Dear Ring Pops,

You are not a very good idea for a confectionary novelty. You do not comfortably fit on any but my smallest fingers, which are too sensitive for the gratuitous suckshow you force me to subject them to. Each time I deign to free one of you from your difficult-to-open wrapper, I find myself slobbering inhumanly to lap up the final bits of sugar at the base of the gem, bumping plastic against my incisors and waterfalling a steady stream of syrupped saliva upon my fingers. Also, you have blue raspberry, but not blueberry. I do not like the blue raspberry kind.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site

Dear Sir or Madam,

War is, to say the least, a difficult Thing. Sons kiss their mothers goodbye for now or forever — they know not which — and are unable to watch as their countrymen become engorged with jingoism and xenophobia like ripe blueberries, as a certain richness flavours every second of precious life with a kind of fatalistic zeal. It’s not blueberry flavour either, but the flavour of fear, which is an unidentifiable flavour. Like tamarind. Seriously, can someone concisely explain what that tastes like? (No.)

I haven’t myself participated in war, so I am not a Soldier. However, I have legally killed a man, so I do feel a sort of kinship with them. I remember what a young lad — barely eighteen — said to me after a U.S.O. performance in Puhkha, “I like dem titties, brah. And South Park.” Yes, I suppose all of us can relate to the soldier breed. Go forth, marching dogs, forward into war like fresh blueberries into cottage cheese. May you never sour, nor have little retarded stems sticking out of you.

Yours Faithfully, The Gentleman of the Site