Daffnee

Here's a CNU (Cynical News Update -- yes, I made that up) for this week: another recent study (because who cares if it's not recent?) found that while Canadians spend about the same amount on food as they did eight year ago, the proportion of money spent eating out rose from $0.26 to $0.30 for each dollar spent. Why, you ask, does such a innocuous finding find itself as the focus of yours truly's ire? Simply put, I spent ten minutes in the cold last night attempting to extricate a dollar from my grocery cart. To be more eloquent and bardlike, I spent ten minutes trying to get my shopping cart into the next one with the assistance of a frustrated (yet polite) Honger boy in order to make the relatively simple mechanism of the cart release work, since another consciencious shopper had declined to do so and left the streamlined row of shopping carts with an unsightly tail end of unaligned vehicles. The gripe is thus -- how is that in Richmond, the heart of Vancouver's eat-out community, I can still be foiled by grocery shoppers? Never mind that the gripe I was initially going to tackle -- that of people eating out period, instead of investing time in the self-sustaining act of making oneself food -- seems more philosophical; buy groceries! use shopping baskets! avoid beans! Wait, that last one was Empedocles: "Wretches, utter wretches, keep your hands from beans!" Professor Shirley Sullivan, you're wonderful.