Since I seem to be one of the few living, literate humans who hasn’t read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy, I decided to at least watch the movies. We watched the first two movies this weekend. The first one, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was really good. The second, The Girl Who Played With Fire (imdb | rotten tomatoes) was just okay.
An excellent beer night
He said, as if there was another kind.
Two good pieces of news from Troy Burtch’s excellent beer blog: first, that the Ontario Craft Brewers have released an iPhone app (which I have dutifully downloaded to the wife’s device) telling me where I can find tasty local beer. Second, that the LCBO will soon be carrying Dieu Du Ciel Solstice D’Hiver (which is on my Project FiftyBrew list) and the Traquair Jacobite Ale, which I lurved when I first had it back in September.
Meanwhile, as I type this, I’m drinking a Creemore Springs urBock, taking me up to 35/50 on Project FiftyBrew. It may come to pass that I take care of #s 36 and 37 tonight as well if the Canadiens keep playing the way they have been tonight…
[UPDATE] Yeah, I drank #36: Garrison Imperial IPA.
[UPDATE Nov 4] Yeah, I drank #37 too: Dieu Du Ciel Rigor Mortis.
Le party
Last night we hosted a little dinner party for CBGB and the Kelly Gang. Good fun and great company all around, but I was so impressed with the meal Nellie whipped up that I had to record it here for posterity. We tried hard to make it a very Ontario-based meal, and with only a few exceptions, we managed that.
.:.
Drinks
Wine (Fielding 2009 White Conception, Union Red)
Beer (Great Lakes Devil’s Pale Ale, Creemore urBock, Hockley Valley Dark)
Ice wine martinis (Grey Goose vodka, Lakeview Cellars vidal icewine)
Hors D’Oeuvres
La Quercia prosciutto
Crostini with chevre, honey and cracked pepper
Appetizer
Curried butternut squash soup with toasted coconut, scallions, cashews and pakoras
Daniel Lenko 2007 Old Vines Chardonnay
Hidden Bench 2007 Fumé Blanc
Main
Cumbrae’s pork loin stuffed with apple & caramelized onion
Sea-salt roasted potatoes, green beans and fennel
Norman Hardie 2008 County Pinot Noir
Norman Hardie 2008 Unfiltered Pinot Noir
Dessert
Ewenity sheep’s milk cheese: Beemster, Ermite, Parmesan and Brebette, served with honey, balsamic, red pepper jelly and apple cinnamon chardonnay jelly
Green & Black’s organic dark chocolate
Raincoast crisps
Daniel Lenko 2002 Vidal Icewine
Macallan 15-year-old Fine Oak aged single malt whisky
.:.
And now…we clean up.
"Here's to you, 1998 amalgamation!"
From Torontoist’s typically excellent visual summary of how Toronto voted for mayor, by ward:
Also, this more nuanced version:
You’ll notice that the actual city of Toronto voted Smitherman, while the suburbs of Etobicoke, North York and Scarborough all voted Ford. You’ll also notice that the purple area in the first map pretty much overlays with the subway lines.
While it’s not really sensible to blame the election result entirely on amalgamation, it’s fun to try. The subject of this post, “Here’s to you, 1998 amalgamation” is taken from the comment section of the Torontoist article. It made me laugh and made me angry all at once.
Bloody hell
- Rob Ford: 47.1%
- George Smitherman: 35.6%
- Joe Pantalone: 11.7%
This is also how I felt on the 8 Nov 2000. Rob Ford may be far less powerful than George Bush was, but he’s much closer to home.
Calgary had their election a week before Toronto. One of those cities elected a progressive young Muslim, the son of an immigrant, to be mayor. The other elected a fiscally & socially conservative white guy from the burbs. It’s like we got each other’s leaders.
Yankee swap anybody?!
The lesser of 2.5 evils
Last year I pointed to the relationship between an Economist blog comment and a five-year-old clip from Real Time with Bill Maher. Specifically I pointed to the need for a third political choice and the general unhealthiness of reducing complex political acts to a binary Coke-vs-Pepsi race. I didn’t get into the whole moral complication of wanting to vote for a third choice (like Ralph Nader, in the 2004 example) but feeling the need to vote ‘strategically’ to keep the worst option from winning. I’ve never believed in voting that way; you should vote for who you think will do the best job.
However: I simply cannot have Peter Griffin running my city.
I want to vote for Joe Pantalone, I do. I don’t buy all the wailing about him continuing the horrible legacy of David Miller, mainly because I don’t think David Miller was a bad mayor. I see George Smitherman as benign and centrist, but I’ll gladly take inertia over the notion of regressing for the next three years.
Just think back. Nobody in America was excited at the idea of Al Gore being president, but look at where the other guy got them. And while they may have voted with their hearts, the Nader supporters inadvertently reaped a simple-minded whirlwind.
Tonight after work I’ll hold my nose and vote, and then go home for a stiff drink while watching the news.
2/3
I have now reached #34 out of 50 on the Project FiftyBrew list, after drinking a Dieu Du Ciel Équinoxe Du Printemps and a Tree Hophead IPA last weekend, and a Wellington County Ale just now.
I’m definitely going to hit a wall soon though. Volo has another four on the list, the LCBO has two more and there’s one (the Garrison Imperial IPA) in my fridge, but after that…it gets sketchy. Two are Dieu du Ciel beers that I never see anywhere and five more are Unibroue that are rarely if ever in Toronto. The other two are from Garrison (no problem, I’m on the east coast all the time) and the Wellington Imperial IPA, which I’m sure will rotate into local taps now that the weather’s turned cold. Both those seven from Quebec could be problematic.
Road trip to Montreal, anyone?
Voting with my wallet
Back in August I had one of the most frustrating customer experiences of my life. I won’t get into the great gory details, but suffice it to say Rogers really, really pissed me off. I told the unhelpful phone rep who spoke to me that I’d be canceling my (rather substantial) cable services in protest. He said he could do nothing. The folks manning Rogers’ Twitter account tried to help, and did solve one of the problems, but not enough to save my business. My white-hot rage had cooled to regular old anger, but I wasn’t staying with them after how they treated me. A few weeks ago I finally pulled the trigger.
So, as I sit here typing this, I’m watching the Montreal game in the corner of my monitor, piped through Bell’s new Fibe TV. Nellie’s in the other room playing with the new PVR, which uses the same interface as Windows Media Center. It’s all pretty slick and it looks great, so…so far so good. Meanwhile, I’ve just called Rogers and explained to them that I’m canceling my service…this agent seemed horrified that I’m leaving after thirteen years with Rogers, especially when I pointed her to the history of that conversation in their CRM system.
Of course, even though they’ll shut off my service in 72 hours, they’re still going to charge me for a full 30 days. Just because they’re douches. And so, one final time: eat a dick, Rogers.
"Did I adequately answer your condescending question?"
Yesterday we visited a movie theatre for the first time in three months (TIFF screenings notwithstanding) to see The Social Network (imdb | rotten tomatoes). Since I first heard about the film I’d been torn: the subject matter seemed ridiculous, but the team working on it — David Fincher directing, Aaron Sorkin adapting the screenplay, Trent Reznor scoring, Jesse Eisenberg playing Mark Zuckerberg — was an all-star lineup. So when early reviews came back extremely positive I was excited, but still a pit perplexed as to what I’d be watching.
I needn’t have worried though. The movie owned me from the first scene, with dialogue written in the same smart, rapid-fire manner that got me hooked on Sports Night and The West Wing, with the White Stripes‘ “Ball and a Biscuit” playing in the background. Fincher briefly took over with his shot of Eisenberg running through the Harvard campus, which was probably CGI but gave that feeling of supernatural realness that Fincher perfected with Zodiac, but generally just stayed out the way of the script. Reznor added some perfect color to a few scenes (the bar in New York where they meet Sean Parker) but, again, didn’t overwhelm the film.
It did drag a bit toward the end (I could have done with a little less Winklevii) but I was still liked it a lot. I don’t know if I’ll buy it when it comes out, but I could probably watch the first hour over and over again.
20,000 words
In case anyone is interested in the pictures from our trip, they’re over here.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 