Canada – Page 9 – A Good Beer Blog

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.

It Is UnCanadian To Question Or Embarrass Your New Rural Overlords!

The whole bleat of the Government of One is getting tired, is it not? How is it that after the PMO botches a story and then botches it again, that the Opposition then commenting on the botch is a deed done wrong? Only the mind of Peter MacKay knows that:

Dion pointed out Friday that Defence Minister Peter Mackay was in Afghanistan when the policy on detainees changed. When questioned on the issue, MacKay refused to answer and criticized Dion instead. “What Mr. Dion is doing, if he wants to be irresponsible and talk about briefings that he received, that’s a decision for him. I am not going to put Canadian soldiers or the people that they’re there to protect in harm’s way by talking about operational details or what takes place in the theatre.”

So when the Tories let loose with the fact about where Opposition government leaders will be in a war zone before it happens, well, that is not bad. But to point out the foolishness of the PMO after it spills the beans? Now that is UnCanadian.

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

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

With 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.