Category: Canada

Why Don’t They Study Slam Dancing And Health Anymore?

beerscience

Another day, another bunch of odd academic studies from lab coated laboratorians or policy documents from lobbyist trying to tell us all what beer does with you or what you do when you are with your beer. From France we learn, first, that “when the music gets loud, we tend to drain our mug of brew faster”:

Researchers staked out two bars in the west of France and observed drinking habits of 40 patrons. With permission from bartenders, the scientists pumped up the volume of a Top 40 station from 72 to 88 pounding decibels. In this earsplitting din of pop-music, patrons drank more in less time.

Is it possible that people who like to drink slowly and have quieter habits do not patronize places where Top 40 stations are played at 72 to 88 pounding decibels? Or maybe are they drinking to numb the pain? This article from here in Canada, next, seems to suggest that university age female drinking is new:

“You’re just an amateur if you can’t drink as much [as the guys] … you’re kind of like a sissy,” says Smith. “It’s not even always how much you’re drinking but what you’re drinking. Like, if a girl is drinking a stereotypical man-drink like whisky or dark rum or beer, it’s like guys are attracted to her or that it’s more impressive.

If they are suggesting this is new, well, that would be news to everyone I know in the mid-50s to early-40s bracket who were at college in Maritime Canada 25 to 30 years ago, who roamed in packs earning nicknames like “The Girls Who Said Woo”. Sure there were dumb, sad or bad incidents to all sorts of kids but risks and dangers were mitigated by group dynamics and common sense – designated drivers, not inviting jerks along and people just watched out for each other, like the time one evening’s overeager drinking buddy was stitched up by last night’s one from the med frat. Heck, on any given evening large lads like me were pointed at by a few gals as they said I was their boyfriend while I scowled a bit. If that does not still occur, that would have nothing to do with the drink so much as a sad loss of good manners.

Finally, US College basketball executives are considering an end to beer advertising during the “March Madness” national championship basketball tournament. Currently:

The NCAA’s advertising policy on its face…specifically prohibits ads for cigarettes, sports wagering, gambling, nightclubs, firearms and weapons, athletic recruitment services, and depictions of any student-athlete group in a degrading, demeaning or disrespectful manner. “Impermissible” ads also include NC-17-rated motion pictures, television programming or interactive games, and alcoholic beverages. But, ads for malt beverages, beer, and wine products that do not exceed six percent alcohol by volume are excepted, with limitations.

This is no small business as we are told that two beer marketers — Anheuser-Busch and Miller Brewing — spent nearly $30 million to advertise during the 2007 NCAA national basketball championships. But are these breweries advertising to the young or the old glory-days guys who pretend to themselves that they were as good back in the day?

I don’t pretend that there is not some degree of common sense or academic value in clever people noting these sorts of things but I am not going to join the new dries anytime soon, either. Sometimes in these matters we only hear of the sort of common sense that sees only one side of the matter and not the kids who like to sweaty slam dance to loud music, the gang of kids looking for safe dumb fun or the sofa surfers who just like to watch those ads for Bud with speaking frogs or with the guys who say “Wazzup?” How much money has A-B or Miller given to higher education through these ads or even otherwise? How many noisy slam-dancers just had a good time – again – and got home safe? How many of my pals met their spouses over pitchers of beer and now have nice, slightly Oldie Olson lives with quite faithful marriages?

Too bad there is no well-funded “Institute for the Realistic Contextualization of Studies and Statistics” which could help with those questions.

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.

#21 – Memo To Cratchit

MEMORANDUM

From: Methuselah

To: Cratchit

Re: Stirrings of Tory Life At Last.

Date: 28 March 2006

+++++++++

Seeing as you have so little to do during these days of the great silence, perhaps you could contact that chum of yours in the office of the Finance Critic to find out why the hell nothing has been said yet about this article in the Globe yesterday. Notice this sort of wording:

Federal Finance Minister Jim Flaherty signalled Monday he will not eliminate the capital gains tax in his first budget. The Conservative government had campaigned on eliminating the tax for individuals on the sale of assets when proceeds are reinvested within six months. But Mr. Flaherty told reporters the government is still considering some election commitments, including when to eliminate the capital gains tax. He wouldn’t elaborate on which other promises are under consideration.

One wonders whether this sort of back stroking by the government before they have stood before Parliament for a single day is a little more important than the sorts of considerations I am hearing about on booking the proper hotel room in Montreal in December and who’s best placed to come second to Mr. Smarty Pants. Get on that thug pal of yours and get something going, would you!

And get a haircut!

Post Post

I was wondering when I would feel that we have entered a new phase, a post post 9/11 era. I sort of felt it when I read this this morning:

The number of police officers patrolling the Halifax port is about to be cut by two-thirds, CBC News has learned. For several years, nine Halifax Regional Police officers have been providing security at the port 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Those officers also patrolled the harbour waters, checking for drunk boaters and safety violations. But sources say that security force is about to be scaled back to only three officers patrolling the water and the entire port. Starting in two weeks, there will be no officers working the night shift and no water patrols on weekends.

I was surprised that the 3/11 passed this year without a peep of a 3 and 1/2th reference. And the fact that Pakistan has lost the track of Osammy is now yesterday’s news after Musharraff heading out to watch a cricket match in India.

Either one of two things will happen: something or nothing.

#20 – Is He Or Isn’t He?

[ toast crunch.]

Him: [mumbles as paper snaps]…who the hell is this guy?…

Her: [from next room] Whaaat?

Him: NOTHING! [mumbles again] Hamas now sorta ok, he meets with Clinton, he turns on the Ethics Commissioner…even if the guy is a hack, why bother rising to the bait?

Oh, my God. Look at this in MacLeans. Look who wrote it!

Because surely what people have discovered about me by now is that I think a few steps ahead. Not to say that I made the decisions before I got here. But I certainly knew what the parameter of the options were… It doesn’t mean that everything you do has to be popular. But everything you are doing has to be serving the public interest. And you’ll have to, in due course, justify it to the population. I’ve been attacked so much in the past few years it doesn’t really matter to me. I always ask myself what will the public’s reaction be to such-and-such a decision or such-and-such a move by the time we get to the next election, when the public actually makes a judgment. So the temporary reaction of a columnist or whatever today doesn’t really mean anything. You have to ask yourself, “How is this going to look to the public in due course?”

“…or whatever”?!?! Like Parliament? I can’t wait to get back into the House and see this guy sweating. Usually it takes two years for an opposition to start tossing around the word arrogant…this guy’s ripe for the tomato toss from day one.

So much like whatshisname…Parizeau…another economist who doesn’t think Canada is a real country…HAH!

Her: [from next room] Whaaat?

Him: NOTHING! [ toast crunch, tea slurp.]

Trevor Greene

I got this sad report through the Kings College grapevine this afternoon:

A Canadian soldier in Afghanistan is in critical but stable condition after being attacked by a man wielding an axe during a meeting with tribal elders today. The reservist soldier, Lieutenant Trevor Greene, of Vancouver was initially taken to the Canadian-led multinational hospital at Kandahar Airfield where he underwent treatment for head wounds. He will now be airlifted to the U.S. medical facility in Landstuhl, Germany, said CTV’s Steve Chao, in Kandahar. Early reports suggested Greene was injured in a firefight with insurgents. It was later learned that he was attacked during a sit-down meeting with tribal elders when a man struck him in the back of the neck with an axe.

Trevor was a couple of years behind me in undergrad but Kings being so small we certainly knew each other, played intramurals, argued over the merits of pre- or post-Wham George Michaels and shared beers. It is quite the thing, 20 odd years after the age folk sign up, that Trevor was still ready and able to volunteer as a reservist. Thoughts today are with him.

In addition to be an officer in the Canadian reserves, Trevor is an author and journalist who wrote on the killings of prostitutes in Vancouver which are now the subject matter of the Pickton trial. More here and here and here and here.

Update, March 8: more stories on Trevor and his condition here, here, here, here and here.

Update, March 9: There is an interview in the Toronto Star with Trevor’s Dad. More here.

Update, March 10: A good story in the Vancouver Sun today about Trevor’s time in the navy.

Update, March 11: here is a CBC radio interview with Trevor’s Dad, Richard Greene. The link should open a real audio player and the interview is about 6 minutes long. [Later] Here is a story from CTV about improvement in Trevor’s health over the last few days.

Update, March 13: Here is a story from the Ottawa Citizen today with updated information on the state of Trevor’s health.

Update, March 15: Trevor’s back in Vancouver.

Update, March 22: Stephen Kimber (who knows Trevor as a Journalism professor at Kings then and now – and who posted in the comments below) wrote this article on the attack on Trevor.

Update, March 29: Barb in Vancouver has posted an update.

Update, April 26: Debbie has posted an update on the great improvements on Trevor over here.

Update, April 27-28: news updates of Debbie’s comment posting here and here and here and here.

Update, 29 April 2006: our pal Stephen Maher has a very good essay in the Chronical Herald today.

Update, 14 September 2006: there was an update on Trevor’s condition in the Vancouver Sun this week.

Update, 21 October 2006: there was an update in the Globe and Mail this morning with lots of quotes from lots of you. Funny – I have never seen the words “Mr.” and “Gibson” placed together in that way. Sounds like Trevor is moving forward.

Update, 16 December 2006: The Toronto Star has an article on Trevor’s recovery in this morning’s paper.

None

#19 – Delighted I’m Sure

One might be forgiven for thinking that, all things considered, given the dearth of plausible candidates for the primus inter pares (or however the hell you spell it) spot in the Party, they might have given Iggy something which might have brought him to the attention of the Speaker more than once every six months.

It is not every day that we manage to find a bona fide intellectual – who published actual books rather than Pierre’s wee collection of pensees on Federalism culled from yesterday’s fish wrap – dumb enough to want to lead the party through the valley of debt to reach the delights of office a decade from now.

The Acting Leaderine is, I suspect, just a little envious. Not that he himself is a stranger to the book writing biz; but his only sales have been to captive law students looking to break the cycle of Wills and Trusts with the p&v of International Law. Actual people have bought, in rather satisfactory numbers, Iggy’s books.

Plus, and one cannot discount this, he has been an actual media star (I trust no one has mentioned that in Canada, so long as you have not actually written any books, that puts you in line to be GG not PM). One would think that the Leaderine would have remembered all this.

One might go further and point out that Slats, for all his prowess on the international hockey sheet – and his own rather popular books – is unlikely to be able to identify any foreign nation where hockey is not actually a part of the national religion. Iggy, on the other hand, has been almost Chatwinesque in his desire to visit the most maggot infested corners of this funny old world. He – and this no doubt knots the knickers of the Leaderine – actually has a clue and the clue is not the anti-American “personal security” cant which the Unworthy utters at such ponderous length from his Pacific perch.

I’m off for a quick dinner with Marie Jose…Bunny is in the Desert for the week. Hope she has fun – I know I will.

#18 – Critique Appointment Day

Interim Leader did well. I like my job just fine. Reminds me of 1986 even if it wasn’t the longest post I held. Some surprise that I got it and some surprises for thems that didn’t get anything. Bit more of an office than I fear though less than I had had. But that’s the way it goes.

Bit of a sour look from Major Announcement himself, but after Defence you would expect that was was a bit of a shock. Not such interesting junkets. Brains Ignatieff certainly can expect quite an education care of Geoff Regan. Good Lord, that should be entertaining to watch. Jack Sprat. That’s what I’ll call him. He’ll get that one right away. Regan will be retired before he clues in. Slats Dryden is a bit of a shocker – Foreign Affairs. Almost as much of a shock that MacKay got that Ministry in the first place. Maybe he’ll befuddle the man from Pictou with the well placed signed rookie card. I bet MacKay still has his cards. He has that look about him.

Man Is The Measure Of All Things

Here is my half-baked unified theory essay based largely on idle car driving and long meeting daydreaming. Entire chunks could be rewritten and reversed, deleted even. I am too lazy to edit it any more and I am note convinced myself but, thought I, what the heck. I’m posting it for comment but given that I am calling it half-baked I would expect that the comment would not be of the “yor a moeron” sort. Pick out what you like, mix and match, compare and contrast.

I don’t know why the opening of Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has clung to the back of my mind:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent last Saturday night at 24 Sussex Dr. fiddling with the TV, trying desperately to find the channel that carried Ben and Rachel’s favourite show, The Forest Rangers. It was the Harper family’s first Saturday night at the Prime Minister’s official residence — the family of four and their two beloved cats moved in just two days before — and the cable wasn’t hooked up. “I told Stephen I would arrange the channels on Monday, and he said, ‘No, let’s do it right now,’ ” Laureen Harper wrote in an e-mail this week. The Prime Minister proceeded to call the cable company…

It is not a sour thought at the sight of a Dad trying without any luck to figure out the electronics or a hapless moment for the new PM that saddens me. It’s that it was The Forest Rangers. Secretly, I hope it is a remake I have not heard of but I suspect it is that same show that was never part of my growing up – because even at 42 it was before my time. I suppose what makes me really sad is that in the last four and a half decades of entertainment communications there is nothing better for a couple of kids to watch than the show that made The Beachcombers seem like Shakespeare – even if their parents hold a pretty tight rein on the TV’s remote control. But I doubt it. Who would remake the Forest Rangers? Who now could?

Is this another post about the false promise of recent changes in mass communications? I suppose it is. This weekend, taking in a movie in a 1930s cinema as well as an excellent live hockey game, I was struck like I should not have been struck how the digital advance is something of a regression. We have a population that has, say, doubled in the last so many decades but the volume and variety of entertainments has exploded. And, while the technological advances have been impressive, has the content kept up? Is it possible that there could be so many more things with which to be entertained or informed without a relative dilution of the actual quality of content?

What have we given up due to the dilution? Audio fidelity in favour of tiny ear plugs. The ability to value excellence in favour of the ability to value what we choose or, worse, what we do. Even TV as a topic for water cooler talk is dumped in favour of the replacement of water cooler talk, the SuperNetWay. We have exchanged audience for authorship and awarded each of ourselves the same prize. Except maybe for Harper as Dad. For him there is that world of kids playing in a fort (without any explanation of who maintains it and on what budget) and helping with some sort of government administrative function in relation to lands and forests (despite the child labour laws). There is something back there in that show which is not here – the suspension of disbelief, that awareness that what your are taking is has acceptable flaws.

But we are such mooks now – suckered by belief in whatever we have placed before ourselves. All it takes is for a new self-flattering toy or medium to come along to make ourselves earnestly believe we must have it. And so with politics – we are so determined to be a vital player in the administration of government that we value our whim is as good as a policy borne of the toil of hundreds and the rulings of decades. We can no longer suspend our disbelief as consumers or citizens but are locked into our own certainty in relation to all things, creating a flat world where anything is pretty much as good as any other thing. We cannot defer. We must each be authority if we are also the personalize me. So no journalist is worth their salt, no policy can be trusted, no means to assert our own personal dominion of expression can dared be passed up. We each pick at the world yet pick each our own world. Less shared, less trusted. More me-like-ness.

Sometimes I think that the few years of this millenium have seen two changes which have melded unexpectedly: the rise of networked information technology and the rise of the fear and the security demand in response to terrorism despite almost five years now passing since, hopefully, the anomaly of 9/11 that shook us out of the sleep and pattern of tens upon tens being blown up here and there on a regular basis between nation upon nation, tribe upon tribe genocides. We can forget sometimes that there was life and community and many of the same problems in 2000, 1999 and before. We trick ourselves that all has been changed. About a year ago I wondered if we were post post 9/11. I wondered it again a few months later, the day before the bombings in London. But maybe the trick is on us, that the uni-mind of internet and homogenization of shared concern has left us burned a bit, blurred a bit even as we technologically assert our individual autonomy. So concerned with our fear of flying – even while we are on the ground – that we now have met unending earnestness and each of us shaken hands with it and made it our own. I thought there was an end to irony in the weeks after September 11th but now I think we lost more than just that as tools of surveillance and information merge in the one screen wired to the network, taking and giving, providing what we can say we have made up ourselves. We must believe now, nothing left to be suspended. Where would you stand during the suspension?

What to do? Doesn’t anyone think this is just a town full of losers to be blown out of? Maybe Steve does. Is the Harper family gathering around the black and white world of the past one way to assert the contrarian way? I still think it is a little sad but I don’t know why exactly. I wish them well.

#17 – Military Intelligence

Tea slurp. Toast crunch. Paper rustle.

Him: (muttering to self) I’m glad I never got to be Minister of Defence. When I was a kid I always wanted to be Minister of the Navy until that dopey move to unify the Forces. No more Halifax junkets, no more boondoggles to UK shipyard pubs at shift change…what was the point.

Her: (from next room) What! Did you say something?

Him: No. No. Nothing. Nevermind. (muttering again) If I had gotten handle on the military I might be able to make head or tails of this stuff in the Star…

Conservative election promises to bolster the military with new ships, soldiers and an Arctic force are long on ambition, but may have come up short on money, say defence analysts. The Tories promised to recruit 13,000 new, full-time soldiers and another 10,000 reservists; to build three heavy, armed icebreakers, an Arctic deepsea port and a surveillance system to keep watch over the North; and to buy new ships and planes.

(mumbles: “rum te-tum-tum…”)

…The Canadian American Security Review, published at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, is also doubtful about the Conservative accounting. “A cost of $2 billion for both ships and deepwater port seems … doubtful,” the publication said. “Election promises are more convincing when better fleshed-out.”

(toast crunch)

“…A true deepwater port would be lots more than $50 million…Everybody that has mentioned that prospect said it would not be cheap…He also said that while the coast guard needs new icebreakers, there’s no need for them in the navy. We’re not planning to arm other icebreakers, so why should we put three in the Arctic? It’s purely symbolic.”

Him: HAH!!! That’s what it is. Symbolic! (muttering again) Harper the Great protecting that which needs no protection.

Her: What dear?

Him: Nothing, nothing…(more muttering) Maybe…I don’t know. I wish that clever fellow was not off on that vacation. I’d give him a call if he weren’t off on that NATO boondoggle he set up for himself pre-paid pre-election. Pan-Global Parlimentarians for Pan-Global Security my arse. A gin tour by any other name. I’ll have a word at caucus when he’s back. (slurps tea) If he’d lay off the RMC stories, bad jokes and back-slapping he might even be someone you could decently get along with.

Her: What dear?

Him: Nothing.