A Good Beer Blog

Midtown Tavern, R.I.P.

David Swick has the whole story in Halifax Daily News:

A city that prides itself on its heritage, and a legendary tavern whose days are numbered. Sounds like a match made in tippling heaven. Operators of the Midtown Tavern in downtown Halifax have applied to the city to tear the old place down, to be replaced by a new drinking spot in a 20-storey hotel. Chances are good that this will actually happen. Times have changed. Even 10 years ago, the Midtown was hot, hot, hot. But plain decor and basic food are no longer the key to success.

“We still serve a tonne of food [Ed.: Dave, even I don’t think Mr. Grant was thinking metric], but no one’s drinking anymore,” says Eric Grant, one of two sons of longtime owner Doug Grant. “We used to break even with
the food and make money on the beer. You can’t do that if people don’t drink. If you won the lottery tomorrow and told me you wanted to open a tavern, I’d say you were crazy.”

Doug Grant, now 78, has told his kids they can do what they want, Eric said. So they worked with a developer to create a plan, and are now taking calls from
hotel chains, with an eye to putting a fancy new bar at the base of 20 storeys of rooms. Rather than unceremoniously destroy the Midtown, tourism and heritage
officials might consider picking it up and moving it. Plunked down somewhere else in town, it could become a curious attraction. Here, after all, is a tavern that did not change for decades — and stayed enormously popular through almost all of that time.

We’ll never see its like again.

Boiled dinner, two and juice. Even in my Halifax time, 1981
to 1992, you passed through the Midtown on your way to other bars, the Deck or the Seahorse. Now it would be a stop or more likely a walk by on the way to Rogues Roost. It wasn’t the same after Jerry moved on a long time ago. He held the place open for us on a blizzardy Friday night.

Around 1984, I saw an oil painting of the Midtown jazzy on a rainy evening for $400.00. I kick my own arse thinking about not buying it. I had steak and egg and two and juice there before seeing Gretzky play for Canada ona Saturday afternoon in September 1983 against the Czeckoslovaks with Hasek either in goal or on the bench as a kid. I think I have had a beer with three-quarters of my best friends in that bar.

This is not good in a number of ways.

End of month passed, weekend away, payday a couple of days away – the cupboard is bare.   Why do I balk at taking cheerios for lunch?   Given the options are dehydrated borsche, wasabi-covered chickpeas, a kilo of saurkraut and a tablespoon of blue cheese, you’d think I’d be going with the cheerios.

I saw this at Doc’s page and boy was I ticked. Cloudy in the atmosphere here two nights ago while the layers higher up were doing a neon dance. Worse than the time I heard the triple play on TV from the kitchen. Others luckier in PEI the next night.

This is a good discussion of the phenomena of weblogs/PWPs, care of Rob1 (via right).

[I’ll have to think about this given the stats and relative adoption rates compared to ham radio.]

Later: I congratulate Rob1.

This is the best statement of where weblogs are today that I have read. It does not backaway from either the overriding hobby aspect as well as its placement on a continuum that reaches at least into the early 90’s as opposed to a new phenomena created by current players.

I am interested in the co-mingling of weblogs and open source and how idea sharing – especially outside of the realms of technology and science – can facilitate the expansion of the uncommoditized world. I remain unsure of the point of aggregation other than that we now can as I see them as a buffer to meaning and community rather than a tool for these. The noise is too great, the opportunity to receive too limited to go beyond superficiality.

I am suspicious of anything calling itself a “tipping point” as I have gone though too many “paradigm shifts” which were little more than a consultant creating a new word. Also, it is not structurally democratic external to itself, given the digital divide(s), however much participants believe themselves a new democractic thing – too much great man theory for that.

I am looking for the unified tool of RSS – not my interests but all interests indexed, an eBay of ideas where I can find any interest discussed in increatingly detailed sub-groups of further detail – a usenet without active participation drawing on content from feeds from open source platform blogs made available to everyone. Is that there yet? It is too much to ask for?

Later Later: The author, Andrew2, is now linked right.

 

There are 12 cicadas buzzing non-stop in my ears this morning. It was so loud, the air in the room shimmered and my pant legs flapped with the bass notes. It was great.

I bought tickets yesterday morning for me and Nate but when I got home this was on the email:

Hey dude;

Sorry… just got your message. No… I’m in halifax. But you are on the guest list plus one. Mike Nelson is the tour manager…find him if there is any problem. Tickets are in your name so pick them up anyway as they are likely better seats. also, backstage passes if you are in the mood to introduce yourself to the boys. The tour manager knows you might stop by. have fun!

Despite my hopefully short term loss of a broad range of frequencies, it was great being the kings of rows G, H and I – before the show kids (I mean kids) were hanging over chairs asking how we got the backstage passes. Rather than explain a long time ago I knew a Guy from a Library in Halifax and he and I both became lawyers, he representing Sloan, I a little web company called silverorange and one day I figured there might be something in an introduction…I said “we do Sloan’s web page”. Our coolness spread into portions of row J and was so intensely felt by one guy that he jumped into the row behind us and told us that he had seen Sloan four times so far this year, that he was in Kingston from U. of A. in Calgary for a conference and then told us a bunch of stuff using words I really didn’t recognize but they were generally variants of cool. He was a fan.

We went backstage before and after, got a rock hug from Chris, talked about ear plugs with the grey Dads of the band and resisted the temptation to grab a beer and sandwich. Chatted about how I watched some of them in earlier incarnations Kearney Lake Road and Blackpool and felt like a dweeb later for being the needy guy but then not so bad as the Chris Murphy chickenburger vintage hoodie sparked a discussion of good stuff that included my 60’s St. Pats High sweatshirt. The show was loud, loud, loud in line with the volume of the new records, Action Pact. Lots of high kicks, roadie exchanges of guitars each of I wanted to lick (the guitars not the roadies) and a ten foot-high flashing strobing arc of tube lighting behind them the width of the stage that confirmed I am not epileptic. “Losing California” was very good. They switched instruments around for “Sensory Deprivation” with Chris on drums, Jay on bass which got very loose. They started to play with us making us shout “hey” on the back of a bo-diddly beat between songs and later all crouch down quiet in our seats until a certain point in the song when we all had to jump up at the perfect rock moment. It was a big loud sing-song.

I have pictures from Nate but I guess he doesn’t know the internet so well as he sent them all as 1,000 kb files which I have to figure out how to reduce. I guess he figured I wanted my signed forearm printed out as a poster – which I might yet do, now that I tihnk about it. Photos, then, later.

Once or twice before – over the six months of this blog – I have checked my referral logs and found some bot was looking at every link on my front page. Tonight the bot was this one.   I wonder what’s in their sphere of autonomy. I wonder anyone reads this after the scan and is it:

person: ming mao
nic-hdl: MM134-AP
e-mail: jinjin@cendata.net
address: Floor #3, Building A, ZhongGuanCun Sci-Tech
address: Development Mansion, South ZhongGuanCun Street
address: HaiDian district, Beijing 100081,China

Probably just the ISP guy.  Gam bey, Ming Mao.

Do you care if it is ever put behind him?  Funny thing for the CBC to worry enough about to include in the story. Will the girls be able to?