Robert Redford died this week. To be honest, I wouldn’t have guessed he was 89. It struck me when I thought back about his movies how much they were part of my life, but maybe not the ones you’d think.
I never saw Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Never saw Jeremiah Johnson or The Candidate. Never saw The Way We Were or Barefoot In The Park or The Sting or The Natural (except the scenes any sports fan has seen) or Out Of Africa or A River Runs Through It or The Horse Whisperer or Ordinary People, his directorial debut for which he won so many awards.
Of the ones I have watched, many of which were lesser-known, I’m watched them A LOT. I watched Three Days Of The Condor a bunch as a teenager (and since) because my parents had it on VHS. I’ve watched All The President’s Men, Sneakers (another Dickinson household favourite growing up), Spy Game, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier more times than I can count. I watch Quiz Show, which he directed, probably twice a year.
It also JUST occurred to me as I was going through his IMDb listing that both his character in Sneakers and Brad Pitt’s character in Spy Game were named Bishop. Just now, despite having watched them dozens of times. Anyway.
Maybe I think fondly of him in these movies because he’s not really a sex symbol in any of them, except maybe Condor. He’s Bob Woodward. He’s an aging security consultant. He’s an underestimated spy. He’s a scheming bureaucrat. He’s funny. He’s charismatic. He was principled and he let his politics (which I agreed with, as far as I know) and environmentalism come through in his movies.
He was a talent, and he was a beauty, and he was a character, and he stood for something. There won’t be many more like him.
Part of Lindsay’s birthday present to me this year was tickets to see Wet Leg at History last night.
First, though: something to eat. We tried Rorschach, but the wait was far too long, so we just started walking. We ended up walking all the way to Godspeed, put ourselves on the waitlist, and finally got seated around 8. We knew we’d miss the opening act, and at this point knew we had to hustle to get there before Wet Leg went on. We had a pretzel and some sausages and duck fat fries and a couple beers (not warm, or in a pack) and made our way down Coxwell. We got there just in time to find a couple spots at…well, at the back.
All in all: great show. I like their albums, but the songs were almost all better live. They played 19 of ’em (which is ~80% of their entire catalogue) but bookended the biggest bangers: crazy strobes and “catch these fists” to open, and then “Chaise Longue”, “mangetout”, and “CPR” to finish. Rhian Teasdale had everyone eating out of her hand all night — that line in the chorus of “mangetout” seems like less a boast and more like an acknowledgment of fact — while Hester Chambers just exuded cool from the back of the stage.
No encore, which I love and respect. Just that big 1-2-3 combination, and they disappeared into a blanket of white light. Primo show.
Back in July WineAlign (to which I subscribe, and have for years) posted the results of the National Wine Awards of Canada. Each day they posted the bottles of one or more varieties which had been awarded Bronze, Silver, Gold (usually), and Platinum (rarely). A bunch of textual information leaking out daily is a hard way to spot any trends, so I did what anyone who loves both wine and spreadsheets would: I loaded it all into Google Sheets.
First, a few notes on how I handled the data:
The ‘score’ metric I refer to below is my calculation and not WineAlign’s. For each wine I assigned a score of 1 for a bronze, 2 for a silver, 3 for a gold, and 5 for a platinum.
I excluded mead, cider, and fruit wine.
They don’t publish how many of each wine type are submitted, just how many win awards, so I can’t determine any kind of efficiency metric per winery or region.
What I noticed:
No surprise: BC and Ontario dominate. BC wines were awarded 432 times, Ontario 423, confirming their position as the premier wine provinces in the country. But Nova Scotia won 15 and Quebec won 13, including in some vinifera categories, which is promising. Plenty of wineries in emerging regions (especially in BC) won awards too, not just the couple biggest in each province.
The same grapes tend to do well nationwide. BC’s top types were Pinot Noir, Red Blends, Chardonnay, Syrah/Shiraz, and Riesling. Ontario’s tops were Chardonnay, Sparkling, Red Blends, Riesling, and Pinot Noir. Sparkling was actually the 6th-most-awarded BC wine too, so apart from Syrah doing well in BC (natch) the most-awarded wines were just about the same. Quebec and Nova Scotia each had Chards and Rieslings awarded as well.
The benches show their strength. For the two largest regions (Niagara, Okanagan) where appellation was sometimes listed on the wine, a few stood out. In BC, the Naramata Bench had nearly 3x the number of winners as Okanagan Falls, the next closest. Meanwhile, in Niagara, the Beamsville Bench had the most awards.
Inniskillin? Inniskillin! When I calculated the total (not average) score by winery, the highest score went to…Inniskillin. I kind of love this; in my two years working at Arterra I told whoever would listen that Inniskillin was our secret weapon, considering most people only know them for icewine. Granted, most of their wines were awarded silver or bronze, but they produced Sauvignon Blanc, Merlot, and Cab Franc which garnered gold, plus a Platinum icewine, so…go check them out.
OK, fine, Mission Hill. Mission Hill had the highest average score among their awarded wines, according to my calculation…which, again, is mine; I don’t know how WineAlign did it. But there must have been something similar in our calculations, since they awarded Mission Hill Winery of the Year.
Platinums. Thirty wines were awarded platinum, across 24 wineries. Six wineries had two platinum wines each: 1 Mill Road, Laughing Stock, Meyer, Mission Hill, SpearHead, and Trius. Seven different kinds of wine were awarded platinum; I will say, I’m shocked that not one Ontario Pinot or Chard was awarded platinum.
I was in Moncton earlier this week for the first time since early June. It felt weird to go so long between visits, considering I was going once or twice per month for the first ~20 months of the new job. No new dinner venues whilst there, but the weather was so gorgeous that after work one day I walked down to Happy Craft Brewing in search of a patio seat. It’s a tricky thing, that: I want to be outside, but I don’t want to be in direct sun. Luckily, the sun had dipped behind the building in such a way that some brand new shade presented itself, and I grabbed it. I drank a tropical sour and a NE IPA and enjoyed the moderate warmth. The patio was full of people playing board games, munching on popcorn, chatting and laughing. Next to me was a table of guys, one of whom was playing Jenga with his young son while trying to help his friend track down mental health resources. It was kind of beautiful, in no small part because I can’t imagine that happening in a Moncton pub not very long ago.
Back in Toronto, Lindsay and I also tried a new (to us) place while doing errands this afternoon: Hastings Snack Bar. She had a few pierogies; I ate an absolutely killer pork schnitzel sandwich. We sat outside under a spreading tree and drank Wellington SPAs and thought to ourselves, why have we never come here before? I mean, sure, we were eventually chased away by hornets, but that’s hardly HSB’s fault.
I like retronyms. Not quite as much as I like a good portmanteau, but they’re still pretty interesting. It’s been fun to see some emerge in my lifetime (e.g., landline phone or snail mail) while others I used for my whole life without ever thinking about it (e.g., cloth diaper or acoustic guitar).
Lately I’ve been thinking about this article — Coffee Is No Longer The Most Important Part of Coffee by Anna Maria Arriaga (link) — and thinking there’s another retronym around the corner.
The article, as the title suggests, talks about how coffee culture is evolving from its third wave — single origin coffee, pour overs, nerds arguing about burr vs. blade grinders, and so on — is giving way to a fourth wave where the coffee is incidental to the coffee drink, giving way to foams, sweeteners, flavour syrups, etc.
“In short, coffee’s fourth wave is defined by everything other than the coffee itself. Maximalist add-ins, flavor combinations, and iced drinks naturally gain popularity when the coffee industry attempts to appeal to younger generations.”
Given this, I think some retronym will emerge to distinguish third-wave coffee. We already had “regular coffee” to distinguish it from decaf, but I’d argue decaf was and is more of the exception, so I’m not sure I’d count that. “Black coffee” was kind of a retronym I suppose, though I read it as more of a stated option.
We also had “drip coffee” which was meant to distinguish from espresso-based drinks, once those became dominant, so there’s that. But I suspect we’re going to end up with something more broadly representing third wave coffee-forward coffee drinks in all forms — that is, the usual lineup at any third wave coffee shop. (Roughly: drip, espresso, cappuccino, latte, maybe a cortado if they fancy.) What that’ll be, I’m not sure — “third wave” is way too clunky.
Maybe this has already happened and I’m just not inside-coffee enough to know. I just like guessing where retronyms are likely to emerge.
I never wanted to live in a house. I was happy living in a condo where I barely had to worry about anything. Sure, there was no backyard and limited floor space, but there was no shovelling, no dragging bins to the sidewalk, and most of all — no major repairs.
Our current house has, until now, not been too bad. But the longer we’re here, the more we realize that the previous owner seems to have done a bunch of work on the house himself, because a lot of stuff just…doesn’t work the way it’s supposed to.
A couple months ago, everything just seemed to go wrong at once:
Our kitchen sink began backing up. We called a plumber. He snaked it and fixed the cheater, which had been installed below the sink water level.
Unrelated to the kitchen sink, water started dripping through the basement ceiling. That seemed to be related to a shower hair clog, as best I can tell.
When I turned on the water supply to the backyard, I noticed a leak in the water line. I noticed it because it sprayed me in the face. The plumber fixed that too.
Also while “opening up” the backyard for the spring, I realized there was no gas getting to our grill. When I had the deck cleaned last year the cleaners must have unhooked the grill, and not hooked it back up properly, and now it’s jammed so hard into the side of the wall (another gift left behind by the previous owner) that I have yet to be able to re-attach it.
The basement toilet suddenly isn’t flushing properly. Or, rather, sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t.
I had a roofer in to repair the disintegrating roof over the vestibule of the house. He checked the main roof and said there was a big problem with the fascia, even though the last guys to go up there said the roof was fine.
Our old patio furniture, for which we overpaid when we moved in, has basically started disintegrating, so we had to buy new stuff. We ordered it months ago; it arrived at the house in the middle of all this, and now I need to figure out a way to truck away the old stuff. At least the new stuff is really nice, weather resistant, and easy to clean.
The neighbourhood raccoons have redoubled their efforts to turn our rainwater catch basin into their local latrine.
Worst of all, maybe, is the fridge. It started acting up months ago — first the water line and ice cube maker conked out, so I called a repair company. They showed up, said they just needed to order a part and it’d be fine. Four months later and many phone calls on my part, they’ve never called me back, nor shown up with the part, nor refunded my money. Slowly, the fridge died completely, and became a big hot power-sucking box in the kitchen. We ordered a new one, an updated version of the same model, and they showed up, only to inform us that there was no way to get the old fridge out of the house. As far as they can tell, the last guy brought the fridge in and built the kitchen around it. They kindly took the fridge back, charging me only a restocking fee, but we were left with no fridge and no path forward. This one is still very much ongoing; in the meantime we’re living out of a cheap dorm fridge. It’s fucking ridiculous.
Sure, the fridge thing could have happened in a condo too, but the rest of it is house bullshit. I’m not handy enough to fix it myself, and I have too much on the go to project-manage it all. Surely there’s a service for this?
I turned 50 last week. The day itself wasn’t very remarkable — I worked a full day, and we just ordered some dinner. No big blowout trip, and even the little long weekend getaway we planned didn’t start until the next day.
After another full workday we drove crawled to Elora, arriving at the Elora Mill just in time for our dinner reservation. We sat outside and ordered the Celebration menu, which was a four course tasting menu — or rather, two different versions, so we could share. I can’t remember all the details of each course, but here it is to the best of my memory:
Strawberry basil gazpacho amuse bouche
Tomato tart // duck terrine
Lobster in a tomato sauce // sourdough angel hair pasta
Seared scallops // venison
Black forest cake // pistachio cake
Wine pairings
Birthday cannoli
We went for an after-dinner walk, enjoying the temperate evening when such things have been in short supply.
I got back in time for some room service breakfast to arrive. We savored yet another kickass meal from downstairs, and enjoyed the view from our room.
We needed some exercise, so we walked up the hill to Victoria Park, took the stairs down to Irvine Creek, and took in the view of the gorge.
Once we ascended, it had warmed up quite a lot, and a drink was in order. We fancied a cocktail, so we went to The Lobby Bar. I had a pineapple vanilla sour; Lindsay had a hillstone crisp martini. Both were too sweet, and the vibe in there was weird, so we decamped for the Elora Brewing Company up the street. We took a patio table in the shade, and drank beers and ate pretzels and admired patio dogs.
We walked back to the hotel and just relaxed in that palatial room for a few hours. We’d liked dinner so much the night before we booked again for night #2. Our table wasn’t ready when we got there, so we killed time in the bar with glasses of Moet & Chandon Champagne. Once we had our table, we enjoyed yet another outstanding meal:
Grilled Lake Erie Pickerel for two w/ soused tomatoes, frites, watercress aïoli
a bottle of Cremant d’Alsace Blanc de Blancs
No late-night walk this time — it had been a long day, and we were spent.
Saturday
Alas, it was time to leave Elora Mill. Not before another room service breakfast though — their apple cinnamon scones are ridiculous. We cleaned up and packed up and left Elora for part two of the long weekend: Niagara-on-the-Lake.
We headed merrily down highway 6 before getting caught in the predictable misery of QEW traffic. We scrapped lunch plans and picked up our wine order at Five Rows (and there ran into an old Arterra colleague). We stopped for groceries in Virgil and late lunch at Silversmith, then drove to our AirBnB.
See that pool? We dropped our stuff and jumped straight into it.
It was a big beautiful house, so we relaxed, opened a bottle of 2019 Le Clos Jordanne Le Grand Clos Pinot Noir, made nachos, played some trivia, and crashed.
Sunday
Another sleep-in. Another dip in the pool. Coffee & breakfast nachos. A few errands: two nearby fruit stands, more groceries, and a stop at the Pie Plate.
Back at the house we opened a bottle of 2024 Five Rows Pinot Gris, played a round of Pandemic, snacked on fresh local fruit, had a wee nap, and then jumped back into the pool. Over the course of the day we drank a bottle of 2024 Five Rows Sauvignon Blanc while Lindsay made me a big dinner: caprese salad w/ local peaches, shrimp + chorizo fajitas, and peach pie & ice cream. We paired all that with a bottle of 2021 Leaning Post Clone 548 Chardonnay.
We somehow digested all that enough to go for a chilly night swim.
Monday
First order of business: get up, get packed, and get out of the AirBnB. But not before one last swim in the pool. We took the leftover pie & ice cream and ate it in the park across the road.
We’d been wanting some sparkling so we drove to Trius. Not a good experience. We paid $25 for three of their premium wines. The premium sparkling was flat — they acknowledged later it was the end of a bottle that had been opened the day before. The other two wines were meh. Given all that maybe we shouldn’t have bought any, but we didn’t want to leave empty-handed, and I know their top-end sparklings are good, so we held our noses.
We drove back to NotL for lunch at Treadwell, a ritual when we’re leaving town. We still don’t know what was going on in the city, but there was no parking anywhere. We ended up parking ten minutes away – illegally, mind you, but so was everyone else’s parking spot.
Lunch was, surprisingly, just okay: my scallops & pork belly were decent, but Lindsay’s mussels were underwhelming. Then we split a lobster club that did NOT feel worth the $49 price tag. It used to be cheaper and better, TBH.
We walked back to the car and braced ourselves for our commute home. Happily, it went about as perfectly as could be: no traffic jams (other than the Gardiner, where it’s always bad), no accidents…just smooth sailing. We were home in less than two hours, where we were greeted by a yelling cat.
Epilogue
I have heartburn from all the rich food & drink, and my muscles are sore from five swims in 40 hours, but other than that…50 feels pretty great.
I was hoping for a quiet couple of weeks following my return from Europe, but that it not what I got. There’s been stuff keeping me busy (in a good way, like a conference or lunch with a friend or visits from family) but also distracting me (a cold, everything in the house breaking at once).
Right after I got back I had a couple days’ work sprint and then went right into a conference — here in Toronto, so no travel, but it definitely consumed all of my intention for 2+ days. Always good to meet new people and re-gain some perspective (and have a nice dinner at Cafe Boulud), but the re-upping of the work to-do pile really made it feel as if I’d never even gotten back from vacation. I did wrap up the week over lunch with Matt at d|bar though, which was great.
Another consequence of that conference is that I developed a cold, my first in over a year as far as I can remember. It laid me low Monday through most of Wednesday. Fortunately it had mostly faded by the time brother #2 and sister-in-law #1 arrived. They were here for a visit, partially with us, partially with their daughter who lives just east of Toronto. On Friday they retrieved said daughter and we all had dinner at La Paella…
Medjool dates wrapped in bacon, stuffed with goat cheese, glazed with a guindilla sherry reduction
Croquetas
Tiger shrimps, garlic, guindillas, olive oil and sweet sherry wine
Artisan Sourdough Bread from Petit Thuet
a Paella which is not on their menu but which contained an extravagant amount of pork (ribs, pork belly, chorizo) along with red peppers, green beans, and butter beans
…followed by heaping bowls of ice cream procured from Craig’s Cookies, of all places.
Yesterday the three of them went to OssFest, then we played a game of Pandemic before they drove my niece home. We were all a bit tired, and the weather had turned to rain, so we just ordered some pizza and drank some wine and had a quiet final night together. This morning Bianca finally decided they were worth hanging out with, just as they were about to leave.
I could do without the cold or the work backlog, but I’ll take a nice family visit anytime. See you next year, guys!
I just had The Big Short on in the background, and something about the ISDA scene has always bugged me. I think I just figured out what.
Around the 1:00 mark, as they make their pitch to get an ISDA, Charlie explains that they’re “doing 30 million right now, but [they] started four years ago with a hundred and ten thousand.” The JP Morgan Chase peon explains that they’re $1.47 billion under the requirement for an ISDA, but to “keep up those returns and give us a call way down the road.” We, along with Jamie and Charlie, cringe with embarrassment.
Here’s the thing though: if they do keep up the same returns they’ve had in the past four years, they’re already more than halfway to that ISDA minimum.
The compound annual growth rate to have gotten from $110,000 to $30,000,000 in four years is 306.4%. That is, they’re quadrupling their money each year, and then some.
That means that a year from when that meeting takes place, Brownfield would have grown from $30 million to $122 million.
A year later it would have grown to $495 million.
If they kept going, they’d hit the $1.5 billion minimum for the ISDA just two years, nine months, and fifteen days from the time of that meeting.
I get that sustaining 306.4% returns for almost seven years is a stretch, but someone working on “Ted’s desk” at JPMC should be able to do enough quick math to determine that growth rate and not brush these guys off as being “way down the road”. Even a movie version of someone who probably never existed.
Skirl | Dan Dickinson 