Ontario: Two Evenings In Dark Bars In Toronto

 

Beer culture is is such a delicate and hopefully early state of development in Canada – even after all these years – that there are only a few places you hope to find an important work related training course so that when the bell rings and class gets out, well, you have something to do. I found a couple of spots the last few days that did the trick.

Feeling all very Ron, I got off the train last evening at around 9:00 pm and by one mere hour later had placed myself (after a little confusion from staff going off shift as to whether they were at work or not) at the upper room of the Queen and Beaver on Elm Street a half block away from the former site of Sam the Record Man. A sad testimony to the swath being cut through recorded music in Canada, the greatest record store in the land is but a hole in the ground now.

But I didn’t let it get me down. I have plenty of lps in the rec room to see me out. Instead, I planted myself in a wing chair and watched the second half of the MLS finals with a small group on a quiet Sunday night. At eight bucks a pint, it was not cheap but not insane either and when you can get a Denison’s weissbier as well as McAuslan oatmeal stout things are not all that bad. Service upstairs was far better than the apparent social intrusion I made on the empty first floor. The neat and tidy English soccer themed rec room feel was great after being stuck on the train for a few hours. We need a society for wing chair appreciation. A society with beer taps.

 

 

 

 

Tonight was a different matter as I walked up Yonge Street to hit the wonderful Cafe Volo. I met Troy Burtch of GCP’n’B there for supper. We got to chat with plenty of fine T.O. beer nerds as well as Ralph the owner and Michael Hancock of Denison’s Brewing. Blab-blab-blab. Chatter-chatter-chat. Bought Troy late wedding gifts in the form of a share of a bottle of Pannepot as well as another of Nostradamus. Should his good bride point out that the gift only went to one half of the happy couple, well, I can only plead that once I gave a wah-wah pedal as a wedding gift.

I had a County Durham Hop Addict which was very good as well as a Beau’s Gabba Gabba Heywhich was one wee notch gooderer and which got a solid three thumbs up from Michael. Five buck pints and the relaxed but seriously aware good beer atmosphere had the place hopping on a Monday night. Ralph was in the cellar beating on the casks at one point, the next telling us about his travels to Italy, then talking about how he was heading back to England for more training before he rolls out his own micro brewing on site. It was the place to be for good beer that night – busy when I wanted busy as much as the night before was quiet when I was whacked.

These moments are few. I don’t get out much so I am that much more tickled when they turn out to be just what I needed..

Hi-Jinx And Fun Times In Canada’s Parliament

I had a sense that there was the word going out this week to raise little bubbles of discredit of the legislative process when young Tory Stephen Taylor¹ put out the message “did you know that 15 minutes in the House of Commons costs the taxpayer $75,000?” Makes sense. Dad’s out of town. Juniors have to be kept in line. With performances like these, well, he may be right:

“Yesterday the government could not tell us why it erected an expensive sign in Gatineau to advertise the installation of another sign,” Nova Scotia MP Mike Savage said. “In Yellowknife, another Conservative sign has been bought to advertise the installation of ‘interior-exterior signs.’ Signs, signs, everywhere a sign.” Mr. Savage wanted to know why the government is spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars on signs when more and more Canadians are using food banks. Transport Minister Baird characterized these signs as “signs of hope”, and signs of opportunity.

You get used to this stuff when it continues for long enough. But it grates and it wears. Look to the voice of reason when it can be heard, like that of Canada’s favorite alt-country politician, Chuck Angus, who spoke out against Twitter in committee on Tuesday:

Mr. Speaker, I am sorry, but this is not a clown show. We are elected to represent our people. We go to committee to do serious business. I believe the issue of members sitting on committee with their inane Twitters about what happens at committee demeans the work of all parliamentarians. I am not going to speak on this party or that party. We have an obligation to represent the best of our country and I would like members of Parliament to put the inane little games away and get down to business of serving their constituents.

Now that’s public speaking. He was building upon his rebuke of the Liberals on Monday:

Mr. Speaker, I always listen with great interest to my hon. colleague, but I think we need to back up a little to see where the Liberal Party has been. When it came to siding with the Conservatives on stripping pay equity for women, the Liberal Party stood and supported that. When it came to stripping basic environmental protection on Canada’s river ways, the Liberal Party stood with the Conservative Party and supported that. When it came to stripping the fundamental obligations on Kyoto, the Liberal party went along with that. The Liberal Party always looks through the prism, not of a national vision but of how to get back to power. Now we have a situation where the Liberal leader, perhaps he was seeking employment benefits himself, suddenly announced that the Liberals would oppose everything from here on in. The Liberals are opposing changes to EI, which would help unemployed workers. Many in my riding have asked me about supporting it, but the Liberal Party does not support that. The bigger issue is getting the visitor from Harvard elected. Now the Liberals are refusing to support the home renovation tax credit, even though it is out there, because the visitor from Harvard sees this as a path to getting to power. The Liberals have supported the government on everything that is wrong. When it finally has done one or two things right, the Liberals oppose it. I cannot understand their hypocrisy on this.

Now, that’s the voice of someone who is taking the business of the business of the nation seriously. Far clearer and finer a voice than, sadly, we had to put up with from Defense Minister Elmersson MacKay whose idea of oratory is “Mr. Speaker, I think we all know here in the House who is doing the huffing and puffing and hyperventilating and pontificating. It is the member opposite.” Sounds like one of those out guys on the Muppets complaining form the balcony, Statler and Waldorf. Another gem from the man who cursed the language with his personal invention, unCanadian.

¹You know, the…err… blogger who gets to speak “with a senior staffer in the Prime Minister’s Office and another staffer at Public Works” to put together a blog post. As fine a gentleman as ever you will meet. Just hi-jinxy methinks from time to time.

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Now I Want The Toque Of My Dreams…

I rarely remember dreams and if I do they are boring. But this morning I woke up laughing. I was at a 20th anniversary of something and my pal Chicken was there holding the hand of a chubby four year old who was packed into winter boots and a ski-doo suit. He starts laughing at me because I am wearing a pale lavender toque with a really over sized patch on it. The patch is slightly irregular. It has dark edging and a white background with some pale spacey stars and space clouds with a black head and shoulders silhouette of a cat eyed round headed spaceman. Now I want that hat.

Chicken’s Dad laughed at it, too, saying it was the stupidest hat he had ever seen. No wonder I don’t try to remember the dreams before they fade away.

New York: Pumking, Southern Tier, Lakewood

I hoard Christmas ales. Buying more than I open every year, building a surplus of aging 10% Yuletide bombs that I dip into after time does its job. Halloween beer? Not so much. There is something about Halloween that is less wistfully recalled, less of a build up and gone when it is done. Who plans for the pumpkin time?

The beer pours an orange amber with a whips of white froth and rim. On the nose there is a hearkening of clean barn from the malt and pumpkin flesh, the smell of carving the great damn gourd outside. It’s quite overwhelming of graham cracker, nutmeg, allspice and booze. In the mouth, there is more of that thick with cream. Rich. Rich enough to put you off but then it doesn’t cloy, its works its way in and then you wonder how it would age.

Plenty of BAer love.

England: Coffee Porter, Meantime, London

I must have picked this up at Finger Lake Beverage last February. Lovely new web site. $3.50 USD with as cheery a small bottle as ever there was. Well, to be fair, the 375 ml cork top from Girardin is pretty damn fine but this is swell as well.

Gorgeous. Dark mahogany beer under a tan cream thick lacing head. Subdued nose with an oddly enhanced twigged hop statement over roast but a weird inversion occurs on the first sip. Excellent coffee meets a hint of double cream with dark chocolate wave followed by a nicely balanced mild astringency cutting it all ending in a very pleasant herbal stuff. All this in one wee bottle. Lovely.

BAers have the hots. And, best of all, Roland + Russell have announced that they are bringing the brewer’s stock to me, here in Ontario. It is all working out, this thing called life…

Big Easlakia Base Ball News Circa 1874

While I was over hobnobbing with the shaken and moved of the southern part of our Easlakian neighbo(u)rhood, I have actual stuff to do. Base ball stuff as I wanted to research the Watertown tournament of 1874 given that there were references to it in the Kingston papers of the time. I had thought that they went to play but in fact it appears that they went to watch as they are not listed as a team in the schedule.

Kingston’s rivals of the day, the Guelph Maple Leaf, win the event held in late June and early July over eight days before pop up here after for a game on 7 July 1874. But there are other notes that make it very curious:

  • There is a first and second class tournaments being played side by side making for a total of 14 teams. I do not know why you would have seven teams per class but there you have it.
  • Being or rather not being “daunted” meant something in the mid-1870s as there is a second class team called “The Undaunted” of La Fargeville, NY and another second class team called “The Dauntless of Watertown, NY. Careful readers will know that there was also a team called Dauntless of Ogdensburg, NY which the Kingston St. Lawrence played on Friday 8 August 1874 in Ogdensburg as well as the Dauntless Club of Toronto that Kingston played in 1872 and 1873 .
  • One team in the first class group was the Ku-Klux of Oneida, NY described as “the acknowledged champion club of Northern and Central New York” in the 29 June issue of the The Daily Times of Watertown. You will be comforted to know that the Maples Leaf of Guelph thumped them 13-4 and that the team was slagged in the paper as “the negro haters” who scored a “usual whitewash,” a “goose egg, ” a “cipher” and “skunked” in various innings.
  • Certain players of the Nassaus of Brooklyn, NY and some Eastons of Easton, Pennsylvania were reported in the 6 July issue as having taken a wagon to Sackets Harbor on Sunday 4 July and returning in quite a state: “It would have been proper if the whole crowd could have been unloaded at the jail.” They apparently were driven through Public Square as they sand “Mulligan Guards” and kindred songs.

Thrilling stuff. Need to do a little cross referencing but it looks like the Eastons of the 1870s may have been a rival to the Philadelphia Athletics which are now the Oakland A’s.

Big Easlakia Base Ball News Circa 1874

While I was over hobnobbing with the shaken and moved of the southern part of our Easlakian neighbo(u)rhood, I have actual stuff to do. Base ball stuff as I wanted to research the Watertown tournament of 1874 given that there were references to it in the Kingston papers of the time. I had thought that they went to play but in fact it appears that they went to watch as they are not listed as a team in the schedule.

Kingston’s rivals of the day, the Guelph Maple Leaf, win the event held in late June and early July over eight days before pop up here after for a game on 7 July 1874. But there are other notes that make it very curious:

  • There is a first and second class tournaments being played side by side making for a total of 14 teams. I do not know why you would have seven teams per class but there you have it.
  • Being or rather not being “daunted” meant something in the mid-1870s as there is a second class team called “The Undaunted” of La Fargeville, NY and another second class team called “The Dauntless of Watertown, NY. Careful readers will know that there was also a team called Dauntless of Ogdensburg, NY which the Kingston St. Lawrence played on Friday 8 August 1874 in Ogdensburg as well as the Dauntless Club of Toronto that Kingston played in 1872 and 1873 .
  • One team in the first class group was the Ku-Klux of Oneida, NY described as “the acknowledged champion club of Northern and Central New York” in the 29 June issue of the The Daily Times of Watertown. You will be comforted to know that the Maples Leaf of Guelph thumped them 13-4 and that the team was slagged in the paper as “the negro haters” who scored a “usual whitewash,” a “goose egg, ” a “cipher” and “skunked” in various innings.
  • Certain players of the Nassaus of Brooklyn, NY and some Eastons of Easton, Pennsylvania were reported in the 6 July issue as having taken a wagon to Sackets Harbor on Sunday 4 July and returning in quite a state: “It would have been proper if the whole crowd could have been unloaded at the jail.” They apparently were driven through Public Square as they sand “Mulligan Guards” and kindred songs.

Thrilling stuff. Need to do a little cross referencing but it looks like the Eastons of the 1870s may have been a rival to the Philadelphia Athletics which are now the Oakland A’s.

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The Last Time Someone Else Won, They Were Whigs

That was the line of the night. Apparently, the last time portions of New York state’s 23rd district of the US Congress were not represented by Republicans, they were represented by Whigs. It was the equivalent of a by-election for the House of Commons. But it had a very different feel. While party affiliation is huge here, so is personal contact as well as local issues that might, in Canada, be handled by someone else. So, in the bar I was invited to attend, local candidates for positions like municipal clerk were applauded in victory or supported in sad defeat by others with far grander titles and offices. I talked with union leaders, insurgent college kids from other states here to get the vote out as well as a very genial county court criminal judge who was elected to a second ten year term in a landslide.

The big news was the Congressional win for the Democrats. But the story for me was how this had the look of a church supper in a way, with local people of all sorts doing what they could to try to play a role in improving their community. Sounds smarmy but when you are chatting with a member of the New York State legislature bouncing he newborn as you hold the corner with the good cold cuts tray, it sorta has that feeling. Follow the results on NCPR and WDT.

Excuse Me… But Are You The Man From Prague?

I got myself invited over the border for tomorrow night to witness the special election for the 23rd New York Congressional District… well, to witness the election night party actually. It was a tale of a three way race until the left-wing Republican dropped out Saturday and then on Sunday threw her support behind the right-wing Democrat all in an effort to keep out the “conservative” Independent who was first rejected by the Republicans but may now have to be reckoned with:

Her position in New York’s Republican Party seems in doubt: The state party chairman, Edward F. Cox, condemned Ms. Scozzafava’s move. “Dede Scozzafava’s endorsement today represents a betrayal of the people of the North Country and the people of her party,” Mr. Cox said, referring to the state’s northern reaches. Ms. Scozzafava had been under siege from conservative leaders because she supports gay rights and abortion rights and was considered too liberal on various fiscal issues. Democrats appeared emboldened by the endorsement, but the outcome of the race in this Republican-leaning district remains unpredictable. Neither candidate is taking anything for granted.

Why do I care? Well, frankly, as I am locally sworn to be a neutral voice in my professional calling it is a conduit to engage my unnatural interest in elections. Plus, I just find northern New York culture fascinating – so similar to and well aware of their Canadian neighbours but also so different, sitting in a construct of governance which is utterly alien constitutionally. You know, I only learned this morning from my cousin in Boston as well as a US soldier in Afghanistan (Facebook is weird somedays) that in the US to give out a bag of chips on Halloween is an insult. Then, you know, its an hour away so why not and, finally, I have to do some vintage baseball research on that big 1874 Watertown tournament not to mention good beer needs to be bought and am combining interests.

But what is my plan? I only learned yesterday that this story is now attracting the international press. Maybe I will get interviewed by the Czech press for the Canadian position. What would I say?

Friday Bullets For The Fall Membership Drive

Membership drive? Not for around here. That didn’t work out well. No, it’s the week that the incessant drone in my head called NCPR asks for your support… and you should answer the call. I feel badly for not going over to answer phones this week and not just because sometimes there is beer.

Friday is upon us. The best day of the work week. I have meetings but they are good meeting, thanks for asking.

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