Month: November 2003

Summer of 2001, I travelled with the SOBs to Connecticut to conclude a bit of business, travelling in a camper van borrowed from this guys which I think had the license plate “DOT COM” or some such thing. I was reminded of that trip after 9/11 when I wrote at Steve’s site on the 17th:

…I thought about the road in Connecticut I drove down with Dan and Nathan after getting a bit lost one evening trying to find the sea from a place near Hartford. The road was parallel to the one we wanted as it turned out. It was fifty miles of large homes on forested lots – multi-car garages, guest houses. As we drove south cars passed us going north, going home for the night. When we hit the coast road, the commuter train station was full of people heading for what looked to us Maritimers as luxery cars, coming home from a workday in the City, in Manhattan. The next day, I bought a big Connecticut flag – like I like to wherever I travel. I flew it at half mast Sunday.

I remember thinking about one particular guy, just getting out of his car in front of one of those huge houses, bending over laughing as he saw the van and then the license plate, perhaps evidently lost.

As part of that trip, we went to Bill’s Seafood in Westbrook on the Connecticut shore of Long Island Sound. Had a soft shelled crab on a bun and marvelled at what must be the most excellent selection of hard liquors I have ever witnessed. The bartender, Jake, was a grey-haired pony-tailed master who, among other things took the time to take an interest in us, where we were from and why we were visiting. Bills is advertised as being by “the singing bridge”. Coming into work this morning in a downpour, I heard and was reminded that the causeway in Kingston is also a singing bridge and remembered one from twenty years ago when I used to visit Bridgewater, N.S, to hang out with the archibald boys. A singing bridge is just one of those open steel weave bed bridges – metal WigWag. I think that is one of the nicest nicknames for a purely utilitarian bit of civil engineering I have come across.

Here is a very good breakdown of what I am seeing in my referral logs as of the last few days.

Add that to reply spam.

I am listening to the The Connection on North Country Public Radio this morning and their phone-in/interview of Roy Moore, the former Alabama Chief Justice who placed a block of stone with the Ten Commandments on it in a courthouse.   During one call, I heard a most extraordinary statement, that the United States is not a democracy but a republic. Quick recourse to Google linked me to this discourse on the distinction. I always considered a republic a sub-set of democracy just as is our Canadian constitutional parliamentary monarchy. Was I wrong?

I wrote this over at Reinvented just now:

How could you miss the nuclear fear? Terrorism has nothing on the propect of Leonid unleashing the 17 warheads aimed at your home town and making it a plateau of black glass to the horizon. Folks have been blowing up stuff and civilians since at least Joseph Conrad’s Secret Agent 100 years ago. How much is what has happened in the last few years really new? I still fear the rusting hulks of the Soviet nuclear fleet at Murmansk, Vlaidivostok and Kaliningrad far more than the guys play acting the very bad Bond script. [That is what I am starting to worry about quite seriously…how long will it take for the war on terror to be over if there are no more 9/11’s? How does it end?]

I wrote it in response to two statements [thread here] which quite surprised me:

• …who needs nuclear fear when we have terrorism (by a mid-20s person); and
• I missed the Cold War and nuclear fear too — totally passed me by (by a late 30s person).

I found these points of view not so much unexpected as they are pervasive so much as bizzare in their utter focus on the history of the very recent. Far greater threats to the western world were almost commonplace throughout the 20th century, even just the last third I lived through. Are we now so sphincter-locked that we forget…forget how to be defiant and get on with it all when we were able to do so faced with far greater risks and fears?

I am not suggesting that either the threat or the fear isn’t real but I cannot shake the feeling I immediately had on that day watching the TV as so many died – this is like a very bad and very ugly Bond film script. There is something in the shallow dimensionality of where we are now [which I do think is largely unrelated to Bush or Iraq] that makes me feel there are new gaps showing in the culture… but I cannot say where they are or what they say about us.

My pals at silverorange had a great time with Sloan on the weekend in Toronto all arranged by Chip. I saw this picture in green this morning and was pretty envious but watching a lunar eclipse with my kids was a close second for a weekend night.

Chip is in the back left not on skateboard

The picture reminded me of other group photos in my life, often from that same early- mid-twenties age, people who are now professionals in distant cities or countries or lost to contact. The sometimes well haired Ian maintains the art well. Here is one of mine from 1987 at the Truro Ponderosa Steakhouse – as opposed to the Truro Ponderosa beverage room.

JP is at back left on skateboard

Haimy is in Japan, Maddy in California, a BC dentist, two Ontario doctors, a cardiac nurse, a municipal clerk, a hospital pharmacist, three I have know idea, me and Smed. Grouping is good.

Midtown Tavern, R.I.P.

David Swick has the whole story in Halifax Daily News:

A city that prides itself on its heritage, and a legendary tavern whose days are numbered. Sounds like a match made in tippling heaven. Operators of the Midtown Tavern in downtown Halifax have applied to the city to tear the old place down, to be replaced by a new drinking spot in a 20-storey hotel. Chances are good that this will actually happen. Times have changed. Even 10 years ago, the Midtown was hot, hot, hot. But plain decor and basic food are no longer the key to success.

“We still serve a tonne of food [Ed.: Dave, even I don’t think Mr. Grant was thinking metric], but no one’s drinking anymore,” says Eric Grant, one of two sons of longtime owner Doug Grant. “We used to break even with
the food and make money on the beer. You can’t do that if people don’t drink. If you won the lottery tomorrow and told me you wanted to open a tavern, I’d say you were crazy.”

Doug Grant, now 78, has told his kids they can do what they want, Eric said. So they worked with a developer to create a plan, and are now taking calls from
hotel chains, with an eye to putting a fancy new bar at the base of 20 storeys of rooms. Rather than unceremoniously destroy the Midtown, tourism and heritage
officials might consider picking it up and moving it. Plunked down somewhere else in town, it could become a curious attraction. Here, after all, is a tavern that did not change for decades — and stayed enormously popular through almost all of that time.

We’ll never see its like again.

Boiled dinner, two and juice. Even in my Halifax time, 1981
to 1992, you passed through the Midtown on your way to other bars, the Deck or the Seahorse. Now it would be a stop or more likely a walk by on the way to Rogues Roost. It wasn’t the same after Jerry moved on a long time ago. He held the place open for us on a blizzardy Friday night.

Around 1984, I saw an oil painting of the Midtown jazzy on a rainy evening for $400.00. I kick my own arse thinking about not buying it. I had steak and egg and two and juice there before seeing Gretzky play for Canada ona Saturday afternoon in September 1983 against the Czeckoslovaks with Hasek either in goal or on the bench as a kid. I think I have had a beer with three-quarters of my best friends in that bar.

This is not good in a number of ways.

End of month passed, weekend away, payday a couple of days away – the cupboard is bare.   Why do I balk at taking cheerios for lunch?   Given the options are dehydrated borsche, wasabi-covered chickpeas, a kilo of saurkraut and a tablespoon of blue cheese, you’d think I’d be going with the cheerios.