A Good Beer Blog

While at Sam the Record Man on Yonge, I picked up a couple of magazines. I found a copy of Arsenal: The Official Magazine which is to When Saturday Comes what a 1979 issue of Teen Beat was to that year’s Rolling Stone. Ashley Cole and David Cassidy are both dreamy but I want a bit more than glossy pictures and bland positives.

The Walrus on the other hand, is a good read. A new literate current affairs type magazine – edited out of Toronto, printed out of Winnipeg – for starters it is 4 bucks cheaper than the $9.95 I wasted on A.:T.O.M. Despite the need to have an article by Margaret Atwood – one presumes they might have a mumbling loser Gordie Lightfoot song as their anthem – it has had some good luck getting actual topical essay writers Douglas Coupland and Lewis Lapham to provide for the first issue. Pegs actually just provides some book reviews so it is not too needy a move. [She does, though, write some odd sentences like her first few:

The literary map is like the geological one: It’s three-dimensional. Mountains are leveled, rifts open, volcanoes suddenly appear where before there were none. Not so long ago, books by émigrés from the Soviet Union or its satellites were almost guaranteed a hearing in the West. Now, ever since 9/11, a catastophe that is a ready a logo, the publishing hot spot has shifted to another incandescent region, the Middle East.

Now I am definitely stupider than Margaret Atwood and have been marked as a bad speller since grade three, but why is the “i” in “It’s” capitalized? Why is the word “geological” used – three-dimensional maps are topographical, not geological. The change in the tastes of publishing described is a swift change but geological shifts are very slow. And why “logo” with all the implications of the branding of falsehood Naomi Klien has brought to the word. Whatever 9/11 has become culturally, for whatever cause its remembrance is misused, the qualities of the event itself are not to the misuse what fast food is to the golden arch.]

Anyway, Atwood aside, The Walrus reminds me of the now longishly departed The Idler (which hung on until last year in its pub form) – but also more Harpers rather than, say, The New Yorker – with photo essays, topics chosen from throughout North American – including Canadian – and global current events and popular culture…and nice cartoons and incidental drawing. Next issue has Stephen Lewis writing about a truly great Canadian Romeo Dellaire, who led the shamefully unsupported UN protection force in Rwanda and who went a ways towards madness afterwards knowing what he saw and what could have been done. I already want to read that.

Had a very good 36 hours:

• For the first time I spoke on privacy law to a group (about 400 senior provincial and MUSH officials) who actually got it.  At the MacDonald block of Queen’s Park down the hall from the Mines and Mineral Information Centre.  I got to publicly disagree with new Federal Privacy Commissioner on the scope of his powers (I was right but 4 hours later) and was asked to speak again to a couple of Canadian Bar Association and provincial government working groups. I hope they actually work. Sounds like they do. [“Working groups” can mean people who do not want the “pointlessness” stigma of “committee” or, on the other hand, it can mean the people involved don’t want to imply they are going to produce what a committee might be exected to produce.]
• Tories whumped. In our riding about 3000 voted Green so I was not alone. If, say, 60,000 of the 78,000 or so who could vote did vote, that is 5% for the good.
• Got bumped at the hotel. Book by web but the fine print was smoking. Always protest being given smoking. We got the Royal suite at the Fredericton Sheraton once. Literally the Royal suite. Two basketball courts large, dining table for 12 and a kitchen.
• Got to walk up and down Yonge Street. There are some incredibly beautiful old buildings still among the towers, especially north of Queen Street. One empty stone bank, which only as as a sign Queen and Yonge branch, has a foot print of maybe 40 by 80 feet but has elegant columns and a dome. It faces the Eaton Centre.
• Got to go to Sams. Sams on Yonge must be the last big record shop in Canada. I walk down one aisle and pick up handfuls. Bought an XTC singles CD 1977 to 1992 for Ian as well as best of Yaz, a Waif’s album, two third-gen ska records and one by The Henrys called Puerto Angel from 1996. Ellen is now immediately in love with The Waifs, aussie folk, and I with the Henrys which I’d call Toronto folk-jazz. Mary Margaret O’Hara, today’s greatest singer in the history of time, flits around a tune or two.
• Had a Guiness at the Irish Embassy pub at 4 pm with TO guys in suits – ivory wall arched ceilings and dark oak wood panelling. Go. A block from Union Sation at Yonge and Front. The bartender was from Winnipeg and homebrewed. He said he visited PEI and went to the crappiest bar – the Gahan House (“the beer all sucked” – but we agreed the cholocate stout was acceptable) but his hopes were was entirely redeemed by visiting a hole in the wall called The Harp and Thistle for curry and Guiness. Had to laugh.
• Best of all, I chose to VIA 1 it back home to get somehing to eat and drink and sat next to a guy who turned out to be in grade 9 with me at West Kings in the Annapolis Valley.

All good. Thanks for reading reruns while I was away.

Off to the Big Smoke this evening for to speak at a workshop tomorrow on PIPEDA as part of this conference.  Taking the train.  Maybe I’ll find a Tory election night party for some free drinkings and weepies.

With the power coming on in Halifax and the rest of Nova Scotia bit by bit some photos are getting out now. There is a good set from the Waterfront and the Queen, South and Inglis Streets areas here which I found through a bluenoser in Winnipeg.

Except for maybe the Federal election in 1997, I don’t vote for winners. I’ve usually voted NDP but have voted Green and even for the almost upset for Hec Clouthier (MP 1997-2000) as Independent Liberal in, what, 1993 or so. I think I said to “No” to the 1992 Charlottetown Accord, a constitutional referendum.  Can’t recall why but I was with the majority there – probably just could not bear voting with Mulroney.

A month after the call, with everyone seemingly on the throw-the-bums-out bandwagon, this is a perfect opportunity in this Ontario provincial election to avoid the mass migration to the not-so-worst-choice Liberals and give some wing-nut false hope. Sadly, the only wack-job running here is from the Family Coalition Party which, although its a nice churchy bunch, believe that the country was founded on Christian principles and not by graft, corruption, monopoly, booze and patronage. Plus they don’t like gay marriage. They’ll burn in Hell for that even if they don’t know it – Satan works that way, you see.

That leaves NDP or Green: high school teachers v. university professors, strike sign wavers v. tree hugging road blockers, draft jug drinkers v. real ale drinkers, steel workers v. frankenfood warners. Leaning Green. Like others. No chance of NDP win here and they’ll do OK over all anyway after it was thought Hampton won the debate [despite my initial reaction.] Too bad some of these parties didn’t run here – where the same guy is leader, president and sole candidate and he believes one other leftie guy from the 19th or 20th century had it all right and everyone one else on the planet is wrong, wrong, wrong. That’s my style. Or this is.

I hope you all paid strict attention to the Scots pagan requirements of last evening’s ringing in of the New Year. These are a few of my grannie’s requirements:

• replace all salt in the house,
• change all bed sheets,
• rotate all clocks forward 12 hours
• kick the tallest darkest haired man out of the house before midnight and have him return with gifts immediately after midnight,
• keep going until you drop – my grandfather fell asleep at a tee off on the 4th of January or so many years ago

Oh, yea, one more thing – don’t forget to burn something big.

You would have noticed I was down. My servers sit happily on PEI where hurricane Juan tore through last night knocking out electricity. I am in Ontario, 1500 km to the west. If you click on my favoured bloggers to your right (my left) you will find some other bloggers there getting up over the afternoon – Kevo is already up but as he runs the ISP there (where my web email sits) you would expect he’d be first.

My folks in Rusticoville said it was like a truck hitting the cottage constantly for 2 hours at the worst of it. Lots of trees down and there is a ship in trouble off Anticosti Island in the Gulf. It is also election day. Halifax got hit with even stronger winds up to 150 km per hour. I do not know the name the sailing ship which is shown here sunk at its wharf. On CBC’s Maritime Noon, I heard tales of trees older than 200 years being ripped apart and many of those at the Public Gardens being badly damaged. I am waiting for Mike Campbell’s blog to get up and updated to read his prespective from inside the city.

Big ups or props or… whatever the young folk are saying these days…to silverorange for getting this up so fast care of the hunking Honda generator. Gas powered inter-provincial blogging in addition to awards for usability. Lots of pictures from Charlottetown here. Here is another Juan related graphic for the hurricane nerds out there: