Month: March 2025

Yorkies

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Thursday evening I met up with old friends BC and CBJ at The York Club, where BC is a member. I’d never been — obviously, given my utter lack of poshness — but I’d had a look at their wine list and was intrigued.

It was great to catch up over a drink at the bar, dinner (short ribs all around, plus a 2007 Hidden Bench Terroir Caché), dessert (I eschewed the beignets and had a glass of beerenauslese instead), and a Highland Park by the fireplace.

No pictures of the wine bottle, for fear I’d get scolded by the staff. No phones in the dining room, you see…a rule which, I admit, I do not hate at all.

Cold Harbor

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I/we’ve been burning through a lot of TV so far this year (season 2 of Patriot, Tsunami: Race Against Time, Say Nothing, season 4 of Slow Horses, The Penguin, Zero Day, Vietnam: The War That Changed America, and season 1 of The Night Agent) but lately we’ve really found ourselves at the nexus of a bunch of big shows, specifically new seasons of Abbott Elementary, Mythic Quest, Yellowjackets, White Lotus, and Severance. Season 2 of Severance (imdb) wrapped up a couple nights ago, and has been the subject of much discussion in our home.

I have a little more patience for the show’s tendency to leave more loose threads than it ties up, but my patience is wearing thin. Hopefully it doesn’t take another three years to see what season 3 reveals.

Also: fuck yeah, Brienne of Tarth.

Yellowjackets and White Lotus should be wrapping up in the coming weeks, just in time for The Studio and the second season of The Last Of Us, so the blitz continues.

Kirstrisma

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It’d been a while since we hung out with Kirsten, so we met for dinner last night at Carisma. I’d gotten up early (3:45 EDT) to catch a flight home, and Lindsay wasn’t feeling well, so we thought it would be an early night. We ended up closing the joint, though.

Here’s what we had:

  • Appetizers
    • Burratina w/ shaved truffle
    • Carpaccio di Manzo
      • A Negroni; glasses of Gavi Di Gavi & Falanghina
  • Mains
    • Pasta del giorno: agnolotti stuffed w/ ricotta
    • Pappardelle w/ wild board ragu
      • Bottles of 2018 Antinori Pian Delle Vigne and Tolaini Valdisanti Toscana
  • Dessert
    • Affogato
    • Classic Italian cheesecake w/ strawberry compote
    • Warm molten chocolate w/ house-made chocolate gelato
      • Glasses of Vinsanto & Reccioto

Elbow mists

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I’m in Moncton this week. A&D drove over for dinner this evening, which was the perfect excuse to finally try Les Brumes du Coude. It’s a lovely casual vibe inside, and the food was wonderful. We shared everything (except that glass of Pineau).

  • round one
    • house ciabatta
    • fromage: Alfred le Fermier
  • round two
    • steak tartare, all dressed w/ rosemary crackers
    • fancy stuffed pie of mushy peas, house bacon, lettuce chiffonade, and Fundy scallops
    • seared salt cod fish cake, boiled market vegetables in salt pork broth
      • bottle of Pouilly-Fumé
  • dessert
    • Carmélita
      • Pineau des Charentes

“Game’s the same, just got more fierce.”

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Four years ago Lindsay wanted to start watching The Wire (imdb). We only made it an episode or two before she bailed. The time wasn’t right.

More recently I re-watched seasons one and two, but when Lindsay said she wanted to give it another go, I went back to the starting line with her. This time it stuck — we plowed through seasons one (cops), two (blue collar workers), and three (dealers); we’re most of the way through season four (schools).

This might be the first time I’ve watched season three and four since the first time in the mid/late-2000s. It’s as good as I remember. Better, even.

Of note: Clay Davis doesn’t say “Sheeeeeeeit” nearly as often as I remembered.

Clay Davis

51st and 49th

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It’s been fewer than six weeks since Trump was inaugurated and I haven’t written about it. I wouldn’t even know where to start. By the time I formulate a thought on something awful — not even the constant stream of embarrassing or enraging “flood the zone with shit” stuff, but truly destructive policy or comments — another awful thing has happened. It’s not that I have any particular insight, but back in the Dubya days (now a quaint period by comparison) the horror was at least infrequent enough to articulate my outrage. Now? No chance.

Being Canadian has meant we can mostly just gawp at this from afar and fight the occasional tarriff war. And until a week or so ago I would have said all the rhetoric about Canada becoming the 51st state was just posturing and bluster ahead of trade negotiations. But what he’s doing with to Ukraine makes me worried. I think his recent assertion that Ukraine simply needs to cede the land Russia occupied by force to end the war, thereby rewarding Russia’s aggression, is a pretext for his own ambitions. He sees countries which have something he wants — Canada, Greenland, Panama — and may well decide to invade and just take part of it; if there’s international pushback that he actually cares about, he’ll simply point to the scenario he’s about to force with Russia/Ukraine and say, “See? It’s fine. I’m only doing that.”

It’s been two centuries since the war of 1812, and 150 years since any sizeable Canada-US conflict at all. The world’s longest undefended border has had a good run, but that run might be coming to an end.