No, there's no way I call up just for a chat, like 'Hi, Nigel, you've left your rear onside winker on!'

She wreaked of liquor. She also wreaked of anger, despair and unsatisfied sexuality, all mixed together.

At first, trolling was simply an apolitical form of amusement — web posting as performance art. The image board 4chan soon became its mecca. Over time, however, the trolls began moving from joking about racism to advocating it in their desire to become ever more edgy. Andrew Anglin, creator of the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer and a longtime troll before that, described the transformation process in a lengthy post on his blog: “The sentiments behind the jokes slowly became serious, as people realized they were based on fact,he wrote.Non-ironic Nazism [began] masquerading as ironic Nazism.”

TransCanada and Exxon are involved in another major Arctic pipeline, the long-stalled and overbudget Mackenzie Gas Project in northern Canada.