-day mead in the North American market:

Long relegated to the dusty corners of history, mead — the drink of kings and Vikings — is making a comeback in the US.

But what’s brewing in this new crop of commercial meaderies — as they are known — is lot more refined from the drink that once decorated tables across medieval Europe.

[…]

Mr Alexander is not the only one to have caught on to the commercial potential of mead.

Vicky Rowe, the owner of mead information website GotMead, says interest in the product in the US has exploded in the past decade.

“We went from 30-40 meaderies making mead to somewhere in the vicinity of 250 in the last 10 years,” she says.

“I like to say that everything old is new again — people come back to what was good once.”

[…]

The mead of the past was often sweet, and didn’t appeal to many drinkers who were just looking for something good to pair with food. But mead has since changed.

“People don’t realise that just because it has honey in it, [mead] doesn’t need to be sweet,” says Ms Rowe, citing the proliferation of not only dry meads but also meads flavoured with fruits, herbs, and spicy peppers.

Yet hampering efforts towards building mead awareness is also the name mead itself.

Technically, mead is classified as wine by the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which regulates alcohol sales and labelling in the US.

This means that mead has to be labelled as “honey wine”, which doesn’t help combat people’s perception of the drink as being as cloyingly sweet.

“How do people recognise it as mead if you can’t say the word?” says Ms Rowe.

September 14, 2013

Highlights of the 2013 Ig Nobels

Filed under: Humour, Media, Science — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:37

At Ars Technica, Dean Burnett rounds up the wins and near-misses of the 2013 Ig Nobel awards:

This year’s Ig Nobel prizes were awarded on September 12 at a meeting of nerds at Harvard University. The prizes are given for genuine scientific research that “first makes people laugh and then makes them think.”

So, at first glance, the research may strike you as somewhat baffling, surreal or even downright ridiculous. But science is rarely frivolous. None of the experiments awarded an Ig Nobel will have been the result of casual whims or unplanned notions, like the cast of TV series Jackass being set loose in a laboratory. If any of the prize-winning experiments really are “mad,” it is a determined, dedicated, thorough sort of madness that is probably a lot more worrying in the long run.

Like the Nobels, the Ig Nobels are awarded for individual categories.

[…]

Psychology

The Ig Nobel for psychology went to Laurent Bègue and colleagues for showing through experiment that drunk people consider themselves more attractive. With alcohol such a common intoxicant the world over, analysis of its effects on human behavior is never not-relevant. People may think it’s obvious that drunk people find themselves more attractive, but that’s never been objectively demonstrated. And with alcohol having so many knock-on effects for society, assessing how it affects people’s behavior is always potentially useful.

This award must be doubly welcome after the original experiment about whether drunk people are more aggressive if you spill their drinks had to be abandoned due to the hospitalization of several post-docs.

[…]

Probability

Bert Tolkamp and colleagues showed that cows are not more likely to lie down if they have been standing up for a longer time. Ergo, cows don’t get tired. This could be useful data for the agricultural industry.

This study was chosen ahead of the other favorite, a study titled “The defecation habits of wild bears in areas of high forestation.”

QotD: Humanity and alcohol

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:01

Anthropologists assure us that wherever we find man he speaks. Chimpanzee-lovers notwithstanding, no animal other than man is capable of laughter. And, although some undiscovered tribe in the Brazilian jungle might conceivably provide an exception tomorrow, every present-day society uses alcohol, as have the majority of those of the past. I am not denying that we share other important pleasures with the brute creation, merely stating the basic fact that conversation, hilarity and drink are connected in a profoundly human, peculiarly intimate way.

There is a choice of conclusions from this. One would be that no such healthy linkage exists in the case of other drugs: a major reason for being on guard against them. More to the point, the collective social benefits of drinking altogether (on this evidence) outweigh the individual disasters it may precipitate. A team of American investigators concluded recently that, without the underpinning provided by alcohol and the relaxation it affords, Western society would have collapsed irretrievably at about the time of the First World War. Not only is drink here to stay; the moral seems to be that when it goes, we go too.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

August 20, 2013

QotD: Queen Victoria’s Tipple

Filed under: Britain, History, Humour, Quotations, Wine — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:01

1/2 tumbler red wine
Scotch

I have it on the authority of Colm Brogan that the Great Queen was “violently opposed to teetotalism, consenting to have one cleric promoted to a deanery only if he promised to stop advocating the pernicious heresy,” and that the above was her dinner-table drink, “a concoction that startled Gladstone” — as I can well believe.

The original recipe calls for claret, but anything better than the merely tolerable will be wasted. The quantity of Scotch is up to you, but I recommend stopping a good deal short of the top of the tumbler. Worth trying once.

Scholars will visualize, pouring in the whisky, the hand of John Brown, the Queen’s Highland servant, confidant and possibly more besides; and I for one, if I listen carefully can hear him muttering, “Och, Your Majesty, dinna mak’ yoursel’ unweel wi’ a’ yon parleyvoo moothwash — ha’e a wee dram o’ guid malt forbye.” Or words to that effect.

Kingsley Amis, Everyday Drinking: The Distilled Kingsley Amis, 2008.

July 21, 2013

Sad tale of whiskey theft

Filed under: Law, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 13:46

It puzzles me why the alleged thief didn’t just sell the stuff and buy (far cheaper) modern booze with the proceeds.

The owner of an historic inn in Pittsburgh has brought charges against a former tenant she says was supposed safeguard 50 bottles of vintage whiskey valued at more than $100,000 but drank it all instead.

The owner of the South Broadway Manor Bed and Breakfast, Patricia Hill, found 104 bottles of Old Farm Pure Rye Whiskey when she bought the historic mansion and converted it into a bed and breakfast. It had originally belonged to Pittsburgh businessman J.P. Brennan.

The whiskey had been distilled in 1912 and given to Brennan in 1918, she told ABC News affiliate WTAE.

“There were four cases, 52 bottles, manufactured by an old distillery here in the Township that went out of business many years ago,” Barry Pritts, chief of police in Scottdale, Pa., said today.

He said the bottles had been made and sold before Prohibition and then passed down.

H/T to Doug Mataconis for the link.

June 4, 2013

LCBO intransigence triggers constitutional challenge

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:02

This is kinda fascinating:

What started out as a simple privacy commissioner complaint has turned into a constitutional challenge of the validity of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario (LCBO) — and this time the Board has only itself to blame for the brouhaha, proving once again that Ontario’s LCBO is so far out of touch with the realities of today’s world, it’s downright scary. At a time when they should be thinking about transitioning out of the alcohol business, the Ontario provincial government and the LCBO seem to be clinging to its very existence with even more tenacity and verve than before. They’re like the old boxer clinging to past glories who just has to show you the right hook he can still throw — yet only ends up throwing out his shoulder. In the LCBO’s case, the word “Control” won’t be pried away from its “cold dead hands” anytime soon… or will it? In its most recent fight, the LCBO is proving it is a government entity most in need of being on the chopping block — if not the auction block — of government institutions that should be moved over to the private sector.

[. . .]

Why the LCBO has chosen to play hardball over such a trivial matter is incomprehensible; according to reports, the LCBO has decided to appeal the order and has asked that the records be sealed in the process. This seems to contravene common sense. “A government entity has chosen to spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars to fight an order by the Privacy Commissioner whose sole purpose is to make these decisions,” Porter says.

Now fed up with the collection of information, Porter and his team have decided to question the entire existence of the LCBO as it contravenes the Constitution Act of 1867 by challenging the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act (IILA) itself — which bans the free flow of goods (including alcohol, wine and beer) between the provinces. The argument hinges on Section 121: “All articles of Growth, Produce or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall, from and after the Union, be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.” This challenge could, and would if successful, lead to the downfall of the LCBO. Social networks were abuzz with the news about the challenge. Alfred Wirth, president and director at HNW Management Inc., applauded the news on Facebook: “Any progress towards competition among merchandisers is to be appreciated – even if it’s for domestically-produced products. Several years ago, when I questioned why Ontario couldn’t privatize the LCBO, the then Minister of Health said that alcoholic beverages were a crucial health matter which the province had to control. Despite the risk of people (including underage youth) freezing to death during our cold Ontario winters, he did not explain why the sale of crucial winter coats could be entrusted to Sears, the Bay, etc…” While Porter himself posted an analogy to cigarettes: “How about this one. Cigarettes are so dangerous that you cannot advertise them on TV, print, billboards or even display them behind a counter… but they can be sold at any store. Alcohol is so dangerous that it has to be sold at a government store with specially-trained people… but the government itself floods the market with advertising and even publishes a free magazine where 50 per cent of the content is about consuming the product.”

Energy lawyer Ian Blue has joined the Vin de Garde team for the action. I interviewed Blue in 2010 about the IILA, which is now under fire. Here’s what Blue had to say: “The law that gives provincial liquor commissions a monopoly and the power they have, is federal law, the Importation of Intoxicating Liquors Act; it’s highly arguable that the law is unconstitutional. It’s also pretty apparent to government constitutional lawyers, who are knowledgeable in these matters… [If the Supreme Court of Canada] takes a hard look at the IILA, and if they do an intellectually honest interpretation, the IILA probably cannot stand up to constitutional scrutiny.”

In 2009, lawyer Schwisberg commented to me when speaking about the IILA: “The very underpinning of Canada’s liquor regulatory system is unconstitutional. Isn’t that a mind blower?” Blue said: “There is nothing natural or logical about the existing system. It bullies, fleeces and frustrates wine producers and the public… If the IILA were to fall… wine producers could probably make quantum leaps of progress towards a fairer and more rational system of liquor and wine distribution in Canada.”

April 11, 2013

Ontario’s LCBO workers vote in favour of a strike

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:50

Michael Pinkus is looking forward to a potential LCBO strike:

Call me an anarchist but I want the LCBO to go on a nice, big, long strike. And by the time you read this newsletter I am 100% sure that the sheeple of the LCBO will have given their bargaining team the go ahead for strike action. Now the LCBO’s contract was up on March 31, 2013 — which means currently the guys and gals roaming, stocking and generally keeping track of the aisles are without a legal contract with the provincial liquor board. I’m not about to get into the nitty-gritty of the contract negotiations, but when I read in the Liquor Board Employees Division (LBED) Bargaining Bulletin: “The offer we received from management can only be described in one word: Outrageous!” — well I just felt that I had to look a little deeper to see how the LCBO was screwing their own people (which is a nice change from the people of Ontario they screw daily).

What outrage would I find on the pages of the LCBO’s proposal? Are they locking the doors and throwing employees out on their ears? Are they proposing actual punishment for selling to minors (like the sting David Menzies did in July of 2012)? Will there be repercussions for doing a bad job, breaking the law, real penalties?

Now I have met, had dealings with, and actually, once upon a time, worked alongside some very good LCBO employees, most of them casual part-timers — but I can tell you that for every one good one there’s two that are lazy, surly and just generally people you don’t want to deal with in a retail situation — and sadly, those are the one’s you are likely to remember. So from the LBED Bargain Bulletin dated March 1, 2013 here are 2 of the 9 crazy demands the LCBO is making of their employees and the Union’s response to those “outrageous” proposals (I highlight my favs, but you can read the full bulletin here):

[. . .]

But who really suffers from an LCBO strike? California, Spain, Italy, France, Australia, Chile, in other words import wines and liquor producers, who can ONLY sell through the Province run monopoly, and they’ll be demanding the LCBO settle so their products get into the hands of Ontarians instead of sitting idly in warehouses collecting dust. Meanwhile local producers could see a boon as Ontarians thirst for wine is not met by the LCBO but instead by in-province wineries. Tourism to wine producing areas should also see an uptick; instead of visiting Grandma on a Saturday afternoon the family would pile into the car (with Grandma) to tour the highways and bi-ways of Ontario wine country. A long LCBO walk could mean that Ontarians finally get the taste for their homegrown wines en masse and will then demand greater access — one weekend away is quaint, but having to make the trek each and every weekend may prove too much. And with that kind of demand we could see movement in this province towards a freer market system with independent and corner wine stores. Maybe the government will get tired of having to pay all those wages, negotiating with an inflexible union and decide to sell off the LCBO — preferring instead to reap the rewards from taxes instead of paying the price of labour unrest … sigh, wouldn’t that be nice?!? As for the employees, the good ones will have no trouble finding a job in the public sector [I think Michael means private sector here], many in the same kind of newly created positions. The others? Well they’ll just go back to ditch digging where they belonged in the first place.

April 5, 2013

Northern Quebec is the home of the world’s best gin

Filed under: Business, Cancon — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 00:02

Or so Maclean’s says. Thanks to Canada’s odd patchwork of post-Prohibition trade restrictions between provinces, Ungava by Domaine Pinnacle is only available in Alberta, BC, and Quebec itself:

It is a difficult gin to miss. When Ungava won a Best of Show award at the prestigious World Spirits Competition last week, a judge noted its “unusual colour that helps grab your senses.” It’s perhaps the most polite way of drawing attention to Ungava’s yellow tint, about which Pinnacle president Charles Crawford is slightly more blunt. “It’s a bit like morning’s vitamin-enriched urine,” he says. His PR people prefer “sunshine yellow.”

The process by which Ungava gin is made is even more peculiar than its colour. An ice cider producer by trade, Crawford has a history of wonky tinctures — Pinnacle also produces maple-infused whiskey and a cider-brandy concoction. “Ice cider is a good product, but you can only make so much of it,” he says. “We decided to get into spirits, because there aren’t many that are uniquely Canadian.” In fact, Crawford wanted the gin to be truly, pre-colonially Canadian. He whittled down a list of 40 indigenous herbs, berries and flowers (“Nothing planted by Europeans”) to six ingredients, all found on the Ungava Peninsula in Nunavik: cloudberries; crowberries; Labrador tea; a Labrador tea cousin known as Ukiurtatuq, or “Arctic blend”; wild rosehips, which lend the gin its yellow colour; and of course juniper, without which Ungava wouldn’t be proper gin.

Every year, Crawford hires “these two guys from Kuujjuaq” (he’s unsure of their names) to pick the botanicals during Ungava’s four-week harvesting season, which usually begins in late August. The pair pack “a couple hundred kilos” of their pickings into clear, pillowy bags and send them 1,500 km straight south to Ungava’s production facility in Cowansville, about an hour’s drive east of Montreal. A neutral spirit made with locally grown corn is infused with the botanicals.

November 25, 2012

It pays to advertise … or at least set up a website for your new business

Filed under: Business, Food — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Coming back from running a few errands yesterday, Elizabeth noticed what looked like a new restaurant setting up shop in downtown Brooklin: The Pour House. We’ve been waiting for Brooklin to get a proper pub or wine bar for a long time, so this seemed like good news. As soon as we got home, she ran a few Google searches to see what was on offer. The googles, they do nothing.

I tried again this morning, searching for “Brooklin Pour House”, and got one link: a parked domain at GoDaddy.com. Perhaps they’re listed under a different name, but it boggles the imagination to see a new business today that doesn’t already have a web presence…

Update, 13 January, 2013: Good news! The owners have created a Facebook page:

Hi Everyone…
Thanks for visiting our Facebook Page! We’re excited to have our Grand Opening in the New Year and hope you will join us for some Wine and incredible Cuisine.
Check back for updates and thank you again for stopping by!
Sincerely,
Brooklin Pour House

Update, 4 June, 2013: There’s now a bare-bones website at http://brooklinpourhouse.com. In the Brooklin tradition, where no business seems to open without at least one direct competitor opening at the same time, here’s another bare-bones website for the 1847 Wine & Beer Bistro, which is also supposed to open soon.

October 31, 2012

The science of “shaken, not stirred”

Filed under: Books, History, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:05

Ah, those dedicated researchers at The Register! This time, they’ve got Gavin Clarke looking into the famous dry martini of James Bond:

“A distressingly large amount of rubbish is talked about cocktails,” Noel Jackson, top boffin at the Life Science Centre in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, tells The Reg.

Jackson, a Cambridge-University-educated chemist, has all the straight-up science on alcohol.

“We do a lot of debunking of things that people think are true,” he tells us. “There’s this business of shaken versus stirred. Once you heard it said from people in the cocktail world that shaking ‘bruises’ a liquid! That’s rubbish.”

The Reg, as part of our ongoing celebration of James Bond’s fiftieth year on film, was talking to Jackson about one of the signature elements of the 007 package: the dry vodka martini. Shaken, not stirred.

Jackson comes on the best of recommendations. We were put onto him by the boffins of the UK’s National Physical Laboratory, who have been instrumental in such developments as packet-switched networking and the “Dambuster” bouncing bomb of World War II fame.

“What he doesn’t know about drinks, doesn’t need to be known,” they told us.

We spoke to Jackson about chemicals and thermal dynamics. We start with flavour, and that means talking alcohol.

October 9, 2012

The fight to save booze-soaked Britons from themselves

Filed under: Britain, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

At sp!ked, Tim Black points out that the inconvenient truth is that Brits drink less than they used to, despite all the tabloid coverage of boozy downtown outings:

Not that painting a miserable portrait of our drinking habits is particularly hard today. There seems to be a consensus across political parties and the media that alcohol consumption is indeed a big, big problem. The only discussion centres upon the best way to address it. Prime minister David Cameron, for instance, can announce, as he did earlier this year, that the ‘scandal’ of drunkenness and alcohol abuse needs to be tackled, and no one bats an eyelid. Booze Britain, complete with puking teens and pissed parents, is a given, a fact that simply doesn’t need to be challenged.

Yet it really should be challenged. At the same time as 4Children was busy readying its assault on parents who — shock, horror — like to drink, the British Beer and Pub Association (BBPA) released rather sobering figures. Using tax-receipt data from Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and survey material from the Office for National Statistics, the BBPA revealed that reality was rather drier than the drink-soaked fantasists would have us believe. In fact, alcohol consumption in Britain has actually fallen to its lowest level for 13 years. Furthermore, according to The Economist, supping rates have veritably plummeted among the young over the past 10 years. That is, the very people deemed to be vomiting and fighting at the coalface of binge-drink Britannia don’t actually seem to be drinking that much. ‘In 2003’, reports The Economist, ‘70 per cent of 16- to 24-year-olds told interviewers they had had a drink in the previous week; by 2010, just 48 per cent had. The proportion of 11- to 15-year-olds who had drunk in the previous week halved over the same period. Heavy drinking sessions are down, too.’

And this is why the existence of 4Children’s scaremongering report is revealing. In its contorted argument, its counterfactual assertion that there is a big, big problem, it shows how the largely state-backed anti-booze industry, a morass of report-churning quangos and ever-so-concerned charities, is dead set on creating a problem where there really isn’t one. Or perhaps more accurately, it wants to problematise an aspect of our everyday behaviour. It wants to wrest an accepted part of social life from its mundane context, and present it back to us as something weird, harmful, perhaps even sinister.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress