Month: October 2006

Kim Freaks

You know he would double dip the chips if you invited Kim Il-sung over. Nick the trinkets and baubles from your bookcase when you weren’t looking, too. Look in the medicine cabinet. Why? Be cause we are all apparently at war with him so he don’t care no more.

Satellite images indicate North Korea appears to be getting ready for a second nuclear test, officials said yesterday, as the defiant Communist regime held huge rallies and proclaimed that UN sanctions amount to a declaration of war.

I say that someone – maybe Belgium – be given the task of storming the palace but do it in a really surreal way to match the nuttiness. Solders dressed up as sad clowns or velvet Elvi. Maybe after a global laugh and point.

Reason #17 As To Why We Need Sponsorships

underholl

This is what I am talking about. I would love to get a copy of this book but – wow! – one hundred and fifty-four clams. Don’t get me wrong. A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900: Economy, Technology and the State by Richard W. Unger (2001) would fit very nicely beside his next following text Beer in the Middle Ages and Renaissance reviewed back here with great gusto. In have a review request in to the publisher in Holland but am not holding my breath given that it is five years old. Yet access to this sort of research is vital to the workings of A Good Beer Blog.

So should you see an ad pop up sometime, this is why. Just saying.

Week Seven With Brendan Carney

It was going so well at about nine minutes into the game. I had just secured a source of Unibroue’s Maudite that I can keep to myself and, like many of you, was heading into Loblaws with the hope of finding a morsel of whisky cheddar when I heard on the radio that Syracuse was up 7-0. Later they were only down 17-14.

But soon that was pretty much that. Soon the Orange had lost on the road to West Virginia 41-17. I search for meaning in these times. Apparently Carney is “suffering through his worst statistical season and there hasn’t been anything out of kickoff or punt returns – except no turnovers.” There was maybe a wobbled hold on a field goal, too. Being on the wrong side of your QB getting sacked five times is not going to help either. Yet it was a big game for Carney in the bigger picture:

Senior Brendan Carney became SU’s career punting yardage leader against the Mountaineers. He kicked seven times for 275 yards at West Virginia and now has 10,256 career punting yards, breaking the old mark of 10,073 held by Mike Shafer.

Here are this week’s stats:

Kickoffs
No.
Yds
TB
OB
Avg
CARNEY,Brendan
4
255
1
0
63.8

Punting
No.
Yds
Ave
Long
In 20
TB
CARNEY,Brendan
7
275
39.3
45
1
2

I hadn’t realized when I picked this way of following Syracuse football that Carney was such a BMOC. Actually I had figured the lot of a punter who does not get to kick field goals would be one in the shadows. Interesting to note that we may (theoretically) see the Orange for the first Bowl in 70 years outside of the USA as the Big East is tagged to send a representative to the first International Bowl. But that would mean winning some more games. And the next two at least against Louisville and Cincinnati do not look like likely candidates. Actually all five remaining games look tough.

More on the game here. More Carney here.

Best Time

We live in cycles even as modernity trys to drive them out. With the fall comes the quietening of the FM band so that weak but neighbouring NPR comes in clearly without the irritation of co-channel soft rock stations from Ottawa. With each week comes the end of the week and the end of work if only for a time. In the day there are the three parts of plot: the beginning, middle and end. Some points in these cycles of cyles seem exceedingly good and just like I notice – since the digital clock became common when I was exactly nine – when it is 12:34 pm more than most times, I notice how good 8:21 am on a Saturday is when there isn’t much planned. Cheese toasts!

Ummm…What Was It I Was Going To Do…

Oh yea, watch the Mets. Go bullpen! Woot, let’s see the bullpen in the fourth! After, get the real news from the game at Deadspin. Like the news Alec Baldwin is an utter loser.

I got my hat like Willie’s but I want Tom’s hat, too. And what is that pitch Tom is pitching? You know I’d drop that one on the wind-up.

Warning: Business Writer Having Fun

I have never embraced the idea that one should not say anything if you have nothing nice to say. This is the ethic of the charlatan and the git. This is not to say that one should not use good manners as problems are honestly surveyed. Yet one has to admire the particular gusto with which this Toronto Star writer takes on the tale of the ending of corporate thingie BCE announced yesterday:

…The die may have been cast in the gradual decline of a great company on April 28, 1983, when Ma Bell was reinvented as BCE by then-Bell CEO Albert Jean de Grandpré. Bored by the regulated phone business, the trained lawyer and erstwhile classmate of Pierre Trudeau at Montreal’s Jean de Brebeuf College refocused one of North America’s most consistently well-run phone utilities away from its core business. His almost comically maladroit diversification campaign took Bell into natural gas pipelines, a trust company, women’s magazine publishing, banknote and other commercial printing, office towers and shopping centres in Canada and the United States and far-flung cable operations in the United States and Britain.

De Grandpré’s successors were left with the unenviable task of unloading that grab-bag of troubled assets at an enormous loss. But Jean Monty, CEO in the 1990s, was the equal to de Grandpré as an ambitious and ill-starred empire builder, snapping up fibre-optic giant Teleglobe Inc., CTV Inc. and The Globe and Mail, and leaving it to Sabia to endure huge writeoffs on Teleglobe, Bell Canada International Inc. and other chronic red-ink generators.

Feckless diversification takes its toll in two ways…

I think that is what someone having fun looks like.

Oh No! Not Torynomics!

I had hope that we had seen the last of the habitual bad math but this report does little to give comfort:

Ottawa itself could lose as much as $218-million in annual hotel tax revenue alone, he said…”Talk about shooting yourself in the foot,” Mr. Pollard said. The value of international tour groups and conventions in hotels was $1.28-billion last year, he said. Canada’s convention business as a whole is worth more than $2-billion a year, another industry official said. The government cancelled the Goods and Services Tax rebate program late last month. It said the move would save $78.8-million and that less than 3 per cent of foreign visitors applied for the rebates anyway. But Mr. Pollard believes the government didn’t include conferences and group travel in its calculations because convention planners get the GST rebates up front, not after the fact.

These number may not pan out as the actuals – do they ever – but as the looming bubble burst approaches doing things to make bits of the economy less competitive is an odd approach for a traditionally pro-business party. The whole tax policy thing is odd when you think about it: increasing income tax, the big-talk do-little GST shift, the uncertainty about moving around tax credits between levels of government, the beer and popcorn money tht makes my kids pay for your kids and now this.

It raises the more interesting and non-partisan question of “why is tax hard?” One likely reason is that it is used as a mechanism for other social and economic policy. It is a tool. If the policy is not well scoped out, perhaps difficulties will show in the tax side of the matter. But what policy goal is achieved by adding $78.8-million to the cost of international business and travel into Canada?

Acces…reaking….up…an’t…Post

What to do? What to Do? Access being denied. I have my rights you know!

OK, that seemed to work. We’ve been having mainly good access but once in a while the sympatico high speed still cuts out. How is it that the phone never cuts out like this, the electricity never cuts out like this, the water never does but high speed is at the whim?

While we are suffering these technical difficulties, check out Mike’s tribute to 80s Can Rock via YouTube, aka “the technology that killed the blogs.”

Middle Ages Brewing By Shoe Cam

We had a bit of a beer blog break through as Gary and I met at Middle Ages Brewing in Syracuse NY as part of his day of two tailgates and my introduction to NCAA football. It was a perfect place to meet to start the day. Gary filled in when my camera’s memory card let it be known that it was not about to cross international borders this weekend. The effect was top notch shoe camera.

 

 

 

 

Let me start by saying, this experience is fairly foreign to Canada but not unknown. Middle Ages opened its doors on Saturday at 11:30 am. Gary was there at the bell and reports that there were a couple of dozen beer fans lined up with growlers to be filled. Once those guys were served, two happy gents behind the bar asked what we wanted and sold us – no, gave us free 4 oz shots of their excellent fresh ale. I tried their porter, IPA and the double IPA. All were as good as I remembered. So good I bought the baseball hat. I figure that if a brewer is good enough to go into business, make great ale and then give it to you for free, you ought to buy the hat. Note also Gary’s uncanny capture of the original portrait of the wench who wails. Gary also showed me the first beer blog award pottery component which now just needs me to forward the brass plaque for the 2006 award to be announced later in the year – though I already am pretty sure I know who is getting it.

 

 

 

 

I mention that I have not seen exactly this sort of thing in Canada before but I have almost seen it. In the days before the beer blog, I lived in the Maritimes and Halifax’s Garrison Brewery would serve all you want. But it had to be booked and was a private affair for attendees only. You got to pour and hang around asking the happy patient brewer lots of repetitive questions and also get a tour of the place but it was not a moment to meet other beerfans and you did have to stick around for the time booked. I like the Middle Ages approach better.

So a return for the tour is definitely in order as are more secret assignments with Gary and the shoe phone.