Free Fifty Shades of Black by Arthur Black Page A

milk is sold in Canada these days, although I haven’t been down to the corner store for a while so there may be yet another incarnation.
    I also haven’t been to downtown Pittsburgh, and that’s a pity, because there’s a milk delivery revolution going on down there. It’s a big old ice-cream van that’s been renovated. Each working day it winds through the streets of Pittsburgh with a giant pink fibreglass breast on top—complete with a rosy nipple that blinks.
    It’s called the Milk Truck, natch. Its purpose: to make life a little easier for breastfeeding moms. Inside there’s a cozy lounge where mothers can find nursing supplies, breast pumps and a welcoming, non-hostile atmosphere. The crew, decked out in saucy milkmaid costumes, also responds to distress calls from nursing mothers in need of some privacy to pump breast milk during the workday.
    The Milk Truck was the inspiration of Jill Miller, a Pittsburgh conceptual artist who created the idea as a commentary on attitudes to breastfeeding in public, then discovered that the Milk Truck was filling a real need.
    But not for everyone. Ms. Miller was astounded to find that a substantial portion of the public is actually offended by the sight of women nursing their babies.
    â€œWe think nobody cares,” she told a reporter from (really) Bust magazine, “but some people—predominantly women—are for some reason fully enraged by the thought of a woman feeding her baby in public.”
    Call me a slavering pervert but I think the sight of a nursing mother and child is about as beautiful as life gets. Tim Hortons customers lining up for their double-doubles wearing pyjamas and hair curlers—THAT’S offensive. But I digress.
    I’d love to see Pittsburgh’s Milk Truck rumbling down my street sporting a fibreglass breast with its nipple winking away.
    And for any passerby who took offence? It would just prove that the real boob wasn’t on the truck.

 
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    Got Beavers? Leave ’ Em to Cougars
    W haddya gonna do when a mob shows up? A gang of fat little furry critters, buckteeth, flat tail, who mind their own business, vegetarian, non-aggressive, whose biggest fault is constructing unsolicited hydro preservation projects, usually in the middle of nowhere?
    Well, you can make them the symbol of your nation and put their portrait on the back of the nickel. Or you could hunt them almost to extinction and turn their furry pelts into a high-fashion haberdashery statement.
    We Canucks did both to the beaver. First we chased it, with traps and guns and clubs, from the sandy shores of the St. Lawrence to the shell beaches of Haida Gwaii, then, noticing that in our quest for furs we had accidentally discovered a country, we honoured the beast responsible with a little long overdue respect.
    Well, sort of. Actually what happened is, High Fashion, as is its fickle way, grew tired of beaver hats, leaving trappers no very good reason to keep killing them. So, before the last beaver was turned into a homburg, we stopped. And the beavers, left on their own, did the thing that they’re second best at—making little beavers. After two or three centuries there are once again plenty of beaver from Canadian coast to coast, and that includes at the end of a hiking trail in Dunbabin Park on Salt Spring Island.
    Which in a long-winded way brings me to my point: we’ve got beavers in Dunbabin Park and we don’t know what to do about it. Normally, the answer would be “why do anything?” Salt Spring’s a live-and-let-live place and we’ve got plenty of trees . . . what’s the problem? Well, the problem is these are uncommonly ambitious beavers. The park trees these beavers are chawing on are not trembling aspens and willowy poplars. They’re chowing down on the trunks of giant cedars, some of them more than a metre in diameter.
    They haven’t felled any of the big trees yet, and