Over the course of several years, I would dutifully get the latest Norton antivirus software and load it up for a while, only to wind up throwing F-bombs around at some point when I was trying to uninstall it. It was insidious, with tentacles deep into my system, and enterprising software engineers out there were forced to come up with independent solutions to root all the nasty bits out. Even then, you would find stray pieces in your registry or who knows where else.

And the reason for every single uninstall was always the same – the Norton software slowed you down. Sometimes way down.
Especially as an on-and-off gamer, specifically one who has always preferred to take his gaming online, anything that slows down my system or impedes my Internet access in any way was simply not acceptable.

Which brings me to the Norton Internet Security 2009 and AntiVirus 2009.
After being asked if I wanted to check them out, I had that same old nag. Will I run into the problems I used to have? Has there been enough complaining to get Symantec’s attention?

Looking at the packaging for both of them, it becomes obvious that they’re dealing with a perception issue. Hanging conspicuously under the product name are the words “Engineered for Speed.”

A good idea, but anybody can stick a blurb in the box copy. There was only going to be one way to find out if these were better products, and I am a curious beast, so I stuck the first disc in the tray.
Installing something takes on a rhythm of its own, one that we all know.

You pop in the disc and up comes the Microsoft installer, you click a few yes bubbles, agree to a bunch more stuff, and wait. Then you reboot, watch all the old-school boot up, sit through the Windows splash and grit your teeth while you wait some more.

But this time it was different.

Symantec isn’t using the Microsoft installer, they’re using their own. And it takes a minute. Really. About one minute. With no reboot.

Now, at this point, I don’t know much more about the Norton packages than I knew two minutes before, but I already like them. Maybe that wasn’t just PR hyperbole on the box. A little Googling reveals that Symantec blames Microsoft for some of the reputation for Norton’s bloat in the past, and this new installer, all stripped down and very, very clean, has me convinced that they might be on to something.

Once into the interface, another aspect of their new commitment to speed is revealed. The main menu is much stripped down as well, with options for basic configuration and tool choice never more than one click away. It’s much easier and more obvious to set your specific level of protection. Pop-ups tips are fairly clear, and there’s not enough on the screen to confuse someone who simply wants to make the simplest choices for their system and be done with it. Another great idea is the removal of the constant nags for other Norton products. In prior versions, people who didn’t have the best grasp on their technology would be confused, assuming that they still didn’t have everything they needed, that there was something missing from the software they had just installed. People who did know what they wanted had already bought it, and they didn’t need to see an ad for anything else. Nobody is going to miss those baked-in ads.

One of the best features of the Internet Security package is the way it decides what is and isn’t malware. When your system is scanned, Norton then goes out and compares what it sees in your computer with a whitelist of files in use on other people’s computers. If Norton doesn’t recognize something, instead of putting up a red flag and causing you some concern that you might not need to have, the software assumes that the file in question must be okay and ignores it. If very few other users have that unknown file, you’ll likely get a warning.

The old method of updating virus and malware definitions is gone (goodbye LiveUpdate), and is replaced by a much more active definition retrieval structure. Norton literally updates its definitions every few minutes, and you can see this in the interface, if you’re the kind of person who needs to know these things down to the second. (I just checked, and it last updated 29 seconds ago.)

I don’t have enough other antivirus software to make an accurate comparison with Norton, but a little looking around online shows me that Norton is among the top rated for rooting out even the nastiest viruses and much the same with the speed of scanning, picking through fat hard drives much faster than I remember from years back.

I also haven’t had enough time to really test the edges of the IdentitySafe and AntiPhishing aspects of Norton, being a fairly careful surfer. Casual examination suggests that it runs quietly in the background until you bump into something that triggers an alert, and it shuts you down before you get a chance to hurt yourself.

The only problem I had with either package was, naturally, once I started running a few games. Even though I had opened up a hole for World of Warcraft to slip through the firewall, I had to fiddle around stopping and starting the program to get a connection, and the same thing happened with Call of Duty 4. The problems didn’t last long, however, and free tech support was there if I wasn’t able to figure it out on my own. As usual, the best place to check for help is the users forum, as there’s bound to be somebody else sharing your pain out there in the world.
After a few weeks of use, I haven’t had any problems at all, no obvious slowdowns or hitches, and no annoyances in terms of configuring. It looks like Symantec has really responded to their customers here and come up with a solution for every complaint from the previous versions. In my estimation, Norton 2009 is highly recommended.

I watch as the opening act surfs the crowd looking for breasts under the shroud of black. A whisper in the ear is all it seems to take and the shroud is lifted in the back of the windowless van downstairs. Is she angry … will she be someday…why the smile little girl.

Lots of screaming up here - slamdancing or do the kids call it moshing now. It used to be we were trampling on the heads of serpents…exposing lies.

Lots of attitude but the kind that leaves when you lie in your own bed alone.

So the jurys out for me on the revolution…but I still have hope

Signing out - the Hustler

As we casually approach the reality of fauxpop.tv, and I mean CASUALLY, we find ourselves bringing in some new writers.

And by writers, I mean writer. Singular.

Neilchair, our esteemed guest, is a young man and therefore fiery tempered and filled with vigor and passion. Or perhaps he is just a miserable prick. It’s hard to say at this point.

What is easy to say is that he will be popping into The Fizz now and again to interrupt my regularly scheduled self-diddlery with his own carping on about this and/or that.

I hope you enjoy it as much as his mother does.

Enter Neilchair:

…Read some troubling news today that modern DrumKing (which, now that I say it out loud doesn’t sound nearly as complimentary as I hoped), Travis Barker, was seriously burned in a jet crash on Friday (Sept. 19, ‘08).

Like many 80s babies (yea… I know… I’m already like this. Imagine what I’ll be like when I’m 40) I came of musical age in the mid-90s and was not immune to the shiny allure of the big SoCal second-coming of punk. In fact, I loved it. Bad Religion, Green Day, Rancid, the Offspring, Blink 182… everything from thundering songs denouncing the economic strangleholds placed on the poor by the greedy, right-wing, fascist government of the day to luscious saccharine 3-chord ballads about boobies… it was all good. And despite the broadening of my horizons, I still hold a great affection for those bands which is why I was disturbed to read of Mr. Barker’s accident. As a side note, he probably won’t die. See? God really does prefer the rich.

That being said, two things struck me as I read the article and a few of the ten million comments after it.

Point 1
First, a few items to keep in mind:
1. Pilots–and especially commercial pilots–have to train and practice and learn to be awesome for a REALLY LONG FRIGGIN’ TIME. A weekend with Flight Simulator X is not going to be enough to make you a licensed commercial pilot, trust me, I know… those guards were not impressed.

2. Next to overdoses, plane crashes are a pretty common and trendy way for the rich & famous to check out, see: Aaliyah, John Denver, Buddy Holly, another-popular-one, so we can’t call this a total surprise; the Big F’s, Failures (of the engine), Fires, Faulty wiring, Foggy mountains leaping out from behind the hedge, do happen. But one observation about this specific case…

They weren’t off the goddamn ground yet.

This has happened a few times in the last couple years, and no, I didn’t bother to look the specific incidents up but I know it has. (I will back him on that, although I too haven’t looked anything up. Ed.) For starters, there was one in France. I think. Or Montreal. Same thing. Anyway, the point is that it happens. But how? How, in Lucifer’s burning hell do you crash a plane that hasn’t taken off yet? I’ll be one of the first to admit (not the first, I’m still holding out hope) that I’m in no way qualified to fly a real airplane, but even in my limited experience of Sunday afternoon computer-simulated flying I know that the easiest, simplest, basic-est, do-blind-folded-in-a-coma-deep-trance act of aviation is Taking Off. Even Ted Striker could probably manage it so how, tell me how, Virginia, does a professionally trained pro like the pilot probably was, manage to drive the thing straight off the end of the runway, across a highway and into an embankment?

Possibly reaching to turn up that new Rihanna–and, in fairness, it is bumpin’.

Point 2
The comments-section.

Almost everyone hates the comment section (wink, wink) and I am no exception (nudge, nudge), excepting the exception of on here… I won’t read them anyway so knock yourself out. “Fisrt!!!!!11!!1″, “faagg”, “visit my sexy hot site with hot male where sexy barley-legell naked women can hook up with other naked mansex” are fine up to a point, but after you realize that although you aren’t the only one who’s naked, you are certainly the only one who’s sexy, the fun tends to fade out. Such was the case under the article.

After I waded through all the, “ohmigod, Travis is so sexy, even if he is a scarred and charred shell of a man”, and “wtf, liek who cares, Neil Peart’s like wayyy better at drumming” I came across the inevitable, “No one even would care about him if he wasn’t a celebrity.” And they’re right. No one would care. That’s the point and, in a nod to my 90s roots… duh.

Now, I’m not a celebrity watcher. I don’t know exactly what Nicole Ritchie looks like or why she’s important and the only thing I know for sure about Paris Hilton is that she shocked the world by displaying her possession of short-term memory in a video over at funnyordie.com (check out the vid, but look at our ads, not theirs). At least Travis Barker is an expert at an extremely complicated instrument and has displayed a high level of skill at playing it in a wide range of styles, but the commenter was right, we only care because we “know” him.

If the guy filling your gas tank has a sniffle, do you suggest he take the rest of the day off? Do you go buy him some herbal tea and spice it up with some honey and a couple drops of lemon extract? Do you offer to put the snarky teenager down the street through college so she can study Art History and design armcovers with safety pins in them? Probably not. But what if the guy at the gas station was your brother. What if the snarky pop-art tart was your own darling Clementine. Totally different story. So what’s the difference? The difference is that you don’t know the other guy and can’t stand the stylistically perfect goth and because you don’t and can’t… you don’t give a shit.

You probably don’t know Travis either but because he’s been out there, pounding the skins, for 15+ years, you form a connection to what he’s done and how it makes you feel, which makes you feel like they’re important, which is why you care when they survive a plane crash that almost every other passenger died in. Common folk like to say that the famous are just like us but the truth is that most of the time, they’re not. Most of the time, they’re Better Than Us. For most famous people (I’ll arbitrarily say 85%) they are famous because they were better than everyone else around at the time.

Unless you’re Robert DeNiro reading this (in which case, do I ever have The Script for you, buddy), Robert DeNiro is a better actor than you are. Unless you’re George Carlin online from the grave (you laugh, it’ll happen), George Carlin is a better comedian than you are. And unless you’re Travis Barker (or, allegedly, Neil Peart… thanks rushfreakfromhell667), Travis is a better drummer than you are.

So the next time that someone famous does or almost does or doesn’t-but-could-have or wasn’t-there-but-could-have-if-they-weren’t-somewhere-else, die in the latest fashionable way, keep the “no one would care” line in the bag. Unless your are the greatest actor, or funniest dude, or craziest drummer… Neil Peart.

Sorry Barker, us Neil’s gotta stick together.

- Neilchair

I sure do.

The drive-in, stay home moms, skinny John Travolta and ads with babies selling cigarettes to their mothers.

/sigh

The Good Old Days

See for yourself here.

Now, if only I could find an ad with my grandma selling bag smokes I’d be all set.

When I look at a tool like this, I don’t see strictly business applications. I see that, as soon as they get the capacity for showing colours – yes it’s black and white in the demo – they have a product that will capture enormous public interest.
Sure, he can sell these to busy sales reps who don’t want to carry a briefcase full of paper through airports and hotels all over the world, but I think he can sell even more to comics fans, magazine readers and news junkies.
Get that thing on the Web and pack a few more features into it and every serious student in the world (who doesn’t live in a developing nation) is going to want one. And schools will start handing them out to first years.
Of course, all of this is price dependent, but inevitably the price will fall, and then even I will have one, and it will be awesome.
And I’m sure that I won’t be the only one who can’t wait to read Neuromancer on it.
The NaySayer

First off, let’s get this straight – some of this movie is hilarious.

I started off my viewing experience laughing like a little girl with a face full of nitrous. I laughed so hard I peed the pants of the guy beside me. The parody in the first act is excellent, gouging its thumbs into the eyeballs of the movie industry and digging deep.

The fake start Ben Stiller uses is brilliant, and I know there were people in the audience who bought the trailers as real until it sunk in who was starring in them.

The movie within a movie was equally enjoyable. Lots of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, even Born on the Fourth of July in there, all being sent up perfectly, sometimes down to the shot.

By now, everyone knows that the three main actors are Ben Stiller as Tugg Speedman, Jack Black as Jeff Portnoy and Robert Downey Jr. keeping his balls out summer going as Kirk Lazarus. And everybody knows that Downey is brilliant as an actor heavily inspired by the intense character building done by intense Method actors like Daniel Day Lewis (assuming there is anyone like Lewis, whose real-life devotion to his roles isn’t too far off what Downey plays in this film). But what people maybe don’t know is that Jack Black isn’t very entertaining in this.

Maybe it’s just me, but Black’s spin on a pathetic star of fart joke comedies falls into some uncomfortable reality with regard to his drug addiction. I wasn’t offended, but I need better jokes if I’m expected to laugh at an addict going through withdrawal. Even the requisite puking scene was weak, and ended up being more about exposition that anything else.

Stiller can play a deluded moron in his sleep by now, and has some great moments throughout the film, but there weren’t many surprises in that character until he begins to perform his Simple Jack character for the narcomilitia towards the end.

I loved Matthew McConaughey as Rick Peck (The Pecker), Speedman’s agent, and I can get onboard the excitement many critics had over Tom Cruise’s heavily made up character turn, although by the end, it completely blows out of energy.

Much of the fun in this film is running through a list of who’s being mocked by all these characters and sequences, and even the more casual readers of Hollywood news/scandal will probably be able to recognize various aspects of plenty of the rich and famous. But the vicious delight of the satire falls away once the Act 2 stuff kicks in, and instead of making me laugh, the filmmakers decided to try and make the kind of movie that they had only moments earlier been taking the piss out of.

Watching Stiller lean on played out action movie tropes was a real kick in the ass, and the number of laughs died out in the theatre I was in as we forgot that we were watching an incisive comedy and went through the action paint-by-numbers.

The problem with this is that we don’t have anything at stake, so the action is meaningless and feels thin. We’ve been laughing, we’ve been having fun and feeling very much in on the joke as the film makes fun of the movie business, so when the story suddenly tries to raise the stakes and take us through a series of set pieces, it feels too much like a straight to video 80s movie. Honestly, I felt like Chuck Norris or Michael Dudikoff was going to pop out and blow a clip off an Uzi or something. This isn’t what I want in my comedy.

By the end, there were a few more laughs – back to the satire - but the final sequence, which involves Tom Cruise again, is a waste of screen time.

Should you go and pay money to see this movie? Maybe. It’s better than buying a pack of smokes, but that’s not a very good review. Imagine this blurb on the poster, “Won’t give you lung cancer.”

Instead, I will tell you that you should see it, have your big laughs up front, and then sit uncomfortably in your seat for a chunk of the middle, yanking out the good stuff here and there, until you see Tom Cruise again, at which point you should notice how big his hands are. Was that a makeup effect, like the hair? It’s hard to say.

10. It’s already been hacked. You don’t know what that actually means, but it sounds awesome!

9. Lots of apps available. You don’t know what that means either, but Leo Laporte seems to like it and he’s awesome!

8. Every time you use it you’ll feel like a character in Minority Report, but without all the annoying Tom Cruise.

7. Heals the sick, clears bad acne and can be used as a compression device for a serious gunshot wound.

6. Easier to buy an iPhone than it is to find a woman who loves you for the person you really are. And I mean you personally, not the collective you.

5. Apple’s use of 3G is 130% more awesome than EDGE, and gets you tons more action than stupid EVDO. Hellooo ladies…

4. Creates a shiny new means by which a few large telecommunication companies can pursue their maniacal agenda to rape, pillage and sodomize their clients prior to stripping them of their wallets, their dignity and their firstborn children.

3. You would only use that money to buy a lot of cheap, plastic crap that was made in China and would leach toxic chemicals into your bloodstream and give you a tumour.

2. The neighbour’s dog said you should get one, right after you buy a handgun and ten rolls of duct tape.

1. You don’t want to make Steve angry. You know how he gets.

The first time I went to Amsterdam, it was with a bunch of teenage girls. Well, maybe not a bunch, but there were definitely at least two of them. And maybe they weren’t exactly teenage girls, but they were teenage girls back when I met them.

Please do not assume that I am a multi-national gentleman of leisure running my newest ladies into the bowels of the Red Light District, because that is simply not the case. I am no pimp, just a simple high school teacher.

There are probably some who find it somewhat disconcerting that a couple of my former students would grow into adulthood only to befriend me and my family, then fly over to Germany to visit us, to sleep in my little German house and eat at my German table and then stroll across the beautiful canals of Amsterdam giggling through the second hand pot smoke at all the real live Amsterdam hookers with me.

Those people would find it all suspicious.

“Why would those girls want to visit you?”

I will admit that I take it as a compliment that two of my former students managed to make it through five years of high school and graduate without a raging desire to seek revenge upon me once they escaped with their diplomas. Maybe I have been doing something right after all.

The two young women in question are NtC and The Uje, and have for years been on again, off again visitors to our home and so it was no surprise that they would end up at our kitchen table during any one of the many planning sessions wherein my good woman and I entered into protracted discussion regarding some aspect of our forthcoming German Adventure.

“You’re so lucky,” said NtC. “I would love to go to Europe.”

Being a man, I just nodded. Yes, of course somebody would wish to go to Europe. Yes, we are so lucky. NtC was correct in her observation. Nest topic…

My wife, however, being a woman, and speaking fluently the female dialect, responded in the correct and perhaps, expected manner, using that same dialect.

“You should come over and visit us.”

“Really?”

“Sure,” said my wife. “It would be fun.”

I should have known what to do. Having lived amongst women for so long, I have acquired a passable understanding of their tongue, although perhaps only just enough to get me in trouble.

At a restaurant, I know that if my wife asks me, “Is that good?” I am supposed to push my plate over towards her and demand (with smiling love) that she try it for herself, rather than tell her it is indeed good and that she should have picked it instead of what she has.

If we are driving a long distance and my wife asks me if I am hungry, and do I want to pull over and get something to eat, I understand that I am not supposed to say “No thanks” and keep driving because I just want to get wherever the hell we are going without biology slowing us down. I am supposed to immediately pull over and find a place for us to have a proper sit-down meal because we aren’t in a hurry and we can always just get a hotel that night.

And when houseguests remark on how they would love to go to Europe we don’t nod and feel privately superior that we have arranged to live there and they haven’t. Instead, we invite them to come over and stay with us.

That is why, not too long after we had settled into normal life at 24 Auf dem Hahn, I got up early one morning, fought two and half hours of stau (crushing Autobahn gridlock) down to Frankfurt, and waited around in the massive Frankfurt airport complex until I saw two familiar and shell-shocked faces bobbing through the crowd.

We drove back to The Deuce chattering like giddy Grade Six girls, and I realized that I was happy to have these girls with me. Seeing my new home through their eyes was more fun than seeing everything through mine all the time. It was like being their teacher all over again, only this time I could say bad words and there was no marking.

After a week of bike rides, city visits and grocery paradise runs to Real, and on the morning of their second last day in Germany, we got up early, slid into their rented BMW (thanks to an incredibly lucky mistake at the airport rental agency), and highballed for Holland.

Driving from the Dusseldorf area to any other area can be distressing. Living in a conurbation of some thirty million people demands that there be a sufficient concentration of highway for all of those people to get where they need to go, all at the same time. This has created what is, even after you figure out where you’re going and what you’re doing, an unimaginable concentration of roads, onramps, offramps, connector thoroughfares, multilane superhighways, and vehicles.

Luckily, I am the kind of resourceful Canadian guy who generally feels like he knows his way around.

Drop me in a new place and I get my bearings very quickly. A few glances at a local map and I’m fully prepared to walk around exactly like I know where I’m going, kind of like a giant wingless pigeon. Maybe I have magnets in my head too. Or maybe I am fooling myself, considering that, for our first few weeks in Germany, I had a hard time figuring which way was North whenever I merged onto the Autobahn.

But I don’t blame myself. I blame the transportation planners, which I suppose means Hitler. He wasn’t much better at planning roads than he was an artist.

If you want to drive to Essen, which is northeast of Meerbusch, you have to leave on a highway that goes south, drive into and partway through Dusseldorf, then turn east, and then drive north. Why? I have no clue. The only thing I can guess is that there is no more room for any more roads that are more direct. They have literally run out of road space. This unnatural experience was repeated driving to Muenster, to Paris, to Venlo in Holland, to almost everywhere that required leaving the house.

“How do these people figure out where they’re going?” I asked my good wife.

She pointed at the cars around us.

“They all use GPS.”

Just to get around in the area where they lived. Probably even to find their way home from work.

“We need to get one, or we are going to go insane and harm ourselves.”

She was right.

It was the best several hundred Euros we spent over there, not counting what we spent on shokolade muesli. And it made driving to Amsterdam with the girls a no brainer. I didn’t have to think about where we were going, where to turn, which lane to be in or any of that. I just had to drive that beautiful piece of German automotive engineering.

Yes. I drove it.

The girls agreed that I should pilot the BMW not only because I was old enough and had my name on the rental agreement, but because it was essential to my mental health. I have no choice but to drive. Once in a while I am forced by heinous circumstances, or possibly rank bullies, to sit in some other section of a motor vehicle where I have no control over my Destiny or the steering wheel and, during those times, I am not fit for human companionship, plus I am car sick.

Thankfully, these young women honoured my needs and allowed me to assume command of a car well beyond my reach, a car the likes of which I would normally not be allowed to touch, let alone drive.

This might explain why, once I pulled out onto the Autobahn, the taunting began in earnest.

“Are you sure you can handle this car?”

“This isn’t your minivan, you know.”

“I thought there was no speed limit on these highways.”

“Doesn’t this car have any higher gears?”

“Are you as old as you drive?”

I shook my head and laughed at them.

“I was immune to peer pressure in Grade Six. Do you honestly think I am going to allow your feeble commentary to goad me into-“

An old lady driving a Smart car blew past us, blaring her horn and shaking her fist.

I stomped the accelerator.

As a rule, my family is a law-abiding group.

In our tribe, we recognize that many of the codes and restrictions under which we live are rooted in logic and self-preservation. Even as a hormone-addled, self-absorbed teenage boy, I wasn’t likely to commit B&Es, shoplift unnecessary luxury items or drive more than 140 kph. I’ve only had five or six or seven or so speeding tickets in my life, and one of them was in Quebec, so that doesn’t count. But here I was on the Autobahn. The Autobahn, and NtC was absolutely correct.

There were no speed limits on this particular stretch of road, no rules or guidelines for careful driving whatsoever, and the pavement was utterly smooth, graded to perfection and maintained in a manner unimaginable anywhere else but for Germany. And I was driving a BMW that purred like a post-coital tigress.

Even my mom would have to agree that I had no other choice.

At 160, there was still no sense of speeding. The car and highway were too well designed. Besides, I was just pacing the regular flow of traffic in the left lane.

At 180, everything started to change. The road before us narrowed in from my peripheral vision, thinning to a blurred strip of dark grey as the speedometer moved towards 190.

The car was still smooth, almost like we weren’t on the road, but floating above it, just a few inches, which gave me the slightest sense of vertigo, like I wasn’t exactly where I was, but a little somewhere else.

It was very quiet in the car as we floated along, and I couldn’t glance over to see if that was due to the girls’ paralyzing fear at our speed or their mute ecstasy at this blatant flouting of North American traffic laws.

I had the distinct sense that, as we edged ever closer to 200, if I looked away from the road, even for a second, something – a moose, a thrown tire, a discarded coffee cup – something would suddenly be there in front of us and the fun would be over in a screaming pinwheel of expensive German engineering and fragile meaty sacks of Canadian touristry.

I eased off the gas, diesel, actually, and watched the speedometer creep down to a more manageable 150. It felt like we were inching our way up to the speaker at a drive-thru, and I could understand why the Germans were so adamant about maintaining their seemingly unhinged highway speed laws. Although it’s dangerous and eerie, and the margin for error is way too small for normal drivers to tolerate, if you were in the habit of driving that fast, going any slower is a total drag. It gives you that same feeling you get driving behind an eighty year old woman coming home from a euchre tournament at the legion with belly full of cherry pie and Earl Grey.

Driving normal speeds after going almost 200 was like putting training wheels back on your bike after you’d learned to ride without them. I felt like I could have driven blindfolded at that speed. I also felt like I would able to stop the car or steer if necessary, so it wasn’t all bad.

We played Ipod Name That Tune for two hours (I won) and suddenly, we were pulling into the Ajax Stadium for a little five Euro Park and Ride.

Just like that, we were in Amsterdam.

Amsterdam is a city that has a lot of connotations, which compels me remind the world that I do not partake of intoxicating substances of any sort.

I do not currently make use of, nor have I ever used, drugs or alcohol of any sort, not counting all the drugs doctors have given me over the years, which would include such highlights as Valium, Percodan, Percocet, Ativan and Adasol-15. These were all prescribed by actual doctors, for legitimate medical reasons, I might add, and as such I didn’t misuse any of them except for that one migraine when I woke up spread all over the macramé mat in front of the sliding glass door at my parents’ house with no memory as to how I got there and a trail of crusted drool on my face.

For me, Amsterdam doesn’t generate any excitement about legal pot, not even in a supposedly chocolate space cake. If I want a brownie, I don’t even want walnut or icing, never mind a few seeds of of skunky old pot. Getting high isn’t what made me want to go.

It was the whores that I was after.

That was a joke.

My first conscious encounter with a real-life hooker took place when I was eighteen and visiting Toronto after a morning tour of York University. It was only my second time in that particular city, which makes it more understandable that, when the impressively full figured woman standing outside the Zanzibar strip bar asked me if I wanted a date, I was almost dumb enough to be flattered. She was at least twice and a half my age, and the idea that an older woman of such bounteous and unusually conspicuous cleavage found me attractive enough to ask me out on a date without even knowing me gave me a great deal of satisfaction.

“Did you hear that?” I asked Marcel. “That woman just asked me out! She doesn’t even know me!”

He probably didn’t believe it had happened until she asked him out too. To my credit, it didn’t hurt my feelings, but that may have been because she made it fairly clear that she perfectly willing to go on a date with both of us at the same time.

It was at that moment that I realized this woman wasn’t attracted to us because of our small town good looks and naturally curly hair (well, mine was naturally curly, Marcel had a perm). Here it was, just past three in the afternoon, and we had met our first lady of the evening!

It was all very exciting, even without actually going on the date.

After that, most of my encounters with prostitutes were much less interesting, and best characterized by an ongoing and rather nagging interaction with the unfortunate, drug ravaged woman working the driest patch of sidewalk in front of the T.D. Green Machine down the street from where I lived at Queen and Manning years later.

She didn’t look as much like the definition of optimism as she did the definition of a crack whore, but I have to give credit where it is due. It didn’t matter how many times I walked past her on my way to the grocery store, she asked me every single time if I wanted a date.

It didn’t matter than I had just told her “no thanks” on my first pass. Five minutes later, when I walked past carrying two armloads of groceries, she asked me again. As she did every single time.

One night after I had quit my job making commercials and didn’t have anything better to do, I passed her seventeen times, walking just past her to the corner and then forty feet back to the book store, and each time, she asked me if I wanted a date. Each time I told her “no thanks.”

Finally, on the last pass, I stopped and asked her why she kept asking in spite of all the evidence supporting my lack of interest. “Didn’t you notice me saying no these last sixteen times?”

She just shrugged. “Maybe you changed your mind.”

The lasting memory of that dentally challenged woman, and the distressing chemically rich urine smell that permeated the air around the Green Machine tainted my view of prostitution. That doesn’t mean that I thought anything was wrong with adult women of sound mind and body choosing to exercise their rights to make money as they see fit, it just meant that it wasn’t right for me. Nobody who gags watching other people chew their fingernails, who can actually taste their fingers from across the room, is going to be able to stomach some kind of intimate tussle behind a dumpster chock full of rotting Chinese food in a back alley on Dundas Street.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting to go to Amsterdam and see what there was to see.

We came out of the subway station onto a busy street along the water, where several canals fed out into the sea. Even though it was Monday morning, the place was packed with tourists, and everybody was funneled up what I assumed was the main street.

I don’t know exactly what I expected, but it just looked like any busy street in an old European city. Cheap Italian restaurants, pubs, Middle-Eastern fast food and T-shirt shops one after another. I didn’t see any hookers standing on the corners, no potheads spilling out into the street smelling like the upholstery in Snoop Dogg’s tour bus.

We followed the flow of people up to a busy square with a statue, some really old buildings, and even fewer hookers.

Where was all the bad stuff?

I slipped into a hotel and rifled through their collection of brochures until I found something with a boobies on the cover. Sure enough, there was a map inside. If we followed the road up another block, curled around to the left and came down into Waterlooplein, we would find a flea market, the Rembrandt House, and there, across the bridge and down the road, was the Sex Museum.

I showed the map to the girls.

“If you were a hooker, wouldn’t you set up near the Sex Museum?”

They agreed.

It didn’t take long to find it.

The Red Light District looks the same as any of the other old parts of this really old city, with tall, slanty medieval buildings tightly packed and sagging over narrow lanes that run alongside the canals.

The sidewalks are tiny, the roads are tiny, the crowds are thick, the canal water is rich with raw sewage, and there are no guard rails or safety measures of any kind preventing you from going over the edge.

I can only assume that, if you did fall into that water, you would have to fling yourself around in mid-air to guarantee that you hit your head on the concrete edge before you hit the water so that you could be unconscious, or better yet, dead before you fell in. I’m not joking about the raw sewage. Toilets have flushed straight into the canals for hundreds of years and there are a lot of people flushing. The water is brown for a reason, and it’s not because the mud is being stirred up.

It wouldn’t have mattered how brown the water was, however, as nobody spends much time looking at it. Yes, the bridges were awesome, the old buildings impressive, the shops bizarre and the coffee shops dank and nasty looking, but all of that is forgotten when you see the little hooker booths.

Once you get into that part of town, I don’t think you’d have noticed flaming dead bodies floating by.

Please don’t assume that I was walking around staring lustfully at semi-nude women for hire like some shaven-headed British soccer hooligan, of which there seemed to be hundreds in the city.

No, my staring was more shocked than lustful.

Now, I am not a prude.

I am not a religious man with some kind of negative attitude towards nudity and human sexuality. I am all for nudity and human sexuality. Remember, I stood with a bus tour of French senior citizens in The Erotic Museum along the Pigalle in Paris and watched a porno movie shot in 1916, and I clapped at the end just like they did.

I am not one of these self-righteous people who feels that prostitution is wrong, assuming that the women involved are taking part in it by their own decision. I don’t think it’s any of my business how some people want to make their money or spend it, as long as everybody’s a consenting adult.

But I have to wonder how it is that a prostitute can expect to make any money in such a competitive market if she looks exactly like former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega with basketball sized breast implants.

I am not exaggerating.

I saw that exact woman, assuming she was a woman.

Not only did she look exactly like Noriega, she was right around his age. And had clearly had the same dermatologist. Or lack thereof.

You have to realize this means that, somewhere in Amsterdam is a little Latin American kid sitting in a park eating a bun, wondering where his grandpa works. Well, I saw that little kid’s grandpa, and the little kid’s grandpa should be ashamed of himself. He should also take that bikini off and go back to being a general, because he can’t possibly be making money as a prostitute.

That is why I was shocked.

Shouldn’t prostitutes be at least a little better looking than that? Think of what they’re doing for a living. Seeing some of these “ladies” of the evening, I will admit that I couldn’t help but feel like, with a little makeup and the right g-string, I would have as good a chance as any to make a few bucks. Honestly, what kind of sick-minded individual wants a hook up with an old lady that looks like the former Panamanian strongman dictator? And pay fifty Euros for it!?

I guess that wasn’t the only thing that shocked me. The sheer number of women is hard to believe. All over this maze of tight little alleys, lanes and side streets, you pass glass door after glass door, each one filled up full with a woman. And if you walk by, you’re usually right there, just inches away from them.

Maybe because they are there every day, the girls in those booths have become immune to that thing people do where they look away from someone when their eyes meet. You know how you’re sitting on the subway looking at people, and then one of those people looks back so you immediately glance in the opposite direction? Well, these women don’t do that. If you glance at them, they stare back at you and smile, and if you don’t look away, they will open the door and call you over. It’s a good thing they don’t have lassoes.

The level of self-confidence they have is amazing, standing there in what amounts to a full length window in bikinis or less, being stared at, laughed at, pointed at, shunned, lusted over, scrutinized, drooled over, and every other response such a display would attract. You want to look, too, because it’s just so weird to see them all placed like gerbils in a pet store, and maybe you could look, but I couldn’t. Not for long. The shiver I got when they looked back at me was too creepy. Meeting their eye was like looking into the ten thousand years stare of a war vet who’s been in The Shit.

Which makes sense.

Think about it. All day these women are literally naked to the world, naked to the filthy, spilled open secret and unsated hungers of nasty, stoned, drunken men and women from all over the world, all living out wildly differing definitions of hygiene.

No wonder so many of them looked rough and hard eyed.

But some didn’t look like that.

Some are attractive, some look like girls you knew from school, some were cute or exotic or smiling.

And one of them looked like she wasn’t even real.

We saw her during one of our constant sweeps through the sector of women stationed opposite the Old Church.

This area was ironic, oxymoronic and morally distressing from the start.

Imagine a large, very old church with a lane going all the way around it.

Now imagine walking around that church counterclockwise.

The first building on your right as you come in from the canal side is a primary school with typical school windows and finger paintings affixed to the glass. We even saw a mother picking up her child there.

The second building, right beside the school, was a porn theatre, festooned out front with enormous posters advertising scenes from the movies. Not dialogue scenes, either. We’re talking scenes from the movies.

Just past the porn theatre, there was General Noriega and much of his senior staff, then a coffee shop, more booths, a lane that lead to a tattoo parlor on the other side of another coffee shop and a gaming hall of some sort, and then more girls. Wandering around on the lane beside the canal was a slitty-eyed entrepreneur singing out “Cocaine, marijuana, ecstasy” in warbling falsetto.

You might think that the mother picking her child up would rush in, grab her daughter, cover the child with a thick hood and run away, but that wasn’t what happened. She walked up, took her daughter’s hand, and wandered off chatting and laughing. Neither of them paid the slightest attention to the posters, the girls or the tourists wandering around goggling at everything.

We were behind that mother and child, but turned off to the right and took a quick left, to move through a very tight alley. As we walked along, trying not to look like we were looking at the girls, I was struck by something in one of the booths.

It looked like a statue, or a life-sized magazine photo, very stylized, perfectly lit and composed.

She was turned the other way, facing the back of the booth. Her hair was swept up into a Japanese kind of bun, with two long black lacquer hair pins holding it together.

Her skin was golden, somewhere between a tan and natural tone.

She had a riding crop in her hand and held it over her shoulder, pointing straight down her spine, like an arrow drawing one’s attention to her bottom, which was hard to believe, and where the last few inches of it rested comfortably between the tops of her buttocks.

It didn’t look like something that could happen in real life.

I am referring to her buttocks.

She was wearing some variation of a one piece bathing suit and a thong, and it revealed what I took to be the miraculous result of a brutal workout schedule. From top to bottom, she looked like she was generated, unnatural.

I stopped still.

“Did you see that?”

The Uje turned back.

“What?”

“Come here.”

NtC stayed where she was.

“What is it?”

I moved three paces back and closer to the full length window.

“That’s real!”

The Uje was shaking her head.

“Oh my God. That’s incredible!”

She was also referring to the girl’s buttocks.

The girl turned to face us.

She had to have been a supermodel.

I stared.

The model didn’t have the Thousand Yard stare. She didn’t look like a lifer on death row. She wasn’t sucking on an unfiltered Gauloise or smacking gum and sneering.

She smiled and crooked a finger at me.

I held my hands up and shook my head.

She made an exaggerated pout and pointed at the door.

I sighed and opened it a crack, leaned in.

“Are you coming in?”

“No. I just wanted to say, whatever you’re doing in the gym, it’s working. You should be proud.”

She smiled sadly.

“I don’t work out.” Not Dutch. She had a slight Parisian accent, spoke perfect English.

“You don’t work out? Liar. ” I angled my head at her abs. “I can see the situps from here.”

She laughed and shrugged, very French.

“It’s all genetics. I’m just lucky. But it doesn’t seem to matter.”

“What do you mean?”

She showed her empty hands.

“Nobody’s visiting.”

Her bottom lip pushed out and she mimed a pout.

“Unless you want to come in…”

It’s a funny thing, prostitution, amazing even.

Men spend so much energy in their lives thinking about women, looking at women, trying to meet women, working up the nerve to talk to women, trying to attract them, impress them, talk them into their cars, into bed, into their lives. And here was this ridiculously attractive young woman in a tiny booth in Amsterdam trying to get a blandly average middle-aged man to have sex with her, and all I had to do was pay.

I smiled.

“That wouldn’t be very nice to my friends, would it?”

She looked past me, at The Uje.

“Your girlfriends?”

“No. My students.”

Her forehead wrinkled up.

“Students?”

“Well, not anymore, but they used to be.”

The hooker made an odd expression.

“What are you doing here with them?”

I smiled.

“That’s funny. I was wondering the exact same thing about you.”

She didn’t say anything and I pulled my head out the door, waved, and walked on.

The Uje was still shaking her head in amazement.

“What is she doing here?”

“Same thing General Noriega’s doing.”

NtC turned to face me.

“What would you do if we weren’t here? Would you go back?”

“Back where? To Germany? Probably.”

“Don’t be stupid. You know what I mean.”

N glanced back behind us.

I laughed.

N was watching my eyes carefully.

“Well?”

“Give me a break. You already know the answer to that or you wouldn’t be here.”

She tried for a second to look serious, failed.

We walked out into the wider street, along the canal, past the hash-eyed guy singing out “ecstasy, cocaine and marijuana”, past the sex shops, and cinemas, the hookers and the tattoo parlors, out onto the main street, looking for a place to get pie.

I am fairly certain that I am the last one to the party on this particular issue, but that doesn’t matter, because I need to be honest here.

I can’t let this go unspoken, and it’s not because of guilt. There is no guilt. Not on my account. Instead, what I feel in the place of guilt is a kind of freedom, a rippling frisson of delight that has run through me and has made me feel like a young man trumpeting his first lover’s name from the highest hill out behind the barn.

So it is that I find myself coming here to share my feelings with the world. Or more correctly, with the six people who remember this blog and continue to click on the link in some spastic reflex, desperate for some kind of enlightenment.

To those six people, I say this:

I have just eaten a Vegan Brownie.

Literally, just now.

I just finished it before I started this post.

The story of this particular brownie is nothing new, is in no way earth-shattering. In fact, one could say it is as banal a brownie origin story as any could imagine. There was no radioactive cocoa powder, no shocking dose of sugary gamma rays, no aliens or Norse gods stepping down out of a flaming chariot to hand me a magical golden hammer. In spite of the complete absence of any of these things, which I’m sure we can all agree would be fricking awesome, I will go ahead and tell you the entirely unremarkable story of the Vegan Brownie and I suspect that you will come to treasure it as I have.

(the story begins now)

As many of you know, I sometimes go to The Big Smoke. Often, I go there as recently as yesterday.

Why I went there on this sunny yesterday morning is unimportant, clearly not as important as the Vegan Brownie or I would be explaining those reasons for this trip even now. Suffice to say that I was there and that I caught a ride with T.Jack and it was a glorious journey filled with the inspiring conversation and long moments of purposeful aimlessness that marks a vigorous dose of correctly applied Man Time.

Toward the end of our day, once our independently conducted business was complete, T.Jack and I convened with a third associate (The Wempster) at Queen and John for what each of us hoped would be a disturbing amount of Korean and Japanese food.

And it is only now that you realize that this is, in some significant way, a restaurant review, although perhaps not in the obvious way.

HoSu is one of those very Toronto Asian restaurants that has decided to focus on not focusing on one thing. This restaurant has done what many similar establishments in the city has done and that is to single-handedly bring together the favourite foods of two countries that have had for many, many years, “rocky relations,” which might be putting it mildly. I will leave it to your discretion as to how much you wish to research the ongoing tensions between Korea and Japan.

The popularity of this little establishment has been a minor source of annoyance for years. Luckily, the frustration of waiting for a table is eased by Pages next door, where discriminating magazine browsers can partake in the pleasures of Italian Vogue or Adbusters with equal enjoyment.

I will not at this point make any reference to the high number of cute waitresses walking around in the restaurant. Except for that one.

After a scandalously long wait, our third dinner companion - The Wempster – flew in wearing a peaked hat and began boasting of his wasted youth.

Was The Wempster at Woodstock? Yes.

Does he remember the concert? Somewhat, although he has no idea if he heard Jimi Hendrix or not. Apparently he was far enough away from the stage and just intoxicated enough to remember only the smell of the people beside him and the fact that his dad’s Boy Scout tents weren’t waterproof.

Did he father a child there? Inconclusive until the full range of DNA testing is complete.

I will not describe to you the flavour of the Red Dragon rolls, nor will I attempt to explain my lusty appreciation Dolsot Beef Bibim Bap.

What I will do, however, is tell you about what happened after we left HoSu.

Two shops and a jaywalk from the restaurant is a Starbuck’s and normally I couldn’t care less. I don’t drink coffee and although my fondness for hot chocolate verges on the erotic, there is only so much room inside a human body and my interior was already close to bursting forth. But T.Jack needed an Americana.

We began our assault on the western face of the Starbuck’s, entering with confidence and approaching the counter. After a cursory examination of the pastries, knowing full well I wanted none of them, I spied a chocolate brownie so dark it didn’t even look real. It was not so much a brownie as absence of brownie, a brownie shaped hole in the fabric of reality.

The sign in front of this brownie read “Vegan Fudge Brownie.”

“Vegan?” I blurted.

A HoSu waitressy looking barista was hidden behind a cake tray.

“Yes.”

I narrowed my eyes at her.

“Really.”

She nodded.

T.Jack snorted. “Vegan!?”

The Wempster shook his head. “Disgusting.”

I was drawn to this dense looking piece of chocolatey goodness.

“What does it taste like?”

The barista looked very earnest. She couldn’t have lied if she wanted to. And why would she? Was she being paid on commission? Was there Vegan Brownie kickback?

“Don’t do it.” T. Jack was very serious. “It’s awful. An offense to brownies.”

The Wempster snorted. “I don’t like sweets.”

“It’s made with applesauce. One point five grams of fat.”

The barista smiled.

I love applesauce.

I love chocolate.

I love brownies.

I love HoSu.

But I am full and therefore I am not hungry.

“It will make you sick.” T.Jack was so sure of himself. Welcome to the smuggery.

I nodded. “Give me that Vegan Brownie. Please.”

Starbuck’s went still.

The Wempster shot me a look.

“You’re not a Vegan.”

“That’s right. I’m not.”

The waitress bagged the brownie, a gleam of triumph in her eye. Maybe she was on commish…

T.Jack glowered.

“I thought you were full.”

“I am. If I ate it now, I would soil myself.”

“You’ll soil yourself no matter when you eat it. Think about what vegans eat. They are all rife with dysentery. They can’t control their bowels. Haven’t you heard of fecal urgency?”

I had, and it did give one pause.

But then I thought about a book I had noticed at Pages. On the front cover was written something about only eating plants. The book had gotten good reviews and it was on prominent display in Page, very close to Ron Jeremy’s autobiography. I took this as a good omen.

“T. Jack, you should know that Vegan Brownies are environmentally sound, and plus, they’re good for you. If I eat one, I’m helping the earth and making myself stronger and healthier. Look how young Sting looks. Do you think I can turn that down?”

I don’t know if Sting is a Vegan, but I know youthful when I see it. I jammed the paper bag into my pocket and we left, T.Jack sipping his coffee with an offended pout.

We drove The Wempster home, burned west on the 401, weathered a T.Jack snoring incident so loud and offensive that he woke himself up, and made it to the G.Dot just in time to finish an argument about global warming with a moment of grudging conciliation.

I thanked the T for a good day, went into my house and fell into bed, the brownie forgotten.

Today I woke up, walked to work blah blah blah and then, sitting at my desk, deeply engaged in the marking of your future leaders’ best writing, I remembered my Vegan Brownie.

It was still in my pocket.

There is nothing as perfectly likely to make a man want to eat a Brownie, Vegan or not, as marking English papers.

I dove into my coat pocket and retrieved the crumpled bag.

The contents of the bag was smushed, slightly stale, a bit crusty, but Vegan. Healthy. Guilt-free.

I didn’t eat that Vegan Brownie, I devoured it.

I tore it apart like a pack of hyenas with a baby gazelle.

Sure, maybe I went home and ate leftover macaroni and tuna fish casserole.

Maybe I will eat eggs and cheese for supper.

Yes, I will be cooking up hot Italian sausages tomorrow night and the night after that, I will probably just eat a bloody, bleating calf chained to a post by a ring in its nose whilst wearing alligator boots and a pair of mink lined leather chaps, but today, for a few minutes, I was a Vegan and I had a Vegan Brownie.

And I loved it.

Who among us hasn’t approached that one supermall in Belgium with goose bumps, knowing full well of the orgy of chocolate filling an entire aisle, most of it cheaper than a grab bag of stale candy corns back at Becker’s.

How about sniffing your way through the dairy coolers in a French superstore?

Exploring the hanging ham racks in Spain’s finer food shops?

Pinching the plump offerings in Italian vegetable markets?

Bathing in the yeasty heat of a German bakery as you finger the warm pretzels you just bought?

Plumbing the briny depths of Sweden’s fish and porn bunkers? Okay, I didn’t go to Sweden, but my wife and daughter did, and although they never said anything about a fish and porn bunker, I am 50-60% sure that they have them. Maybe not together, and maybe not in the same store, but they have them. You know the Swedes.

In Holland, the big excitement for my family was brown sugar.

Brown sugar is not common in Germany. Oh, they have a kind of sugar you can buy, and it’s brown all right, but it’s crystalline and granular, like the snow conditions at a cheap downhill ski resort in March when the snow machines are running full time. We needed the kind of brown sugar that is fine and tiny grained, but clumps together like wet sand. This is the kind of sugar you would need also if you were hoping to enjoy a mess of Chocolate Chip Banana Bran Muffins or Chocolate Chip cookies.

You might also be saddened to learn that Germany is equally deficient in chocolate chips as well, although that is not the same kind of hardship. A highly acceptable response to chocolate chip deficit is to buy one of those dark Euro chocolate bars, chop it up roughly, eat the hunter’s portion, then throw the rest into your batter as if it was a bag of President’s Choice semi-sweet and you’re all set.

But without brown sugar, you might as well not even bother.

The Dutch, however, they understand a Canadian family’s needs.

We learned this on the way home from England.

Passing through a town called Venlo on the Hollish-Germish border, I remember Mark telling me that, under dire circumstances along the lines of a canned pork and bean craving or a deep yearning for prepackaged foods (not popular in The Germ), a trip to Venlo’s mall sized grocery store was much in order.

And having just been in England for two weeks, I had an itch for peanut butter.

If you lived in the greater Dusseldorf area, peanut butter was not easy to get in reasonable quantities.

There was, in the average food shop, a small jar, slightly larger than a urine sample container, although much more appealing.

As you know, the average European considers peanut butter grotesque, a vile epitome of all that is wrong with America, not including the President. Laden with icing sugar, sweeter than I like it, those tiny sample jars were also expensive, and buying it guaranteed a cashier would give you the hairy eyeball.

Would the Dutch, famed for their tolerant society, stock their shelves with the stuff? Would they have it in containers large enough to cover more than one slice of toast per jar?

The answer was yes.

But that was not the most fascinating aspect of our excursion into Venlo’s enormous grocery mall.

It was the candy.

I have put a lot of different things in my mouth.

When I was four, I picked up old cigarette butts that the teenage neighbor kid just dumped out on the freshly oiled gravel of John Street, and then I smoked them. Well, pretended to.

When I was nine, I tried to live off the land like the natives and eat the soft bark inside a birch tree. And the curled up green disk in the bottom of a dandelion puff. And grass. And a lot of not particularly tasty things that grew in and around my yard.

When I was fourteen, I got half of Catherine’s A.B.C. gum (not really caring whether or not it still had any flavor left) at twelve thirty five and chewed it until three o’clock, feeling increasingly a most likely one-sided intimate connection with Catherine with every chew.

When I was twenty one, I ate sea urchin sushi (heinous, don’t even bother).

But I can’t remember putting much of anything in my mouth that was as offensive to the inside of my mouth as the triple extra super salted whatever else they were called drupjes masquerading as candy.

Drupjes (pretend it rhymes with puppies but WAY less cute and not nearly as tasty) are supposed to be a treat. They’re sold everywhere Dutch people could potentially gather, and come in a myriad number of shapes, sizes and formulations. For no reason I can come up with, these drupjes are sold in the candy sections of stores, right beside edible products such as chocolate and gumballs. Most of the drup that I have seen look like the petrified droppings of some small woodland creature. If only they tasted as good.

Do you know that feeling just before you throw up where your mouth is awash in a sudden rush of saliva much more viscous and plentiful than normal? That’s the feeling of having one of these drupjes in your mouth, only you have to imagine a chewing tobacco/anise flavoured salt lick accompaniment to this pre-vomit. You simply can’t spit the triple salted ones out fast enough to mitigate the havoc they are capable of wreaking on the tender interior of the human face.

It’s true that most drupjes aren’t that brutal, they’re just nasty and somewhat nauseating. Some are okay, but nowhere near flavourful, and then there are a bunch more that aren’t really that awful, and they could almost be construed as being vaguely similar to candy, assuming you really, really like black licorice.

We made a wide berth around the drup (I had so utterly frightened the children that they held their noses as we ran past the bulk candies) on our way to the general area of the cookies, where I imagined fingering a huge variety of spekulaas and butter cookies. There on the top shelf was something called stroopwaffel.

I took that name to be a reference to both syrup and waffles. Each cookie was a thin disk of very dense, almost unbearably sweet caramel honeyish syrup that is thick and viscous and locked into a latticework layer of wafers. This thick syrup can be seen semi-hardened on the sides of the cookies in the package, like darkened amber, sweetly free of the petrified husks of prehistoric insects, waiting to be softened with the correct application of heat.

We had to buy them in order to find out.

After loading up our poor little Ford Fiesta with bag after bag of Dutch booty, we screamed back to Meerbusch and lit up the tea pot.

Using her great knowledge of science and vectors and stuff, my wife had correctly calculated that each stroopwaffel was the perfect size to be place across the top of an average sized teacup.

Under the cookie, powerful Bernoulli currents of heated air flow upward where they are trapped under the dense wafers, unable to escape.

The cookie very quickly begins to sag with the weight of the syrup as it liquefies, and if you were an adult, you would immediately lunge at the cookie and find out how fricking delicious are. If you were a child, you would sit and watch as the cookie sags until it falls apart in your tea and becomes a gooey mess.

After you eat a stroopwaffel, there follows a vague feeling of unease.

Is it a sugar mad craving for another cookie, or is it a hot rush of glucose driven nausea?

There is only ever one way to find out.

Luckily, Holland is only forty minutes away.

delicious stroopwaffely goodness