Month: January 2007

Friday The Bulletteenth

Friday is the new Saturday in the work world. Remembering working Saturdays in the years of schlepverk, retail wages funding weekends reminds me of dressdowns and finishing the afternoon ending with the Beat Authority:

  • Make a flake. Go ahead. You know you want to. Post them on the fridge in the coffee room after.
  • Baseball owners told not to spoil their monopoly for fear of the imposition of fairness.
  • I knew I liked Vermont and Vermonters but now I have a favorite one, Senator Patrick Leahy who lead the good fight in the cause of Mr. Arar yesterday:

    “We knew damn well if he went back to Canada he wouldn’t be tortured. He would be held and he would be investigated,” Leahy thundered, wagging his finger at Gonzales. “We also knew damn well if he went to Syria he would be tortured. And it’s beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured. It’s a black mark on us. It has brought about the condemnation of some of our closest and best allies.”

  • The Globe is telling iLies. These are iLies as I know the world is better with more expensive future junk that does nothing more for me than a walkman did in 1985.
  • I have concerns. We should all have concerns. This year’s center of the infield is no 2006 center of the infield:

    “He’s very athletic,” Epstein said. “He has great range at the position. He’ll make his share of errors, but we think that’s more than compensated for by his fantastic range. He gets to as many balls as anybody at that position. He’s definitely a plus offensive player for the position. He’s a tough out. He can handle all different kinds of pitching.” Though Lugo probably won’t measure up to Alex Gonzalez from a defensive standpoint — who does? — he has the ability to make up for it in other ways…Lugo, who used to be a pest for the Red Sox when he played in Tampa Bay, will make his DP flips to rookie Dustin Pedroia. The Sox opted not to bring classy free-agent veteran Mark Loretta back for a second season. This will be the first time the Red Sox open the season with a rookie position player since 2001…

    I am thinking these days that not signing Loretta is going to be the Achilles heel of the team. In addition to more errors and shortstop, Pedroia was weak at bat last year batting under .200 in September when he was given some late games. What is wrong with having a solid defense and decent bats in the middle?

  • US Senate ethics changes v. the actual CPC Accountability Act. Compare and contrast.

Ice Storm Day

In the good old days of high density high altitude living I had a sense of what the storm was doing by looking down from my perch. Now I know the fear that living in the suburbs brings, crouched in the cellar surrounded by concrete and brick. What will the trip to work hold? Where are my boots? Do I own boots? Is there a website with school cancellations around here?

The House Of Many Mouths And Many Short Sleeps

Some days I realize I don’t have to wonder what it was like to keep watch on a ship in the British navy in around 1815. There was a period of about one hour last night when all were snoozing. On the upside, I got to watch Craig Ferguson.

Where is Mike “the Sandman” Campbell when you need him? And exactly how many Campbells do we have around here anyway? One of the things about being a house of many mouths is that you do get acquainted with these sorts of shows. Mike is right, too: Max is the man and Rollie Pollie Ollie rules. But Mrs. Shrinks – yowza!.

The Friday Chat That Made The Internet What It Is

If I didn’t do Friday chat, the Internet would stop. That is what the voices tell me.

  • How Canadian are you? What a dumb question to pose in relation to immigration? What is the benchmark? If they asked a group of Haligonians when I was young the answer would be “not much”. We didn’t think much of Upper Canada, the US or New Brunswick for that matter – PEI was “queer Island” but a useful place to get beer when you were 18. We were Nova Scotians first and Canadians administratively. And enough with “visible minority” Only Canadians uses the term and it is stunned.
  • It is getting so close, people are starting to get nutty:

    “I like it, man,” Papelbon said. “I went to the Celtics [team stats] game (Wednesday night) and some guy came running up to me when I was sitting courtside and said, “We’re going to get 20 wins out of you next year!” I like that. I like the pressure.’

    It is an incredible line up they have accumulated over the winter. But that is what I said about last year. I still do not really know why you take a closer and make him a starter but I suppose it is all in the percentages, twenty wins is better than 35 saves.

  • Oh dear: “NDP plotting strategy to out-green its rivals“. You know what? I don’t care that much about green. What I mean is I am all for good stewardship and maximizing sustainability but I think that is a matter of prudence not a core political theory. A core political election platforms should be about change to justice, pervasive wealth creation, international security, that sort of stuff. In an election where green battles green, essentially a battle of filing cabinet arrangement techniques, I may stay home.
  • I take it the Central Committee never thought of this at the time.
  • I work with privacy law but even I am having a hard (pre-coffee) time translating this concept:

    It is likely that people wishing to take advantage of public information will still be required to apply for licences. “The reason we require licensing is to ensure that government information is not misrepresented or used to mislead the public,” said Mr Wretham. The Statute Law Database, an obscure if fascinating resource, is perhaps an unlikely candidate to have kick-started such a revolution but it will make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the UK’s legal history.

    Those of you with more contemporary British legal experience will have a better handle on this but it sounds like the UK may be making not only access to information free but use of government data free. This would be sort of huge in that there are massive of mapping, statistical and scientific knowledge in the hands of the state as a consequence or even intentional result of public sector activity.

That is it – maybe more later.

Real Future Phones

Here we are now,
Entertain us!

More news out of some trade show that the world demands to replicate kids copying the deaf dumb and blind kid playing pinball from Tommy even though we all know the kids are really like the kids in Quadrophenia:

The head of the world’s biggest maker of cellphones struck the tone for the whole wireless industry this week when he rode a bright yellow bicycle onto the stage before giving a keynote speech…Wireless e-mail was just the start. Major consumer electronics and technology players say the time is here for delivering e-mail, music and video to mobile devices, and that theme is dominating much of the discussion here at the world’s largest consumer electronics trade show.

No, not Steve Jobs and his hand Segway but a less interesting but actually practical head of Motorola about putting real things in to real people’s hands.

I do not despair as I am entering that age of life where I am more and more unimportant and my thoughts on things are of less value to the populace than they ever were. But Canada’s nicest geek, Tod Maffin, was on the CBC this morning talking about these new small screen gizmos, yapping them up like the biased frontman any business reporter is – the MSM bias on business never being a concern, of course – when the host gave the telling closing quation “how are your eyes?” Answer: “bad.”

Problem? Like with recent US foreign policy there is no accountability with IT claims, no review of either the return on investment or the practical performance. These announcements will sell a bunch of stuff that does not yet really work and also sell some stuff that does work that has been on the market. Stuff will sell. That is the key to a bubble economy.

Book Review: Brewed In Canada, Allen Winn Sneath

sneathWith all the reviews of whatever comes through the door I do, I should not forget some recent and not so recent books I have come to rely upon and give them an airing, too. Brewed In Canada subtitled “The Untold Story of Canada’s 350-Year-Old Brewing Industry” (a gift from two and a half years ago which was published in 2001) is one such reference guide that I pick up over and over when trying to figure out who was who where they were and what it was they were doing.

Sneath, the author, was one of the founders of the now departed Algonquin Brewing Company, one time holder of 1% of the Ontario beer market according to page 293. They made a beer called Hunt Club that was available in the mid-90s from Upper Ottawa Valley LCBO in one litre plastic bottles which was often seen in my fridge back then. Dandy stuff. Anyway, his real claim to beer historian fame as far as I am concerned is the one hundred plus page chronology at the end of the book in an appendix. This has served me well when I needed to confirm facts like PEI was the last province to end prohibition…in 1948!¹

The other 325 pages or so of this book is a standard history of the sort that pays more attention to the facts that have been gleaned than the sort that has an agenda in ordering those facts to make some sort of point as has been seen recently. It covers the early colonial period, the rise of regional breweries, the consolidations sparked by E.P. Taylor’s Canadian Breweries, the Dow beer non-tainting scandal of 1966 and on to the world of micro-brewing. While this book is comprehensive and certainly a must-have for any Canadian beer nerd, the book has one irritating feature – as pointed out by Bodensatz, it has no index! This means you have to go over it again and again to recover that fact bumping around at the back of your mind but given the quality of the book it is not such a bad fate.

I am not sure but this one may be now out of print but it is worth hunting out.

¹ No wonder the moonshine is so good and plentiful there. I seem to recall the drill was to ask for “St. Augustus” when at a kitchen party.

New York: Big Red, Southern Tier, Lakewood

This is an imperial red ale. I do not know if this is a style of one but it is the first I have seen.

Orange smoked amber ale under rich lace foamy ivory head. A salute to crystal malt, that double soaked-and double-dried barley that mimics raisin. Some grain but largely round malt with a nice tea flavoured hop that leaves an astringency that structures but does not cut the malt. Malt fruit? White grape, date, pear and some vegetative notes when the hops are considered. Strong at 9.5% but once again something to respect from these guys.

All the BAers know the love.