Turn on, tune in, drop out... and now, please, bugger off

If you're going to San Francisco, be sure not to go to Haight Ashbury: place is overrun by people wanting to relive the hippy era, those who never left it and a whole bunch of people looking to make money off these silly sods.

Well done, then to Ross Mirkarimi, a local politician, who is trying to cut down on the number of shops selling useless tat and stuff that could, possibly, be used to smoke dope. It's not that he has some puritanical objection to drug use, but he does make the not unreasonable point that it would be good to have a few shops selling useful stuff like groceries in the area instead.

Not all the locals agree, however. One said:

"I think there are too few heads shops in the city," he said. "I like hippies. We need more."

Contemplate that quote for a moment; cherish it and then revere it for the perfect wrongness of it. Could there be a more lucid and poised way of expressing something that is so profoundly, unquenchably the antithesis of what is correct? The sentence would work perfectly, too, were you to substitute the world 'hippies' for 'lawyers' (both being parasitic, annoying and prone to dressing in silly clothes) too.

Lawyers and hippies, after all, are possibly the only two groups about whom it is not possible to be too uncomplimentary.