Tags: Netflix

What you can’t measure, you can’t improve.

This is one reason the alcohol lobby is fighting so hard against instituting a common definition of “a drink” on its bottles. If that happened, people would know how much alcohol is in their glass of wine or bottle of beer.

The drinks industry is reeling. In the US last year, 20% of drinking-age Americans took part in Dry January. This year, it’s 35%. No wonder Tito’s Vodka hired Martha Stewart to create off-label ways to consume vodka. The “dry” movement is also spreading: yesterday I got an email from the Canadian Cancer Society urging me to sign up for Dry February.

To foretell the liquor lobby’s fight-back tactics, check out the following playbooks from the past: tobacco, sugar, opioids, fossil fuels and long ago, seatbelts.

Meanwhile…

Mass murder isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

People can get used to anything. Cannibalism if you’re hungry enough. Genocide if you’re evil enough. Driving to Buffalo for surgery if your hip is screaming enough. Cheating on your Harvard application if you’re ambitious enough. But the incidence of mass killings in America is now so mundane and predictable that there’s a 200-page handbook for Mayors and city managers to use when the daily slaughter of the innocents hits their city. And it is daily. So far this year, there have been 351 mass shootings in America, but that figure will be out of date depending on what day you’re reading this. While it’s small consolation that in Canada, we measure mass shootings in decades vs. days, it speaks to America’s extreme and lethal worship of its constitution where “We the people” feels like “Let us pray.”

Meanwhile…

A Slap in the Face

My wife says don’t plant anything in Ontario until the May 24th weekend. But the impulse to declare winter over (spring officially started last week) lies deep within us. Why else would we worship cherry blossom season when the blossoms are covered in ice?  At least they tell the truth on Fogo Island: “Pack Ice Season follows winter, bringing multi-year sparkling ice floes to surround our shores.” Meanwhile, here in Toronto, it’s still a Hobson’s Choice: the parka or the chilly walk.

But these should warm you up:

RamsayWrites

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