Month: May 2007

What Is Going On This Morning?

That is sort of what this is all about. Wake up. Read the news. Figure out what is whacky and see if I can write something. It’s not so dumb.

It’s a bit interesting that the Prime Minister has used Parliamentary privilege to suspend a court case. I would presume, as an election is not strictly speaking a Parliamentary matter, that the matter is only on hold. Embarrassing if it picks up come the next election. But that is not that interesting unless you have a good set of books on Parliamentary privilege or have access to the factum with the written legal case to nose around in. The Sox and the Mets lost – not interesting even if the Tiger’s pitcher was throwing over 100 miles an hour late in the game. It’s been raining the perfect rain which is interesting now that the basil and tomatoes are up, too. Show soaking rain followed hours later by a nigh of pouring. Everything’ll pop once the sun comes out. Falwell dead. Not interesting though the gayness of Tinky Winky was interesting – best line from a comedian: “show me the gentials!” Canoes are cheaper in the States than in Canada – that is wrong yet interesting and I have to obey the mighty dollar. Please all pray for a high Canadian dollar in the next two weeks. Darwin’s letters now online. What took them so long? Not interesting. Exercise desk? Not. Dark matter found. Feh.

Better go to work.

Group Project: What Would You Do?

Being not a small person since I was little and perhaps having the look of someone whose soccer training might be transferrable to headbutting in a pinch, I have not had the need to deal with a moment like this since the horror that was the junior high locker room:

Before I had a chance to take a sip of my coffee, someone — I won’t name them here because it might only serve to make a bad situation worse — came up behind me, said hello, and then asked me about something I’d posted here about them on my weblog. I attempted to explain my reasons for making the post, but before I could finish they responded by saying “so you think you’re pretty fucking smart” and then took a swing at the full cup of coffee in my hand, spilling it across the counter and over my newspaper and breakfast. Without another word they went out the front door and sped off in their car.

I think Peter did everything right in calling the cops and, in a small place like PEI, not directly calling the guy out – except perhaps he failed to inquire in reply as to whether the gent thought he was King Shit, as we used to say in the Maritime school playground of my youth.

But what would you have done? We think of many a pithy retort or ninja move we might make but we never do. I’d be more inclined to spend a lifetime eating away at shoulda-woulda-coulda. Would your jammy bun have been launched in the guys face? Would you have done a dapper Patrick MacNee as John Steed and hooked his ankle with your cane on his way out the door sending him into the display case? If you blog, have you had such a moment?

And would you name the jerk?

Do I See Damn Lies?

Does anyone believe these stats about web use that are about?

About 5.9 million Canadians spent an average of 83 minutes each on MySpace in March, said Bryan Segal of comScore Canada Inc., which measures Internet traffic. Remarkably, three other properties in the social networking category attracted even more Canadians. Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Live Spaces drew in 39 per cent of online Canadians, followed by Google’s Blogger (29 per cent) and independently owned Facebook (28 per cent).

I don’t have a strong reaction to percentages of on-line Canadians but I have a hard time believing 5.9 million Canadians are on MySpace. Is it in a meaningful way? I mean aren’t we now in a Canada with 1.3 blogs for every person? Wasn’t that where the future was? But maybe it is so as we are told in 2005 an “estimated 16.8 million adult Canadians, or 68%, used the Internet for personal non-business reasons during the 12 months prior to the survey.”

Maybe it is true. Maybe I am just Oldie Oldson, blogging away when the fun is happening elsewhere. The kid with the walkie-talkie when everyone is locked up the a Commodore 64. Maybe things are really upside down:

Chris (Zeke) Hand, the owner of Zeke’s Gallery in Montreal, used to partake in after-work drinks several times a week when he worked in the music industry. He says the booze is better in the art world, but he’s now choosing to do more of his networking and socializing online on sites like LinkedIn and Facebook. “They are an alternate means to connect with people without the possibility of being thrown in jail,” he says.

On-line with now fear of being thrown in jail? Has even Pr0n lost its illicit attraction? Oh dear – not quite.

The Radishes Are Up

I do not particularly like radishes but I am glad they are there. They will pop out of the ground whatever the conditions well before anything else. Maybe it’s because they give you both the false senses that you are good at something and that you have a treat to look forward to…even though a radish would pretty much grow out of a concrete block and tastes like gasoline mixed with black pepper. I plant a milder variety called French Breakfast. It reminds me of the month or less that me and pals spent in Paris 21 years ago, practicing nutritional deficiency and borderline alcoholism. Maybe the seed hybridizer stayed at the same hotel with the surely staff and the meager meals and remembered when he named his radish.

My relationship to radishes reminds me of my relationship to TV. So far today I have read or heard two stories about the collapse of TV in America. Katie Couric is floundering and NBC is foundering…or maybe it’s the other way around. NBC is actually bringing back the Bionic Woman – even though it was only the second best bionic person TV show of all time. Comparatively, the Bosox are roaring ahead and TV ratings for the sport are strong as well. I appear, along with many others, to be choosing reality – as opposed to a sort of reality in news snippets, in a series or even that sort of W2 social networking where there is neither real society or work’s rewards. Baseball – the perfect passive participation activity in its association with truth, beauty and real skill – is rising up through the wasteland of quality multimedia contentlessness. One always hopes the next thing will be real and good and simple. Perhaps it will be.

Out back, there are a few struggling tomato seed sproutlings as well, near the radishes but under special plastic roofing suffering from the cold as well, needing the sort of attention no radish would demand. I have no idea if they will make it, given this colder sort of May. Probably a replanting is necessary. I hear, however, that a radish is quite good with cold olive oil. And cheese.

Book Review: A History of Brewing in Holland 900 – 1900

hbhI started reading my copy of A History of Brewing in Holland 900-1900: Economy, Technology and the State by UBC professor Richard W. Unger, published in 2001. Careful readers will recall that I had ached after this book ever since I reviewed his 2004 publication Beer in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance but was a bit depressed about the sticker price of this one. Divine (or at least professorial) intervention, however, landed me the prize of a review copy.

I am only about 70 pages in – up to the 1400s – and am fascinated all over again by the precision and detail of the research yet also by how readable Unger makes understanding his work. So far, in a nutshell, he has taken medieval tax and shipping records and then traces how the semi-autonomous cities and towns within and neighbouring the Low Countries produced traded and consumed beer. He shows how Holland’s success in leveraging the new fangled hop that arrived from the south-eastern North Sea shipping trade in the 1300s led to the replacement of gruit as a flavouring in beer, triggered a shift in taxation and public regulation while expanding commerce through the ability of hops to stabilize the beer to allow it travel farther while maintaining its good condition. This portion of the book mirrors some of what was included more detail in his other book – for example, how taxes were based first on granting a monopoly to supplying an ingredient (ie counts farming to local towns the right to control the gruit trade) then on the production of beer (excise tax based on production provided more than 50% of Lieden’s revenue in the early 1400s) then on control of shipping of beer (through tolls, holding periods for trans-shipped casks and special import duties). The general information on the medieval economy is also interesting – like the fact that the Black Plague led to the marketplace for labour after it passed through as the survivors could decide what to do with their skills and thereby their lives.

I will add to this post as I move through the book but, again, I am struck how I would love to find a current text of this detailed quality in relation to the economics of English, American or any other region’s brewing but, other than Hornsey’s more scientific and encyclopedic A History of Beer and Brewing, know of none.

Bullet Points For The Day After The Game

One last look at Coco before the drive home
 

A huge thank you to Chris whose extra tickets gave me and the lad an unforgettable evening. And it was not just having the tickets. It was not that the tickets were in the sixth row. It was not Tina. It was not that the Sox hammered the Jays 8-0. It is not even that knuckleballer Wakefield was entirely in the zone. It was because after (I think) the sixth when Wakefield pitched to Wells who flied out to Coco for the third out who then ran in and, after getting to first base from center field…looked up …and I stood up in my white Sox jersey and black cap…and I shout “COCO!!!”…and he looked at me…and I looked at him…and he threw me the ball. I just about peed with joy.

 

In other news, it is Friday and there shall be bullets and they shall be good:

-> Well, suffice it to say, the Jays suck. I had a sense of it even in February but their play last night was pathetic. Halladay got an error in the first trying to pick off Yuke at second and putting it in to the outfield instead. Glaus got an error losing the ball in the lights at third which was nothing compared to in the first, bases loaded with two out, he daydreams and drifts off base only to be picked off by catcher Doug Mirabelli to Yuke who didn’t even have to beat him back to first – he tagged him feet away. Soon thereafter, the Jays went to sleep. Losing their alleged closer until August 2008 doesn’t help. They are now fighting for fourth in the AL East until 2009.

-> Apparently there is a world outside of baseball. And it has silly people in it.

The man arrested for allegedly leaking the Conservative government’s environmental plan was a temporary employee, a self-described anarchist and drummer in a punk band that sings an angry screed against the Prime Minister and the “rise of the right.”

Releasing pending legislation or regulations is not whistle blowing – the law will soon be public anyway and in draft and…stuff. Way to go bad band drummer.

-> If China is mad at us, we must be doing something right.

-> The PEI election is tepidying up. Apparently the 4% of the population made up of former Lieutenant Governors are getting all snippy with each other. Earth to person who said “it’s not the ethical thing to do” – no one cares, get a life, stop pretending that winning the prize in the Cracker Jacks makes you something. In more sensible news from the hustings, some-time comment makers around here, Cyn, is running for a seat.

-> Some people have useless dreams:

A British climber is in the closing stages of an attempt to set a world record for the highest mobile call. Rod Baber is making final preparations to scale Mount Everest and make the call from its north ridge.

I think I am going to swim to the bottom of the ocean and open a pack of 1983 O-Pee-Chee hockey cards. Not ’84…’83.

Just a reminder that in four weeks there is a Gen X 40 authorized event – the Watertown Wizards home opener. Friday June 8, 2007. I am told by one of the owners that they may play the Canadian anthem for us. Last year is was four bucks for adults, one for kids.

Take Me Out To The Ball Game

I can’t say the Jays deserve to be better than last in a surprisingly weak AL East but the time is coming to determine whether they have already packed it in for the season:

The question is, on an injury-ravaged team that has fallen into last place in the American League East with a record of 13-20 and is now 91/2 games behind the first-place Red Sox, how many more lacklustre efforts will the Jays’ executive have to witness before initiating change?

Watching the game last night, the Jay’s broadcast unfortunately, I was interested to check out where we will be seating tonight and then I realized, like watching a CFL game broadcast from a city east of Winnipeg, they were not showing the crowd or what claimed to be one.

Belgium: Brise-BonBons, Brasserie Fantome, Soy

I have to say I am in a conflict with this beer. I have liked all the Fantome I have tried…and I am supposed to approach these reviews with some sense of objectivity…supposedly. I love this beer. There I have said it. And, yes, I would marry it, seeing as you asked. Fresh pear juicy bright. There is a milkiness, a white pepperiness and cream of wheat. There is grain and there is toffee sweet. And there is green hop, arugula. Fabulous masses of thick lacing rich off-white foam over cloudy deep straw. Tea astringency in the end. Here’s the brewer’s website. All 61 BAers share the love.

XOXO. This is the beer you wish you had.

When I am At The Ballgame…

…I shall eat a hot dog. Nothing better to watch a crumbling home team better than by eating a hot dog. To be fair, tomorrow’s game will see Halliday on the mound so a Bosox loss would not be a fraud upon the gods but I will still root for the last knuckleballer and eat a hot dog and so will the lad. The selling of hot dogs is big stuff in MLB. The Mets apparently sell the most:

Shea Stadium leads all major league ballparks with annual consumption of more than 1.5 million hot dogs. (Yankee Stadium, interestingly enough, is not ranked among the top 10.) According to Aramark, most of Shea’s dogs are sold by 48 vendors who roam the stands, as opposed to concessionaires who sell from fixed locations. The average vendor sells 150 a game, and 10,000 to 12,000 a season. Working for commissions ranging from 13 percent to 16 percent depending on seniority, they can make $150 to $200 a game, and as much as $30,000 a season.

Some say it’s going to be a twenty buck dog but for me it is all about averages. In the next 30 days I plan to see MLB, Double A in Maine and a Watertown Wizards game just over the border and I shall eat a hot dog each time. I know the Watertown dogs are about two bucks so even if the wieners at Portland are six to eight, I think over all I can invest in the twenty dollar dog knowing that I can look over the end of it and seem Manny Ramerez about twenty feet away.

If you plan for these things, you can have these things. Apparently they may play the Canadian national anthem at Watertown, too. You just have to ask.

One Thing George Does Better

George gets a rough ride. For the most part he deserves it to one degree or another but this whole thing with the Queen is a bit much even for me:

He had stumbled on a line in his speech, saying that she had helped the United States “celebrate its bicentennial in 17…” Mr. Bush caught himself and corrected the date to 1976. He paused, winked, and looked to see if the Queen had taken offence.

Gee wizz. Can’t a guy get a break? Let’s be honest. He are some reasons a visit by HRH to my house would not go so well as a visit to the White House:

  • The teas is in a mug. Deal with it.
  • My daughter will ask “what’s with that hat?”
  • You may have to wait your turn.
  • Phil stays outside.

The last one is a biggie. And, yes, that’s a beer. Want one?