“Maybe they don’t like those things that you write,” is how my mother once put it after I didn’t get a writing job I felt I wanted. Just testing âe¦ yep, her assessment still hurts after all these years.

My mother probably did not mean my writing, which I suspect she rather liked. She meant the things that I think and say aloud.

Fine. She calls them “those things that you write” and I call them “inadvisable remarks.” I feel some inadvisable remarks coming on. I don’t see why I should have to be the one to make them, but no one else is volunteering.

Inadvisable remark 1. I cannot sympathize with the Ottawa woman who ate some of her pet dog’s food in order to encourage it (to do what exactly? Not eat, surely) and was then taken to hospital after vomiting and foaming at the mouth.

She also suffered from loss of appetite, the CBC reported. But then so did I after reading the story, and I imagine her dog, Furkid, is beyond disgusted.

Pet food is revolting. It’s usually made from slaughtered animals or animals that died inexplicably, and of the “rendered” stuff, I shall not speak. It comes in wet, moist and dry. So do a lot of unsavoury things that dogs eat. But if pets like this sort of thing, I cannot argue with their honest animal nature.

That is not the case with humans. It’s acceptable to nibble at the baby food and say “num num, this is delicious” even though it tastes like spackle. Babies fall for this. Babies are naive. But it is not normal to get down on your knees, eat out of the doggie dish and pretend to enjoy it.

What gets me the most is that this lady confessed in the emergency room. I would have lied and said the kibble fell into my mouth. Or I mistook it for braised veal. I speak as someone who regularly empties her paper shredder without unplugging it first.

May I just add that I don’t think there is any blame in this case that can be laid at the feet of government. Call me a right-wing crank, but I don’t look to the feds for regulation when I eat food that a dog turned up its nose at and froth emerges.

Inadvisable remark 2. I know a great wrong was done to Valerie Plame by a vicious White House looking to take revenge on her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, for contradicting the Bush people’s claims on WMD. Even the Mob doesn’t go after wives.

But Plame joined the CIA when she was 22. This was in the ’80s, not a moral high mark for the CIA, if there has ever been such a time. She spied when she attended the London School of Economics in Britain. She reported on her fellow students in a friendly nation for an agency responsible for a parade of human rights abuses.

She lied for a living.

Although I understand the principle behind her complaint about her outing and I respect her husband, I recoil from her.

Inadvisable remark 3. They called it Anna Nicole Smith’s “death fridge” and I suppose rightly so. It was a stark place, unlike the mouldy stash-holes in most people’s homes that are full of ancient, once-loved portions stowed in Tupperware with the lid mysteriously bulging from rot gas.

My fridge is foreign to me. My husband fills it with mysterious ingredients for sauces and chutneys and tapenades. I don’t get this. All I comprehend are the dairy products. Milk and its friends seem sensible to me.

Ms. Smith’s fridge contained a few diet drinks and a bottle of methadone the size of a tankard of President’s Choice Pulp Free Organic Orange Juice. In fairness to Big Pharma though, I do note that the drugs that killed her did not appear to be ones that needed refrigeration. Plus she was mixing.

Never mix your drugs.

Anna Nicole was a druggie, not a drinker. Good for her. I cannot get over the ridicule heaped on the corpse of this sad woman when in fact she had more strength than many people I know. In my neighbourhood, people drink for the Canadian gold medal.

Alcohol is the white, middle-class drug of choice. Few people acknowledge this because everything middle-class Canadians do is seen as the norm. We buy cardboard tankards of coffee, we eat doughnuts by the carton and we drink like fish. We don’t do drugs.

Yet the people where I live are pale, haggard proof that booze is the most damaging drug in existence, far more common, habitual and ravaging than pot or smack or coke.

Smoking kills you, yes, but it doesn’t make you violent or hate your family, nor does it eat away at your kindness. It makes you wrinkled and smelly while looking all cool and knowing.

I wonder if Toronto changed its recycling rules — booze bottles are to go back to the store now, not in the blue box — because people weren’t recycling them anyway. They were hiding them in their regular trash out of curtain-twitching shame.

The thing that most shocked me when I hit my 40s was the number of alcoholics it turned out I knew. It’s funny to drink heavily when you’re young. It’s almost required. But it’s mirthless when you’re middle aged and putting away two gallons of rye a week and your doctor isn’t allowed to tell you that you might as well be doing meth.

This demonization of drugs is doing Canadians and their families enormous damage, if only we would admit it. But we’d rather pose as being shocked by the Anna Nicoles of the world and her bulk methadone. Rest in peace, fine abstemious woman.

Inadvisable remark 4. Does it strike you as odd that Tony Blair would go out of his way, flapping maps around, to say that 15 British sailors were in Iraqi, not Iranian, waters when they were captured by the Iranian navy?

He’s saying he wouldn’t intrude on Iran’s territorial waters without permission. Which suggests he thinks the Iraqis invited British soldiers into their country four years ago.

These sailors shouldn’t be in Iraq or Iran, they should be floating off Torquay, in southern England, defending the Trident nuclear submarines of which Blair is so fond from the machinations of his own Labour party.

Blair is even more delusional than George W. Bush. Perhaps this is why respectable commentators in his country, like Matthew Parris in the Times of London, have openly questioned whether the man is sane.

This Week

Hermione Lee’s new biography of Edith Wharton is magnificent. It’s time we were reminded what an unusual woman she was in every way. She was a great and prolific novelist — The House of Mirth still describes women’s dilemmas today — a truly innovative designer of homes, a talented gardener and a fine historian and memoirist who managed to do what is impossible now, to move between the United States and Europe and understand both universes.

She did all this while being seriously rich (then, as now, women born into wealth too often did nothing with their lives) and married to a hopeless jerk. Lee defends her from being seen as a kind of second-hand Henry James. In fact, she far surpassed him in her time.