Me and Mine – Page 19 – A Good Beer Blog

Group Project: Now Eight Years Have Passed

No glib snark today. No bullet points. Where are you eight years later? I wrote this in 2003. Five years ago, I posted my comments from three years earlier made at my pal Steve’s blog, Acts of Volition. Here they are again:

Alan McLeod
[7:48 AM September 17, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

I have found myself, like everyone else, having been staring at the TV in a daze for days. I was in the middle of a presentation at the curling rink in Summerside last Tuesday when someone came into the room to tell what was going on. I drove home at lunch and the TV has seemingly been on ever since. One thing that has happened here in New Glasgow, PEI is that there are no passenger jets overhead flying between Europe and the US east coast. Usually there are 5 to 10 in the sky at any one time. You notice the silence. I have seen two con-trails but am reliably told that it is likely a US military refueling tanker. Moncton airport apparently has about 5 US jets operating out of it now, according to a PEI air traffic controller.

I flew the flag at half mast. Most people did around here. I have thought alot about the bit of business I have done in the US on four trips in the last year and the people I have met. 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.

Alan McLeod
[7:56 AM September 19, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

I was interested in reading Peter’s comments as a first crisis as a Dad. The same is true for me. I have these echoes of war in the past that the 1990’s had silenced. When I was a child in suburban Ontario in the late 60’s I remember asking my mom if we were at war. We were watching Vietnam on TV. I remember having bombing dreams after Dad told me for the millionth time that when he was my age, Hitler carpet bombed his grannies house along with their whole town – Greenock, Scotland – for three days. I remember heading about the fall of Saigon on the school bus heading to junior high. I remember the fear in high school and undergrad that Ronnie R. and Leonid B. would vaporize us all. I remember in law school wondering with the rest of the team if the intermural basketball game should go on given that the US had just started bombing Bagdad. And Rwanda and Bosnia…and then nothing… No big events for eight years. Relatively speaking peace was breaking out, the UN acted in Cambodia, Bosnia, Kosovo. Things were being handled. I moved into a good career, got married, got a mortgage and a couple of kids. Then the buildings fell down…Driving to work the other day I actually got a start when I saw, coming down the Brackley Road, low on the horizon a Dash Eight coming into land at the airport. I saw in my mind that building. One one hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff. On the other hand, we gen’ x’ers have some experience of this stuff…

Alan McLeod
[10:38 AM September 19, 2001]

A good reference but, for me, at 38, having lived my first 28 or so during the Cold war, the presence of war and the potential to be sucked into one personally was never “violence unthinkable” despite how the life of a Canadian 20-something gen’ x’er in Nova Scotia was so peaceful and fun. On top of the fears, I wrote about above, my folks moved in ’56 to avoid the Third World War believed coming due to Hungary, French-Indochina and the Suez. When I got my UK Right of Abode in 1981, my mother thought Maggie T. might draft me for the Falkins. The fear of the bomb. We were living in our own minds on borrowed time and as a result were in no rush to prepare for kids, mortgages and careers. My 20’s were different from your – perhaps until now. From the fall of the Wall until the falling of the WTC there was a period of freedom from “the bomb” that I think I will not experience for a while.

Alan McLeod [7:33 AM September 24, 2001]
elal@pei.sympatico.ca

Like everyone, I am still thinking about what has happened and how things have changed since 11 September. One thing I think has changed is that irony and cynicism as a guiding principle for one’s life has been severely undermined. In North American popular culture for 20 years or so, the ability to comment upon any proposition with a tongue in cheek reort has been acceptable, almost expected and often a winning point in a conversation. David Letterman was an early adherent. We were so witty that we could turn any philosophical proposition or political stance around to show its paradoxical components and therefore its lack of integrity. Few principles could sustain the probe – wealth was bad but being a bleeding heart helping the poor is pointless emotionality; liking art was lightheaded but disliking art was neanderthalic; being involved with politics was self-interested, not being involved…well that was OK because that serves irony. The dominance of irony seems to have been swept away this month. Friends, beauty, nature, reflection are all assets we are being told to lean upon to understand the world now. Causes are largely just, protests are mute and people have gotten nicer on the highways. Will it last? Will street people have enough coin to get things to eat? Will we like our new neighbours and ask to try their strange foods? Will we stop thinking about our own inadequacies at work or home and enjoy the day?

What has changed in my life since the attacks? I have made a point of being in the USA often, mostly across in New York. It started out in part because we are so near but also to make sure the kids see US soldiers in normal life like they see members of the Canadian military in our streets in Kingston in uniform… even in my living room and on our vintage baseball team and at the Royal Military College games. When you see a young family in a mall, the Mom or Dad or both with the cut or even uniform of the 10th Mountain division from nearby Fort Drum, NY they know who they are also seeing on the news. It also makes you feel old, knowing that people half you age are pulling your weigh. I constantly listen to, am slightly obsessed with and am an active member of a NPR station that even runs the feed of this blog on their website as part of figuring out what “regional” means.

And I also remember.

My Cultural Family Emblem Sullied And Used

What other nation has to put with this, gets to be treated like a Geico caveman? So nice to see MacLeod of MacLeod dress tartan being shaped like a coin purse, then used as scant clothing and then used to illustrate cheapness, getting a free meal. Because that is what we do, we Scots. We hunt out ways to freeload, you know, when we aren’t creating modernity. What other culture could the Globe and Mail treat with such casual disrespect?

In The International Monday Morning Papers…

Finally, I made it to the life of if not a jet setter, then, maybe a border hopper as this morning’s Watertown Daily News proves:

While heckling from the “cranks,” or fans, was not an official requirement of the game, there was certainly plenty directed toward all four teams. Mr. Drinkwater himself engaged in a fair amount of good-natured bantering as umpire and later as a player on the Rochesters, who won their first game against Kingston 9-2 but lost 12-4 in the championship round against the Ontarios… For Alan C. McLeod, organizer of the Kingston team, it was international collaboration that brought his players to the vintage games in the first place. “Obviously there’s a lot of camaraderie. Sackets Harbor got us interested in this two years ago,” Mr. McLeod said. According to the organizer, teams from Canada used to cross over into the States to play baseball with Americans as early as 1870.

Getting whupped 9-2 by the Rochester best nine is not exactly bad when you consider it was the fourth game for the Kingston St. Lawrence Brown Stockings and Rochester has run a weekly program for years. We got tagged for five in the sixth, too. We were down by just one before that. Have I made enough excuses? Need a lighter bat as well. And a bit more work on the fielding. And I shouldn’t have tried for second that one time but they did say that a ball that went into the bush was a double when they meant that a ball that went into the bush and stays in there was a double. I should have done a Billy Martin on those Rochestarians but I was way too out of breath.

Laying Down The Late Inning Double A Bunt

I was clicking away last Thursday as the Binghampton Mets beat the Portland Sea Dogs 2-1 in a pitchers’ duel. Got the bunt in a good sequence of shots. We had pretty good seats for seven or eight bucks and got to witness a lot of players who will never make the bigs. Some might. I really liked the Sea Dogs shortstop Diaz as well as all of the Met’s pitchers. Great Sox hope Lars Anderson did not have a good game going 0-4 with two strike outs. In fact in the ninth the lad was shouting “Swing At It, Would’ja Lars!!” as another strike went by as the bat sat nestled on his shoulder. Earlier, after bobbling and almost dropping a foul pop fly he was dubbed “Two Hands, Lars!” after the advice the boy shouted field wards a couple of seconds later. Super tiny midget level softball is paying off. Lars hit 3-4 the next night.

Grill, Shed, Steak, Rain, Bieres de Garde And Saisons

The trouble with charcoal grilling is that when the rain comes you can’t turn it off. Propane, on the other hand, has a nice dial that has a “0” setting. But there is the garden shed and, when it rains and you have visitors, it can turn out to be a delightful place to while away a late afternoon hour reading last week’s newspapers in the recycling bin, listening to AM radio and comparing a few examples of bieres de garde and saisons.

We opened the Ch’ti Blonde from Brasserie Castelain à Bénifontaine first, a gold ale called a saison (though French not Belgian) by the BAers but a biere de garde by Phil Markowski in his book Farmhouse Ales under a white mouse head that resolved to a froth and rim. It was the favorite of the set with cream malted milk, pear juice and nutty grain. Very soft water. I actually wrote “limpid cream of what graininess” but I am a little embarrassed by that pencil scribble. It gets a fairly poor rating from the BAers but maybe that is because they were not in a shed when they tried it. Castelain’s Blond (no “e”) Biere de Garde was drier but still creamy fruity, not far off the greatest example of a Canadian export ale. Light sultana rather than pear. Also dry in the sense of bread crusty rather than astringency. Lighter gold than the Ch’ti but, again, the rich firm egg white mousse head and far more BAers approve. By this time the shed dwellers had decided that steak could in fact be finger food and also that these ales were an excellent pairing with chunks of rib and New York strip. The Jenlain Ambree by Brasserie Duyck was another level of richness altogether, the colour of a chunk of deep smoked Baltic amber, the richest lacing I have ever seen left on a glass. Hazelnut and raisin, brown sugar and black current with a hint of tobacco. Lately I have been thinking that amber ales are the one style that could quietly slip away and never be missed. Placing this in the glass in the hand in the shed as the rain thumped on the roof and steak was eaten was an instructive treat as to what ambers can be, though 6% of BAers hesitate to be so enthusiastic.

I think this is the worst photo I have ever posted so I will keep it tiny unless you choose to click on it for the full effect. Apparently there is a limit to the beery photographic arts and I have made it my own. The 3 Monts to the left was picked up at Marche Jovi in nearby Quebec for a stunningly low price of under six bucks. Plenty of malteser and pale malt graininess with yellow plum and apple fruitiness, straw gold with more of the thick rich head, cream in the yeast. The water was not as soft was either beer from Castelain but all BAers love it. By Brasserie De Saint-Sylvestre who also made this biere nouvelle. To the right, the Fantome Winter was one of the stranger beers I have ever had and, frankly, a disappointment. All I could taste was radish, sharp and vegetative, over and all around the insufficient malt. In my ignorance, I didn’t realize that was likely quite an aged beer as the happy BAers explain. Neither the cork or even label, with its unmarked best before portion, give a hint as to the year but that is all right as I suspect I will consider this just a lesson learned even though I generally love Fantome.

By this time there were stars and a breeze as the cold front finished moving through.

Vintage Base Ball At The Royal Military College

What a day! A squeaker in the first game at 14 to 13 for RMC over the St. Lawrence after RMC entered the bottom of the ninth down 10 to 13. In the second game a more reasonable 12- 5 by the Canadian military elite over the slothful loutish lumps. Each game was roughly an hour and a half. Great fun and a wonderful reason to retire to the Kingston Brewing Company for a great variety of interpretations on what exactly happened. Oatmeal stout is such a tonic. No word of a lie when I tell you there was TV, radio and newspaper coverage from two nations present. A great way to welcome in the warmer months.

Holding A Proper Who-la-thon

Tired of the pap that has passed for children’s TV since the advent of “My Little Pony” and that damned purple dinosaur Barney? Needing an opportunity to introduce fear and other lessons into the lives of your kiddies in a controlled yet, err, meaningful way? Hold a Who-la-thon! And if you are going to hold a proper Who-law-thon, you need a number of things:

A room full of pre-teens ready to be fed junk food then unknowingly being prepared to be terrified. Sit said kids packed on to one sofa to maximize huddling in terror (HIT) effect.
A selection of Doctor Who episodes from a variety of eras and series. Avoid the first and second Doctors as black and white TV confuses people under forty. Prepare screening in an order to maximize HIT through developing a crescendo of fear. We chose 1975’s two-parter The Sontaran Experiment with the Fourth Doctor, a Sarah Jane Adventure with Slitheens followed by a two-parter from the Tenth Doctor, the most recent, featuring Cybermen.
Remove all pillows and hats from the immediate viewing area so as to limit the face hiding opportunities within the rec room.
During showing use phrases like “oh, you are not going to like this bit” and “make sure you see this bit” just before the bodies begin to pile up or a well loved semi-minor character gets zapped so as to encourage more HIT.
Adopt vocal tone of most evil character during mid-screening chit chat.
Remind children periodically that things always work out in the end never indicating clearly when the end shall come.
Leave lights off throughout the house and plan Who-la-thon so as to hours of darkness to provide for immediate trip in dark well past bedtime leaving little opportunity for answering of questions.

Remember, the Who-la-thon is a teaching moment with lasting consequences. Consider using the Who-la-thon as the moment to introduce cola drinks into your children’s diet to avoid the faint likelihood of nodding off after the spike of sugared snacks from the early hours wears off. Also, this is the time when the illusion of the perfection of parents can be helpfully dispelled so understand that the right answer to questions like “why did the Earth blow up, Daddy?” or “what happens if the invasion fleet isn’t destroyed” is a quietly spoken and slightly delayed “I have no idea.” Because you really don’t.

Friday Bullets For My Day Off In The USA

My three hours at the NCPR phone farm starts at noon so I should get my butt out the door about nine thirty. I wonder of they will let me play with the Twitter controls. Things I do in the states: eat jerky (I have a rule – no jerky in the homeland); buy a local weekly newspaper (they still report who was visting from away like a Maritime weekly); look for flags (I still need a NY state flag); and shop at grocery store for cans of butter beans and multi-coloured goldfish crackers. In America the goldfish crackers come in different colours than orange. That is what makes the USA great. When I hear the “USA, USA” chant I think of multi-coloured goldfish crackers.

I watched the last ER and hated it. I hate ER. I used to comment on ER usenet groups when it was a cool show (holy oldie olson internet reference!) but I stopped watching around 1998. Death and death and more death. If they were such good ER doctors, the death parade wouldn’t go on and on. Plus I get that Stamos guy mixed up with the guy from “Joanie Loves Chachi” – but at least one Doctor Who crossover moment so at least that was something.
I do not yet see the world from the perspective of Davros’ toggle switch but I must say that the words “anti-facist demonstrators” do equally warm my heart. The juxtaposition with this and this should be more publicly troubling than it is.
I don’t know what to make of Harper these days but there is plenty of evidence that Canada is doing well economically under his watch.
Today is also an edition of The Session and the topic is smoked beer. Never heard of it? Start with our man in Ireland and follow the links.
Mr. Taylor and I engaged in a very interesting dicussion of social software and the courts this week. Have a look. Maybe we are both wrong.
When was the last time a First Lady said something that you though was simply solid advice: She told the 240 girls about growing up on Chicago’s south side, and urged them to think of education as “cool.” “I never cut class. I liked being smart. I liked getting A’s,” she said. “You have everything you need. Everything you need to succeed you already have right here.” I am going to use that line. I wonder if she is also strong on the use of 1970s British TV Sci-Fi as a tool for teaching about ethics and the importance of blasting things freom outer space?
I was listening last night to WFAN and the discussion of baseball ticket prices. At their new palace, the stinky cheater Yankees, the average gret seat now costs over $500 compared to about $150 at the Mets and Red Sox. Another reason to engage in recreation ritual hate. By the way, I watched the 2004 Red Sox ESPN summary last night. I am now very ready for baseball to begin.

That must be it for today. Where will I go by the end of the day? Maybe to the mall? Woot!

Being A Beer Hound Without Any Sense Of Style

When I was a lad and knew a thing or two about hoofing a ball, we would arse around by playing “soccer without style” – playing the game without any of the conventions which quickly collapsed into just arsing around. I think I do the much the same thing when I think about beer as I am not really that much interested in style. I am not strongly against style like, I think it is fair to say, Ron Pattinson whose entertaining research has pretty much proven that the historic antecedents for much of what is accepted as stylistic gospel is just not there. But, even without Ron’s passion and critical eye, I am still not sure why I would care that much ago beer taxonomic classification system over, for example, assessing according to a beer’s quality control standards or a brewer’s sense of innovation. I thought about that when I read this passage from a post by Philadelphia’s own Jack Curtin from Friday (and again today):

When asked by a lady at his Philly Beer Week dinner the previous night at the Four Seasons how she could tell the difference between “stouts, porters and ales,” Fritz said he told her “it’s easy, you read the label.” He then repeated an argument that I’ve heard from him before, that beer styles are considered much too important these days, that the beer is what matters, not some arbitrary level of IBUs et al. He looked around and said it was all the writers’ fault, “you just want something to write about.” Lew countered by blaming homebrewers and I said, more correctly I believe, that it’s the fault of the Brewers Association, who need all the categories for GABF. “Okay,” said Fritz, “it’s all Charlie Papazian’s fault then.”

I came to beer in a number of ways: being a child of immigrants and wanting to try what was good in the old country, being the sort of omnivore in all respects that will pop anything in his gob and – for about five years – being a fairly active homebrewer. But I never really cared if something was to style even if I collected a small library of home brewing guides that I would pore over incessantly. For me, the interesting thing was the odd ingredient – making a pale ale…or a porter…or a Scotch ale with this hop then that one, finding out what smoked malt or torrified wheat added. I really didn’t care what style my beer matched. Interestingly, that playing with style was what I found most of all in Papazian’s guides.

I think my lack of style continues in these my days of being a beer hound. I do not want to take a beer judge course nor become a cicerone. Neither do I tick or rate. I don’t think that this makes me just a poor fan of beer, either. I truly do just want a good beer in my glass, whatever that beer is, and I trust no one but me to make the final assessment. It takes some effort, as with the sour beer studies, to hunt out and learn what “good” might mean to me but I fully expect that one day a stout laced with the essence of roast lamb might interest me as much as those historically accurate Victorian ales Ron has been toying with developing. All I care about is whether the beer is interesting or not… and, I suppose, whether its level of interest to me is reflected in the price I have to pay to consume it. Does that leave me adrift of the norm? A voice in the wilderness? I don’t know. But, given there are so many things that I can say that about, it does give some comfort. After all, there is only one person who can swallow a beer for me.

Adam Dunn Apparently Does Not Suck So Much

It was one of the best games I have ever attended in any sport. Bizarrely, this morning Canadian sports media are not covering it as their lead story. Had Bay hit the run and Canada gone on to win, the nation would have gloated for years. But the outcome was immaterial to the quality of the game. Perhaps Canadian sports fans can’t appreciate the glory of achievement even in a close loss. If so, that wouldn’t be the case for those who were there. Conversely, the New York Times appreciated the moment the US reliever Putz faced in the ninth: “From the start, though, Putz could tell this game would be different from any he had experienced in a decade of professional baseball. The Rogers Centre throbbed with noise — it was the loudest crowd Putz said he had ever heard.” That is the big moment up top in the ninth – a man on second, two outs and Jason Bay at the plate fighting off pitches only to fly out in the end. The place had been going crazy for an hour up to that point after Canada’s minor league relievers twice got out of bases loaded situations. Heroic moments.

My children learned new words and new ways to use words. Many of those words were directed at USA right fielder Adam Dunn who spent the first half of the game parked in front of us before sending the game reeling with his three run homer. But I knew he did not suck as I saw him at Cooperstown in the home run derby in 2006 jack more than one out of the park. I have a deep belief that seeing sports live in a crowd is a very good thing and an important part of childhood. Fodder for character and an education that your classmate junior peewee “elite” soccer players are pretty much being led down a path.

Seeing a fan of the other side slagged by your crowd mates and then seeing him turn on them victorious and finger pointing is a life lesson. Seeing ultimately good natured but rough talk between adults should be shocking spicy thing. Watching reactions to great achievements and huge disappointments provides a foundation for future personal experience.