Beer in America

Some amazing, good, and not so good beers I’ve tried in my first two weeks in the US

One of my favourite things about living in the States so far is that the bountiful presence of micro-brew beer, and the ease with which it can be obtained. A three-minute walk puts me in the front door of a neighbourhood deli offering some decent standards like Guinness, Red Stripe, and Corona. For a only a slightly longer walk or bike ride, I can be treated to a bamboozling beernocopia the likes of which I have only ever seen approximated when I lived in Chicoutimi, Continue reading “Beer in America”

Smart suburb planning in NYC, 100 years ago

Forest Hills Gardens, a suburb of NYC, is a 100-year-old model of community planning.

I recently moved to New York City (Brooklyn, to be specific) and in an interesting twist came across a Slate magazine slideshow  (Forest Hills Gardens) via a tweet from one of my favourite Toronto-based publications, Spacing magazine. The article/photo essay details the principles enacted by turn of the 19th-century Forest Hills Gardens community, a suburb 20 minutes from Manhattan that is transit-oriented, walkable, and features mixed-use zoning and a variety of single-family dwellings, from attached to freestanding.

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Some philosophical kisses

The Heidegger kiss: all your kisses are okay, but never as good as before the latinization of Greece.

A friend sent me a link to some definitions of kisses as they might be defined according to certain philosophers. E.g., and Aristotelian kiss: a kiss performed using techniques gained solely from theoretical speculation untainted by any experiential data by one who feels that the latter is irrelevant anyway.

I came up with a few others.

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