alexist

I've decided (after a few weeks of reading it) that I really dislike Lionel Shriver's column in Guardian G2. She's the kind of expat that drives me mad through stereotyping and just getting the facts wrong. Take this week:

1) Regular US milk is simply pasteurized and homogenized, not "boiled to death", and tastes no worse and no better than your typical Tesco "pasteurised homogenised standardised milk".

2) Non-ultra-pasteurized cream is not impossible to find, certainly not in New York. I can think of several places that stock it. (Though I will agree that British double cream is delicious.)

3) She must be the only person in Britain to buy a 250mL pot of cream. (For the non-Brits: dairy products were exempted from metric laws, although the measures are still expressed in mL for smaller volumes--so you actually buy 284mL, or half a pint.)

(I seem to encounter the "Oh everything here is so much better!" species of expat too often. I'm not the "everything in the US is so much better!" opposite; I'm just not ashamed of where I'm from and not afraid to be proud of it. And I'm incurably pedantic.)

My laptop charger broke (the pin bit). Of course, warranty expired in July.

So I had to shell out for a new one. Ow.