By Keith Houston. New York: W. W. Norton, 2013.
Even more interesting than I thought.
The author charts the history of punctuation marks, devoting different chapters to specific symbols. Along with covering the fascinating history of the things we employ to make our writing clear, the author also delves into the histories of stuff such as coins, printing, the typewriter, and fiction along the way.
Purchase it here.
102.5 WBEN-FM Buffalo Rock 102 from 1982 with ID and voicetracked anncr back and frontselling songs cold.
104.5 CHUM-FM Toronto from 1985 unknown anncr counting down the "Top Twelve at 12", midnight, that is.
104.5 CHUM-FM Toronto from 1987 Rick Ringer coming off a record.
104.5 CHUM-FM from 1988 unknown anncr saying 4:30 "information update" was coming up with Bob Summers. Later, ID voiced by Gord James, "104.5 CHUM-FM, listen while you work."
104.5 CHUM-FM from spring 1989 Gord James giving time of 12:23, saying it was the Thursday before a long weekend and that the kids were getting out of school. At the end of the song James was frontselling, an ID voiced by him "Toronto's rock and lots of it." Later an ID urging people to listen to the station in their cars. Later, Lee Eckley giving time of 7:10 in the middle of "25 minutes of nonstop rock."
104.5 CHUM-FM Toronto from late 1989 Gord James talking about song of the day contest where you could win skis and bindings. On the other side of the tape, Q-107 (CILQ-FM) Toronto ID mentioning they were broadcasting to the Anik B sattilite.
104.5 CHUM-FM Toronto from 1982 Roger Ashby "Sunday Morning Oldies" frontselling songs. Spotlight on The Hollies. Later returned to regular programming.
FM 108 (107.9 CING-FM) Burlington unknown anncr backselling songs.
104.5 CHUM-FM Toronto unknown anncr listing qualifiers for vacation contest and playing oldies. Gord James IDs as well as a couple kind of funky, sung ones.
This guy is right! Canadians do not care about anything, seriously.
This video discusses Trump, Epstein and the One in control of it all.
Oh my!
National Review
Europe Is Delusional
By Charles C. W. Cooke
December 10, 2025 1:44 PM
Europe, in the year 2025, is what NPR would look like if it ran a continent.
It is time for a rant about Europe. It has, in fact, been time for quite a while, but there is always a moment at which the straw meets the camel, and, for me, that moment came when the European Union announced that it intended to extort another hundred million dollars or so out of the wildly productive American tech sector, and then the bureaucrats and politicos who staff that dreadful institution took to the very service they were in the midst of extorting to offer up generalized attacks on the United States. As a former Brit who enjoys spending time in both France and Italy, I take no particular pleasure in unloading in this manner, but honesty compels it: In its current incarnation, Europe is a poor, corrupt, sclerotic, vampiric open-air museum, and its leadership class is full of priggish, dishonest, supercilious, rent-seeking parasites, whose boundless sense of superiority ought by rights to have vanished in 1901. Europe, in the year 2025, is what a continent would look like if it were run by NPR. It is a librarian in a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, snobbishly shushing the workers outside. It is a faculty meeting, a Sierra Club protest, a forum for those who believe that words create reality. There is no reason that we in the United States should consent to be lectured by the apologists for such a silly place.
Worse yet is how unabashedly smug those who engage in this lecturing have become. Criticize a European from America and you will immediately be hit with a wall of undeservedly self-righteous disdain. This should not be mistaken for pride; rather, it is that peculiar, negative, defensive sort of hauteur that is focused less on the positive virtues of the speaker, and more on his deeply held conviction that, whatever his deficiencies, at least he’s not you. That, at root, is the contemporary European mantra — At Least We’re Not American — and, like many mantras, it is impervious to fact or repudiation. What about the massive gap in GDP that has opened up between the U.S. and Europe since 2008? At least we’re not American. What about the anemic performance of European companies relative to those in the United States? At least we’re not American. What about the gulf between GDP per capita in Europe and GDP per capita in the United States, or about the U.S.’s great advantages in biotech and energy and advanced semiconductors, or the fact that, if most European countries were to join the U.S., they’d have a lower standard of living than people do in Mississippi, or that the average European is six times more likely to die from a lack of heating or air conditioning than an American is from a gun, or that most European countries are unable to usefully project military power? At least we’re not American.
Why, pray, do Europeans tell themselves that? Because, if they didn’t, they might have to account for their failures, and because that would require a capacity for introspection that they simply do not possess. Read any Eurocrat’s assessment of the United States, and you will encounter a thoroughly preposterous image of life here, in which science is ignored in favor of superstition; in which nobody is able to read or write; in which only billionaires are admitted to hospitals; in which one is unable to go to the supermarket without being gunned down by gangs; in which the sole food option is McDonald’s; and which, absent the benevolent guidance of EU censors, the population is fatally misled by an endless supply of Koran-burning bigots — and yet which, despite all of that, has magically managed to become the richest, most powerful, most sought-after nation in the history of the world. Invariably, these hallucinations are coupled with a penchant for sophistry and excuse-making that would make Gorgias blush. Europe’s feeble economic growth is recast as “sustainability.” Its habitual censorship of dissenters is brushed away with the contention that any speech that is prosecuted is, by definition, not “free speech” at all. Poor people have adopted a salutary “life balance”; rule by apparatchiks is “sophisticated democracy”; the superintendence of every last thing is the “management of community tensions.” Most fun of all, perhaps, is the insistence that all critics of Europe and its governments must by definition be “far right,” and even working on behalf of Vladimir Putin — a bizarre charge to hear from the leaders of a continent that has spent 80 years being protected by the carapace of hard American power.
I am a writer, not a politician, and as a result I am free to be as rude as I wish about anything that takes my fancy. Given the geopolitical concerns at stake, I would not recommend that those in power here in America echo my sentiments about Europe in quite this fashion or this tone, but I would hope that they are aware of the problem, which is that Europe — a region that the West needs to remain a useful ally — has become utterly deluded about its fortunes, its importance, its nature, and its very place in the world, and that unless it is told “No” by its suzerains, forcefully, repeatedly, and without any interest in the looks it receives in return, that delusion is unlikely to be dissipated any time soon.
New York Post
DoorDash driver accused of pepper-spraying customer’s Arby’s order, resulting in wife falling ill
By Nicholas McEntyre
Published Dec. 10, 2025, 1:00 a.m. ET
Caught red (pepper) handed.
A DoorDash driver has been banned from the app after being accused of dousing an order with pepper spray and causing an unsuspecting customer to fall ill after eating the tainted food.
The sick act was caught on a doorbell camera outside an Evansville, Indiana, home just after midnight on Sunday.
The driver, who hasn’t been charged with any crime, was dropping off an Arby’s delivery to Mark Cardin and his wife, Mandy, when she snapped a confirmation photo before suddenly producing an object from her pocket and spraying the order.
The blue-haired worker placed the spray back into her jacket pocket before walking away, all in front of the camera.
The couple brought the order inside, unaware that something was wrong with it and began chowing down.
Moments later, Mandy began struggling to breathe.
“I noticed my wife had starting eating and she started choking and gasping, and after she had a couple bites of her food she actually threw up,” he told WFIE.
The horrified customer began investigating the cause of his wife’s sudden illness when he examined the order.
“I had a look at the bag and seen that there was some kind of spray or something,” Cardin said. “The bag had been tampered with. So I pulled up my doorbell camera and seen that the lady who dropped the food off had actually tampered with it on purpose for some reason.”
Cardin shared the photos and videos of the driver to Facebook asking for help in identifying the driver.
He attempted to contact her but found she already blocked him on the app.
Cardin reported the food runner’s stunt to DoorDash and the Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office is looking to get the driver fired and charged.
“I definitely want to see her prosecuted,” Cardin told WFIE, adding that they had never met her before and had left a tip before the incident.
The driver has been banned from the app after footage surfaced of the late-night delivery.
“We have zero tolerance for this type of appalling behavior. The Dasher in question has been permanently removed from the platform, and our team is standing by to support law enforcement with any investigation,” a DoorDash spokesperson told The Post.
Cardin doesn’t know exactly what was sprayed on the food, fearing it could’ve been worse than it was.
“It’s horrific,” Cardin said. “We assume it’s pepper spray, that’s more than likely what it is, but now in this day and age it could’ve been anything. It could’ve been rat poison, it could’ve been fentanyl. I mean, my wife could’ve been dead.”
The Vanderburgh County Sheriff’s Office has opened an investigation into the driver and could charge her with consumer product tampering, a level 6 felony, according to WFIE.
If the foreign spray resulted in harm the charge could be increased to a level 5 felony.
“We live in a terrible world right now,” Mark said. “Horrific. People are mean for no reason. There was no reason to do what she done,” Cardin said, encouraging other food delivery app users to be cautious with their future orders.
“I would say to anybody, if you order food on any kind of delivery service, make sure you have a doorbell,” Mark said.
“This is making me second guess ever ordering food from anywhere ever again,” he said.
New York Post
Instacart caught using shady algorithm to charge different prices to individual customers — in the same stores, bombshell study reveals
By Taylor Herzlich and Lisa Fickenscher
Published Dec. 9, 2025, 5:36 p.m. ET
Popular food delivery service Instacart has been using a shady algorithm that charges different prices to different customers on the same grocery items in the same supermarkets without telling them, according to an explosive study.
At a Target store in North Canton, Ohio, the wildly popular grocery app charged a customer $2.99 for Skippy Creamy Peanut Butter one day in September – while other Instacart users that day paid as much as $3.59 for the same jar picked up from the same location, according to the study.
At a Safeway supermarket in Seattle, shoppers using Instacart paid five different prices for the same Oscar Mayer Deli Turkey: $3.99, $4.31, $4.59, $4.69 and $4.89 — a range that spanned a whopping 23% between the lowest and highest markup.
The same pattern emerged at Target and Safeway stores across four cities, according to Groundwork Collaborative and Consumer Reports, which used 437 shoppers in its survey, ordering groceries off the Instacart app for in-store pickup.
It’s the latest example of so-called “dynamic pricing” — the hated practice introduced more than a decade ago by Uber and Lyft, hiking prices for rides during rainstorms — that is nickel-and-diming consumers, even as relentless inflation has sparked an affordability crisis.
Airlines are known to hike prices when more customers visit their sites at the same time — a tactic known as “surveillance pricing.” Even fast-food junkies claim to have spotted fluctuating prices on burger menus that are increasingly displayed on video screens.
Groundwork, a consumer advocacy group, said Instacart’s pricing algorithm could lead to shoppers forking over an extra $1,200 on groceries each year — even as food inflation has outpaced price increases for other goods since the pandemic.
Nearly three-quarters of grocery items surveyed were sold at different price points on Instacart, one of the largest grocery-shopping apps in the US, according to the study published Tuesday.
In response to a query by The Post, Instacart said its price “tests” are never based on the personal or behavioral characteristics of shoppers. It said its prices were never “dynamic,” meaning they never change in real time, although the study found that they changed wildly depending on who was shopping.
The study found no evidence that Instacart was using personal information, but said it’s almost certain that Instacart and other retailers have the ability to base prices on demographics like age and household income, as well as whether they’re new or returning customers.
Instacart claimed its “tests” help retailers “learn what matters most to consumers.” While the algorithm might charge higher prices on craft beverages or specialty snacks, it often lowers prices on essentials like milk and bread, Instacart claimed.
“Just as retailers have long tested prices in their physical stores to better understand consumer preferences, a subset of only 10 retail partners – ones that already apply markups – do the same online via Instacart,” an Instacart spokesperson told The Post in a statement.
A Target spokeswoman, however, told The Post in a written statement that “Target is not affiliated with Instacart and is not responsible for prices on the Instacart platform.” The Target spokesperson declined to comment on whether the retailer was reviewing Instacart’s practices at its stores.
Albertsons, which owns Safeway, did not immediately respond to The Post’s request for comment.
With grocery prices up 25% since the pandemic, President Trump over the weekend ordered a sweeping investigation into food price-fixing allegations. Several Dem lawmakers have accused food conglomerates of price gouging.
Instacart powers e-commerce for Stew Leonard’s, which operates more than a half dozen supermarkets across the New York metro area. But Instacart has never approached Stew Leonard’s to do variable pricing within the same store — and the grocer says it never would.
“We would never price customer A differently from customer B,” the grocer’s chief marketing officer, Tammy Berentson told The Post. “We would have nothing to gain. It’s unfair. We are transparent about our pricing and we want to be fair to our customers and for our customers to trust us.”
At a Safeway in Washington, DC, a couple of shoppers paid as little as $3.99 for a dozen Lucerne eggs, while others coughed up $4.79 for the same carton. At that same store, some shoppers paid $2.99 for a box of Signature SELECT Corn Flakes, while others were charged as much as $3.69.
A box of Premium Original Saltine Crackers at a Target in North Canton, Ohio, cost $3.99 for some Instacart customers, and $4.59 and $4.69 for some others. Some shoppers paid $1.19 for store-brand farfalle pasta at the same Target, while others were charged $1.43.
Instacart charged shoppers at least four different prices on Wheat Thins at a Safeway in Seattle, at $3.99, $4.31, $4.69 and $4.89.
“Instacart is a black hole for the retailer,” an industry executive told The Post. “The classic rub in the scenario is ‘Whose customer is it’ – Instacart’s or the grocer’s?'”
“The problem is the retailers got into Instacart because it gives them an online presence, but then the pandemic occurred and they realized that they don’t have any visibility into the customer transactions,” the executive added.
The price changes are powered by Eversight, a software firm that Instacart acquired in 2022.
In a call with investors last year, Instacart CEO Fidji Simo said the new AI technology “helps retailers dynamically optimize their pricing both online and in-store to really figure out which categories of products a customer is more price sensitive on versus less price sensitive on and really adjust their prices based on that information.”
