Christopher Snowdon on Derby Council and its proposed ‘Tesco Tax’: 

A hundred years ago, they would have been in favour of taxing the electricity companies to subsidise the candlestick makers. Forty years ago, they would have been throwing money at British Leyland… And what is the justification for this looting? Essentially it boils down to a rose-tinted nostalgia for high street shopping by reactionaries, protectionists and the kind of people who insist that supermarkets are unpopular despite the fact that they are always full (due to our old friend ‘false consciousness’, no doubt). These are the people who hated Woolworths and HMV until the day they went bust, at which point they tearfully mourned the end of an era.

Simon Cooke on the same: 

Seeking to rescue the traditional town centre by this [‘Tesco Tax’] route merely replaces trade with subsidy. The independent retailers and town centres become dependent on the money that flows from the levy. This doesn’t really make those businesses and those centres viable; it merely acts to ossify a failed model. The future for high streets… doesn’t lie with mere shopping but with being places of leisure and pleasure. This probably means fewer shops and smaller centres but it also means a different approach starting from what people want – not defined by opinion polling but rather by what people actually consume.

And Tim Worstall on telling certain politicians to take a running jump: 

We’re going to have a law now where a willing purchaser cannot negotiate with a willing supplier to gain 600 calories in return for folding money instead of 400 calories for a smaller amount? What? Here’s how things work in a free and liberal society: you don’t get to decide what we would like to have. We get to decide what we would like to have.

The MP in question, Sarah Wallaston, “formerly a doctor and teacher,” is “now bringing a love of South Devon to Westminster.” And hoping to dictate your default portion size. The state, says Ms Wallaston, has “a duty to intervene” by telling you what it is you “don’t need” when buying drinks and snacks at the local cinema. Because you simply can’t be trusted near those sweet and shiny objects. At which point, I’m reminded of the Guardian’s Jill Filipovic, who also struggles with the concept of personal liberty and, specifically, with why “every socially conscious person” doesn’t agree with her. Being “socially conscious,” so defined, and therefore better than us, doesn’t seem to entail any reservation about spending, or indeed wasting, other people’s earnings on imposing state-dictated portion sizes. Or any reservation about embracing a condescending relationship with those of whom one is supposedly being conscious. Quite the opposite, in fact.

Catherine Chalmers’ photo series Food Chain starts with a caterpillar gorging on a tomato. Then the grisly drama begins to unfold. 

Via Vice. 

For newcomers, more items from the archives.

I Don’t Think She’s Handling the Menopause Very Well. 

Rocío Boliver, a performance artist, “devotee of transgression” and author of “porno-erotic texts,” struggles with middle age.

There is of course a long and tedious tradition of self-harm in performance art. It’s hardly less common than nudity or faeces. Or anti-capitalist pablum. Though to be fair, some have embraced self-mutilation in a slightly less time-wasting and roundabout manner. In 1971 an artist named Chris Burden had a friend load a rifle and then shoot him in the arm. Mr Burden felt this would lead to him being “taken seriously as an artist.” Though it seems this colossal seriousness had to be reaffirmed three years later, when Burden felt it artistically necessary to have both of his hands nailed to the roof of a VW Beetle.

A Dining Room Comedy. 

The exquisite mealtime sorrows of the Guardianista male.

The bearer of these sorrows, David Dennis, has apparently spent an awful lot of time fretting about his wife putting food on his plate. I mean literally putting food on his plate, as when serving a typical meal. Given Mr Dennis’s rather pronounced Guardianista tendencies, it’s scarcely surprising that he’s also been fretting that other people, possibly people much like himself, may subsequently judge him for this patriarchal trespass, as if he and his wife were dreadful throwbacks to a darker, more primitive age.

Her Unspeakable Woes. 

Icess Fernandez Rojas isn’t being sufficiently affirmed by strangers, software and disposable paper cups. Something must be done.

It’s all very tragic. Our Guardian columnist just wants to “celebrate [her] uniqueness” in an “inclusive society” and her spellchecking software, the subtleties of which apparently elude her, is dashing those hopes. She isn’t being “validated” by Microsoft Word. It’s how utopias die.

There’s more to stroke and fondle in the greatest hits. 

In which we share the unending woes of three Guardian columnists. First, Nell Frizzell conjures a grand tale of sorrow and social injustice from her own unremarkable sleeping patterns and tells us that “going to bed early is our last great social taboo.” You heard her. Going to bed “before midnight” is a great social taboo. The last one. Such waywardness is, we learn, “a one-way ticket to condescension… and pariahdom.” “You will be ridiculed,” says Ms Frizzell. “If not shunned.” She is, nevertheless, being very, very brave. “It won’t stop me.”

Meanwhile, Bella Mackie, a Guardian comment moderator and daughter of the paper’s editor Alan Rusbridger, recounts her own fearless, indeed Herculean struggle with an addiction to… Diet Coke: “Giving up my favourite drink was as difficult as I had feared. I set about it with a determination to go cold turkey, knowing that even one can would make me slip back into old habits.” There followed a dark downward spiral. “For the first month, I felt exhausted and could barely keep my eyes open at my desk. Then came the nerves, the feeling that something was missing.” Yes, dear reader. Feel her pain and weep.

And finally, the chronically unhappy professional lesbian Julie Bindel bemoans the evils of marriage, including same-sex marriage, and is sternly disapproving of the fact that “there seems to be an almost total acceptance of [marriage] by lesbians today.” Specifically, what troubles her is that so many gay people, an overwhelming majority, “have a desire for ‘ordinariness’ and do not want to be seen as living ‘alternative’ lifestyles.” Given Ms Bindel’s niche career as a quarrelsome misfit and radical ‘activist’, this desire for bourgeois normativity simply will not do. And so she invokes the wisdom of feminist lecturer Nicola Barker, who tells us, flatly, that, “Same-sex marriage fits comfortably within the conservative ideology of the self-sufficient family and contributes to the politics of state austerity.”

Of course Ms Bindel goes further, as she must, and in doing so coughs up a contender for our series of classic Guardian sentences: “Isn’t marriage merely a clever ploy to keep us quiet about the trickier issues such as the deportation of lesbian asylum seekers?”

A question foremost on everyone’s lips. 

I’m off to a barbecue this afternoon, but I thought I’d leave you with something to chew on: 

“Culinary insiders have long known that it is only in the cheapest dumplings that one finds non-inverted rectums.” Via Kate.