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No. Sin.

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     Recently there have been more and more non-alcoholic products making the news.  When magazines such as Bon Appetit and Bloomberg Businessweek start to devote entire sections to the products, then something is indeed hitting the shelves.  All of which led one magazine to ask, who are the people asking for such "drinks?"  Some are speculating that Gen-Z (those grouped as now being 12-27) are the driving force, although I often wonder if social "analysts" are just looking for a simple stereotype.  I say that because in my state (Utah), the Mormon culture practices avoiding both caffeine and alcohol, which has given rise to a chain of "dirty sodas" as defined by the Swig franchise and recently featured in The New Yorker ; drive around this state and Swig drive-throughs are nearly as numerous as Starbucks, if that makes sense.  But non-alcoholic products have moved way past beer (Miller and other brewers tried "low" alcohol beer for a bit...
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Duped (licate)...

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Graphic:  Roadkill Tees       Other than magic or illusions, nobody likes to be conned.  This can be something small, like when the sale price doesn't ring up at checkout; or it can be huge as in your life savings vanishing in a flash (or after an election).  But those are financial, and there are many other ways of being fooled...think the car salesperson, or the timeshare, or the politician; the "forked-tongue" of yesteryear suddenly becomes an apt description for most of those cases.  But the grocery store?  Picture this headline from The Guardian : Major egg companies may be using avian flu to hike US prices ; a related piece had this: US’s biggest egg producer’s profits triple as prices soar... Cal-Maine’s profits nearly eight times as high as at the start of the bird flu outbreak.   In the fascinating book by Benjamin Lorr, The Secret Life of Groceries , the world and history of our markets is explored with extensive research and p...
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Dog Gone, It

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      My dog and I see things differently, which seems like a no-brainer, but let me give you a for instance.  It comes in threes is an old "wives" tale with little to no basis, sort of like the "myth" of needing to walk 10,000 steps daily, wrote Psychology Today (it was originally a marketing scheme to sell fitness trackers developed in Japan).  But once such idioms are planted in your mind, they becomes Manchurian in a sense, embedded and difficult to shed, particularly when it comes to bad luck or to bad things happening.  Why is that?  The flat tire or the small ding in the fender is followed by a sprained ankle or a bonk on the head.  Nothing too serious, and often with a bit of time and a bit of cash, you survive and chalk it up to a bit of bad luck (yes, we woke up to that flat tire ).  But when a good friend got a rare form of cancer, one almost always with a bad outcome despite aggressive treatment, it was suddenly in our fa...
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Write or Wrong. Or...

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       There is much going on in the world today, and more and more of us (it seems) are beginning to voice our opinions, whether it's at dinner tables, town halls, or national protests.  Often the conversation remains civil, unless you're one of those GOP Congress folk now taking their meetings virtual simply to avoid confrontations with their constituents (wait, isn't that their job?).  And the question remains, what makes you upset?  Is it the plummeting markets and that fading hope of retirement; or the debacle that was Signal Gate, or Netanyahu's IDF bombing and burying aide and ambulance workers  and  their vehicles to hide evidence (wrote  The Guardian ; videos of the incident and more at The Rocket Medic ), or the tariffs increasing the prices of goods, or that despite nearly a million people taking part in the Hands Off protests around the world a few days ago, Trump was in Florida playing golf?  And nobody in Congress...
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