Author: Dan Dickinson

"Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me."

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Two days ago I finished reading Sebastien Junger‘s War (amazon | kobo), his recounting of the time he spent in the mountains of eastern Afghanistan embedded with a single platoon. For those two days I have not been able to stop thinking about the book, and the men.

Second platoon are described in the book as “the tip of the spear. They’re the main effort for the company, and the company is the main effort for the battalion, and the battalion is the main effort for the brigade.” They occupy serious, dangerous ground, with soldiers living rough in little more than sandbags and temporary walls dug into hillsides, constantly fighting the Taliban for control of a remote valley.

I won’t get into much more detail than that. But the fact that I burned through 268 pages in a week (and it’s not like I can usually find much time to read for fun) and can’t stop imagining this place I’ve never seen should tell you how compelling it is. I’m desperate to watch Restrepo (imdb | rotten tomatoes), a documentary by Junger and photographer Tim Heatherington about their time with second platoon and one of the top-rated movies of last year, so that I can put faces to names.

Encore

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Signs of spring: birds singing. Snow melting. Taxes. Maple syrup. Flowers blooming. Bruins/Habs.

Tomorrow night Montreal will face Boston in the playoffs for the fifth time in ten years. True, that’s not quite as frequent as in the years before the 1993 shift to conference vs. divisional playoffs, when they met each other in the playoffs nine straight years. But this year has a little extra zing, thanks to Zdeno Chara’s attempted decapitation of Max Pacioretty last month.

I don’t see Montreal trying to go after the Bruins physically. First, they can’t. Second, if physical retaliation were their plan they would have tried it during their final meeting of the season, in which Boston demolished them 7-0. No, the Canadiens’ only intended revenge would be to knock off the third-seeded Bruins. But I don’t see how they can do it. Boston is too big, too strong, too fast. Montreal has been without their two best defensemen, Andrei Markov and Josh Gorges, for the better part of the year. Montreal’s only star player is Carey Price, but Boston goalie Tim Thomas is also one of the best in the league on many nights.

If Price steals a few wins, Thomas gets rattled, Boston’s scorers dry up and Montreal gets a second straight heroic playoff from guys like Mike Cammalleri, Brian Gionta and P.K. Subban, then maybe they’ll pull off the upset.

If, if, if. Go Habs go.

PBR…actually not as terrible as I'd been led to believe

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It has been a weekend of decadent eating and drinking. Unlike, you know, every other weekend.

Friday night we joined M2 and H2 for dinner at their sweet loft. On top of the barbecued steaks Mike had a theme in mind: beer judging. He’d procured 14 interesting beers and two “mystery brews”, and we were each expected to rate all sixteen.

As it turned out we only got through twelve, eleven of which are pictured here. The two mystery selections were Pabst Blue Ribbon and Labatt Blue, placed there to keep us on our toes. The top-rated beer of the night was the Sam Adams / Weihenstephan Infinium…very tasty indeed. I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed having my face licked by their dog, Murphy. I miss having a dog.

Ahem. Anyway.

Saturday was a blur of errands, lunch at La Bettola, penance at the gym (another 5k after being idle for two weeks) and prepping for the arrival of CBGB and the Kelly Gang. They popped over to ours for drinks (Denison’s Weissbeer, Neustadt 10W30, Great Lakes Orange Peel Ale and Erdinger Dunkel for the gents; ice wine martinis for the ladies; a bottle of 2007 Closson Chase S. Kocsis Chardonnay all around) before dinner at Harlem to celebrate Lisa’s birthday. There was a great deal of fried chicken and catfish lafayette consumed, among other things, and we all came back to our place for more drinks (bottles of Stratus Cab Franc, Nyarai Veritas and Strewn Cab Sauv) before they made their way back to their respective broods.

Not surprisingly, today was a sleep-in day. Nellie’s been watching hours of crap TV while I take care of the details of our upcoming trips. Apart from the few hours of work I’ll surely have to do this evening, it’s been an awfully good weekend.

"Few would have predicted it sixty years before, but the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe."

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I’ve done it.

I have finally, finally, finally finished Postwar (amazon | kobo) by Tony Judt, having started it…I don’t know, like a year ago. I must have read north of a half dozen other books during breaks from this one…not because it was bad — it’s actually an incredible book when you consider what it does — but because it was 831 pages of relatively dense historical perspective.

Length aside, there’s another reason why this feels like an accomplishment: in finishing it I also conclude my self-made 8-book series about WWI and WWII. I wanted to know more about the buildup and aftermath of each war, and having read these I feel like I do. These books, read (amongst many others) over the past four years, were:

  • The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman
  • A Short History of WWI by James Stokesbury
  • Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan
  • The Coming Of The Third Reich by Richard Evans
  • The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s by Piers Brendon
  • A Short History of WWII by James Stokesbury
  • A Writer At War: A Soviet Journalist with the Red Army, 1941-1945 by Vasily Grossman
  • Postwar by Tony Judt

If you find yourself curious about how exactly the Nazis were able to come to power, or why Europe and the Middle East were divided up as they were, or which army truly beat back Hitler’s armies, or any other aspect (at a high level, anyway) of the wars, I’d highly recommend any and all of these.

Frater!

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This past weekend was a rare treat: a brother visit. Brother #2 arrived Friday night and left Monday morning. In between we had dinner at Duggan’s and breakfast at Hank’s, visited St. Lawrence Market, enjoyed the lone spring-like day so far this year by visiting the Distillery district, watched some funny movies, had a long and sumptuous dinner at Fieramosca followed by ill-advised Trappist ales at Smokeless Joe, played a little Call of Duty: Black Ops and were generally lazy the rest of the time.

Happily this won’t be the only brother visit of the year. We’re visiting my family’s farm in July since brother #1 will be visiting from Australia, and then in the fall we’ll be visiting Australia for three weeks ourselves. Beaucoup de familial bonding, as they say.

Our string of harsh/depressing docs continues

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We have made our picks for the upcoming Hot Docs documentary festival:

  1. Better This World
  2. If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front
  3. The Bully Project
  4. How to Die in Oregon
  5. The Hollywood Complex

Just to recap, then, that’s:

  • domestic terrorism and government entrapment;
  • arson and (more) domestic terrorism;
  • bullying;
  • euthanasia;
  • fame-whoring of children.

La la la springtime happiness la la!

Better This World

Paese

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We tried a new restaurant last night: Paese. I’d heard good things about their Italian food with a Canadian influence (their tagline is “Inspired in Italy, Made in Canada”) and we decided to give it a whirl, bypassing the endless nondescript eateries lining King Street west of John.

The Canadian-Italian theme really came through, to good effect. Our scallops wrapped in pancetta were excellent; I had a glass of Tempranillo, while Nellie had a Canadian Chardonnay. Our mains were certainly Italian — margherita pizza for me, linguine with sausage and rapini for her — but our wine (an 07 Daniel Lenko Syrah) was oh so Canada.

We had no room for dessert, opting instead for a beer or three at Smokeless Joe, but the menu we looked at seemed enticing. I think we’ll be back; it’s one of the few decent options in that swatch of King West, along with Luna across the street in Festival Tower.

It's like spaghetti, except it's more square than round

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What a goddamn enjoyable day. No one stellar thing to trump all others, just a collection of goodness. Examples:

  • Eating rosemary/olive bread and cloth-bound cheddar and pineapple for breakfast, which sounds disgusting but was awesome.
  • Getting some work done. (Okay, so this isn’t particularly fun, but it feels good to get it out of the way and not have to go to the office.)
  • Listening to the new Elbow album, which is excellent, and the new PJ Harvey, which I hated at first but now cannot shake from my head.
  • Lunch at La Bettola di Terroni which, despite being right around the corner from us, we’d never tried. It was fantastic. I had the braised beef agnolotti in a sage brown butter sauce; Nellie had the chitarra pasta in a lemon cream sauce with sausage & truffles. We also helped the couple sitting next to us, in town from North Carolina, to find a place to spend the day (the Distillery District) and eat dinner (Origin).
  • Gathering supplies at a less-crowded-than-normal St. Lawrence Market, as well as two bottles of Flat Rock (Riesling, Pinot Noir) for this weekend’s meals.
  • Espresso. For which I have apparently developed a taste (need?).
  • Submitting 2010 taxes avec healthy return.
  • Running 4.5km and feeling pretty good doing it.
  • Eating a fairly tasty meal from Golden Thai (after we found out the even-closer Thai place, Ivory Thailand, had been replaced by a French bistro some 3 hours earlier) along with the afore-mentioned Riesling.
  • Watching many episodes of Sons of Anarchy (imdb).
  • Admiring the supermoon.
  • Booking a kick-ass campsite for this fall’s excursion.

In absentia

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My blog host had a little hiccup on Sunday, which means two things:

  1. Accented characters are displaying strangely right now. Not sure why just yet. Character code set something or other. Fix is coming forthwith; in the interim please don’t report me to the Ministry of Bilingualism.
  2. The post I’d written on Sunday about Sons of Anarchy has disappeared, as the hosting service went to last good backup, and I’ve spent more time fixing than writing, so it’s been — ye gods! — 10 days since my last blog post.

Have you heard about big red?

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It’s hard to believe that it’s only been ten months since our first trip to visit Niagara wineries. It was there that I started to learn about, and fall for, Ontario wine. Since then we’ve made another trip, as well as a run to Prince Edward County, and the majority of my LCBO purchases in these ten months have been from Ontario. It’s safe to say that I’m hooked.

On Friday a colleague (teasingly) mocked my love of Ontario wine. He claims to like bigger, fuller reds, and suggested Ontario wine was “fine if you like [makes disgusted face] Pinot Noir.” To which I say: phooey.

Listen up, kids: there is some excellent Ontario wine out there, some of which are substantial enough to be mistaken for Australian or Californian. Granted, a lot of them are pricey, but there are certainly affordable ones out there as well. Here are some suggestions for people who actually want to give it a try:

  • My favourite Ontario wine, and maybe my favourite wine overall: the Thirty Bench Cab Franc ($40). This wine also just won the top prize at Cuvée 2011, Ontario’s ‘wine oscars’. If $40 is a little rich for your blood, then the Thirty Bench Red blend ($24) carries quite a bit of the Cab Franc and is more accessible, and nearly as full-bodied.
  • If the Cab you want is not Franc, but Sauv, then Thirty Bench also does an excellent one of those for $40. However, biodynamic producer Southbrook also does a fantastic one in their Whimsy line ($35). Meanwhile, the Strewn Cab Sauv is just $20.
  • I was never a big fan of Syrah, but Southbrook’s bottles turned me around. Peppery, substantial, but still easy to drink…well worth the $25. If you’re looking to spend less, the Creekside Shiraz costs $16, rates a healthy 88 points and can be found in practically any LCBO.
  • The Tawse Meritage ($58) almost knocked me over when I tried it in their tasting room. A bottle of it is sitting in my cellar, waiting for a special occasion. For a lower-cost, equally-ass-kicking Meritage I really, really wish I could tell you to go buy the 07 Hidden Bench Terroir Caché ($35), but as far as I can tell it’s sold out. We’ve drunk two bottles of it to date, and — because we were greedy and opened it a few years too early — had to decant it for hours before drinking it. Now our final bottle is lying in wait for at least two more years, and I’m not sharing.
  • And yes, Ontario does have good Pinot Noir. And I like Pinot Noir. But I didn’t really like it until I tried the real — in my opinion — local champs of the grape: Le Clos Jordanne ($25-$75, depending on the vineyard) and Norman Hardie ($35-$39). Flat Rock does a great lower-cost bottle($20) too.
  • If you’re not particular about varietal and just want a serious red, I can recommend either the Stratus Red blend ($44) or the Chateau des Charmes Equuleus ($40). If that’s too rich, the Creekside Laura Red ($20) is a worthy substitute.

I’ve missed plenty, but hopefully that’s enough to convince a few people that there really are some great Ontario reds available at a variety of prices. Besides, drinking local never hurt anybody!