And that's saying a mouthful, because I am basically a non-drinker. Can't get through a glass of beer or wine. Never drink hard liquor.
But, ah, prosecco...
Prosecco is that sparkling champagne-like drink from Venice that begins almost every evening in Venice. It is inexpensive (Here in Vancouver, you might pay as much as $16 for a bottle.), doesn't leave you with a champagne headache and magically makes everything seem alright.
I know I sound like a true junkie. But understand that I may drink this elixir once every three months and I certainly don't drink enough to become even mildly intoxicated.
Now, prosecco is in an authenticity battle.
People all over the world are making variations of it and marketing it in the strangest ways.
Check out the NY Times story this morning, and then buy a bottle FROM VENICE ONLY and enjoy with friends and loved ones over dinner.
The one good thing about this weather is the quiet.
Trudge through the sludge and snow to your nearest shopping district, as I have every day this week, and you hear........ well, almost nothing.
It's quite wonderful.
Very few cars or buses, just the usual crazy with no lights and a big American car with rear-wheel drive and summer tires. Don't you love it?
Everything else about this weather is tiresome and downright scary.
Will my pipes freeze? Will the roof or skylights collapse? Will I be killed or knocked out by falling snow, ice or tree limbs? Two very large branches of the pine tree in my front yard are already down.
Will the floods be inevitable?
Will the power be knocked out, thus making my home a dark icicle?
So far, so good.... so far...
As for the people who are rushing up to Grouse Mountain, well, I can't even get my car out from the snow-plowed little home its adopted two blocks away.
And the thousands stranded at Metrotown, who asked you to go shopping? Who asked you to leave home?
Yesterday, I saw two guts with shovels working diligently on clearing their car from its igloo and I thought, "Where are you going?"
Huddling, cuddling, cacooning...
Having said that, today, after a hearty breakfast, I will actually attempt to rescue my car and return the three movies I rented from the store that is about five kilometres from here.
As for the new Batman movie that I rented last night from the local video shop, I am returning it half watched. Puleeeze...Quel Dreque!
By the way and apropos of absolutely nothing, I caught a few moments of the late night news on two local television channels.
Both carried stories about all the lovely people who lined up at midnight on a cold, snowy Christmas night and waited until the stores opened to buy handbags or whatever at Boxing Day sale prices.
Are there folks anywhere on earth dumber, more pitiable than these?
Outside of Fendi or D&G, do these sorry excuses have a life?
Further to the post below on Walt Patterson's essay on "Managing Energy Wrong," read this exciting piece in today's NY Times about managing energy right!
How would you like - especially on a day like today - to live in a house with no heating system?
My good friend of some 47 years now, Walt Patterson, is a renowned scientist, who writes and lectures world-wide on Energy and its managment.
I direct you to his website to learn a little more about him, but in particular to draw you to read his latest piece (among many, many books and countless articles and papers over the years), called, "Managing Energy Wrong."
In this essay, Walt has nailed perfectly, and in detail, the way governments and investors, looking always for the Big Solution, the Silver Bullet, create Top Down policies that don't work, when they should be looking to the field for Bottom Up answers that are more complex and that take more effort, but do work.
You need spend only a few days almost anywhere in Europe to sense how deeply the media there have demonized Israel. Here is Victor's response to the latest hate literature that passes for journalism.
Victor is not a Jew.
The Israeli raids on Gaza top the newscasts. I have listened to two reports this morning which inevitably add that some of the dead "include children." Like we couldn't assume that.
In the last war with Hamas in Lebanon, Israel made a foolish mistake and appears to have learned from it. The mistake was assuming that careful, so-called surgical strikes would win media support on the basis that civilian targets were sparred. Instead, Reuters performed their time worn tactic of paying kids to pose as rock throwers and then sent these cliched photos to a Pavlovian world media. Agence France Presse photographed the same wailing Lebanese woman at three separate sites. Hamas declared a pr victory. Enraptured Lebanese awarded heroic Hamas with parliamentary seats.
This time, Israel has dumped the failed surgical strike strategy and bombed Hamas mercilessly in their own back yard. It is doubtful that Hamas rocketeers are looking heroic to citizens who have seen a living hell brought to their neighbourhoods thanks to the the deadly games of militants. Yes, the world community (read feckless Europeans) will condemn Israel but they would have done the same thing had Israel dropped food baskets and accidently killed a donkey.
I also think this is a message to Obama. People have assumed that because he has hired a pro-Israeli psychopath, Rahm Emanuel, as his Chief of Staff, that this signals a pro Israeli bias in Obama's administration. That would require classic ignorance of the American media (Israel' s arch enemy and Obama's fan club) not to mention the deep anti-Jewish currents among segments of Obama's followers. ( Jesse Jackson's son was Obama's co-campaign manager and as we all know, Jesse is the black equivalent of Michael Richards when it comes to anti-Jewish rants.)
None of which is to celebrate violence. Violence is a vile certainty of the human condition. It is, I fear, a permanent reality in the middle east. It will not disappear with lofty Presidential speeches, UN calls for restraint or yet another photo op cease fire. It is an endless blood war between two deeply disparate cultures.
If you thought Prime Minister Stephen Harper's attempt to remove government financing for political parties was ugly and entirely partisan, then what do you make of Premier Gordon Campbell's new law restricting political advertising?
This is transparently aimed at unions, who actually have war chests available and at the ready for the May 12th election.
The problem is that TV campaigns have to be planned months in advance and nobody knows this better than Campbell.
I am no fan of the BCTF, but I must give them full credit for challenging this law in court and for getting to the press to keep this issue before the public.
The BC Supreme Court is taking its royal time on this attempt by the unions to have the law declared unconstitutional and its very delay aids and abets what should be seen as a Campbell law bordering itself on criminality.
The law is an offense to common sense and democratic process.
I don't care how many photo ops the premier takes of himself hugging bantam hockey players, he's a thug.
A man dressed as Santa Claus knocks on the door of a house in Covina, California on Christmas Eve. When a young girl answers the door, the man shoots her in the face. He walks into a large family gathering and begins shooting indiscriminately. He then sets fire to the house and leaves.
By the time he is finished, he has killed eight people.
Finally, he drives to another location and kills himself.
Now...
The young CNN reporter, putting on as grave a mask as he can muster, desperately trying to hide his overwhelming excitement that he is at last on network television and that it took nine deaths to get him there, intones deeply, "But the real question, Robin, is 'Why?'"
No it isn't.
Why is that the real question?
Let's suppose we learn the why? What will we know? What can we do about it?
The man lost his job. He had a sore tummy. His girl friend wouldn't fellate him. Wal-Mart wouldn't cash his pay check.
We could do something about this?
Psychiatrists would help him in weekly anger management courses?
The Why is completely irrelevant and serves only to help the writers for the back story they will need when they make the soon-to-be-released TV Mini-Drama, "Santa Rampage."
No.
There is only one useful question here and it is the one that will not be addressed.
NASHVILLE — Although the number of uninsured and the cost of coverage have ballooned under his watch, President Bush leaves office with a health care legacy in bricks and mortar: he has doubled federal financing for community health centers, enabling the creation or expansion of 1,297 clinics in medically underserved areas.
That's the first paragraph from a NY Times story this morning.
Now, read the rest to see the challenges facing the Obama watch and millions of Americans.
Then, get down in the snow and thank the Great Flake for our flawed but wonderful health care program here in Canerda.
There are several conceits at the center of Mike Nichol’s movie, “Charlie Wilson’s War,” that border on the obscene.
The first is that one America man sees human suffering and thus infuses the hardships of others with meaning. Without his personal “moment,” the cruelties of the world are mute and moot.
Specifically, Texas Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) visits Afghanistan, which is being pummeled by Soviet airships. Then he visits the refugee camps, talks to the limbless children and witnesses first hand the horrors of real life away from the flesh pits of Washington and Houston.
But it is not the wounded and impoverished Afghanis for whom we are asked to shed a tear.
Here is the first conceit. It is the now ennobled Yankee we are encouraged to champion. We can tell that this is our mission because the orchestra swells in rising crescendos of hope and glory, and the congressman covers his eyes in empathetic pain. This is an obscenity.
The second is that music score.
The next time the trumpets blare and the holy choirs rise on high, honorable Afghani peasants, armed now with covertly supplied Israeli anti-helicopter and anti-tank weapons, slaughter Soviet soldiers with the same relentless efficiency that the Soviets had previously mowed down the women and children of Afghanistan. Were we supposed to cheer?
The last time the music score offends is in the crowning moments of the film, when the good Congressman is being given a medal. His co-plotters, a wealthy Texas woman (Julia Roberts) and a CIA/FBI operative (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), look on in teary co-conspirator admiration.
The music here and the moment are pure “Mr. Holland’s Opus.” I fully expected Hanks to melt into Richard Dreyfus, much like John Travolta and Nicholas Cage kept doing in “Face Off,” until you couldn’t tell – or care – who was blowing up whom.
And care is important here.
In spite of terrific work from three terrific actors and Hollywood mega-stars, and direction from the legendary Nichols (“The Graduate,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolff?” and “Catch-22”), there is nothing one can possibly care about in this flick.
The script and dialogue (Aaron Sorkin) is very fast and clever and witty and fast and clever and witty.
It goes by faster than your first sex experience and with almost as much resonance.
Now, if you want an experience even more execrable than watching the movie, try sitting through the "special features" on the DVD and listening to the actors discussing how great they all are and how important this trifle really is meant to be.
She has now been described as " one of the nicest persons I’ve met.”
She has also been suspected of being drunk while driving her Ford Escape too fast and dangerously near Nanaimo on Monday, resulting in the deaths of two of her boys.
The police would like to look at the blood sample the hospital now has.
This is to say that what follows does not let this individual off the hook. Speeding and trying to pass in these nightmare snow-out conditions is simply crazy.
BUT...
The particular stretch of highway where this tragedy unfolded - Cassidy, near Nanaimo, has had 50 collisions since 2003. One man who works at the Cassidy Inn pub says he terrified every night when he leaves the parking lot. In spite of calls from local residents to add some safety measures, like cement median dividers and traffic lights, the Highways Ministry and has not responded and ICBC - home of the Hushed UP Chop Scandal -has not yet flagged this a as "high crash area."
Let's see...50 crashes since '03 and ICBC can't designate this a "high crash area?"
Of course they can't.
Because that would mean money and action on the part of the provincial government.
And for any of you who have ever driven anywhere near Nanaimo or have a Google map handy, you will note that this particular neck of the woods ISN'T PART OF THE SEA-TO-SKY OLYMPIC SPEED ROUTE.
Now, this is exactly an example of the editorial I posted on Saturday, "The Role of Government in Our Lives."
Mr. Campbell will spend millions upon millions for that famous road to Whistler Village, but God forbid he should spend a few thousand on fixing a dangerous stretch of highway less than two hours dangerous drive from the legislature.
Political realities are clear and they are not attractive.
Pope Benedict in his end-of-the-year speech at the Vatican on Monday, said that homosexuality is as much a threat to the human race as climate change.
Hahahahaha...
Ignorance on Holy High.
Let's leave aside why the Pontiff would bother to speak so negatively about anything in an annual Christmas message.
Has some one not informed the dear man that men and women shtup?
Biology or God's Great Plan - take your pick - dictate that men and women are going to couple at fairly regular intervals and - miracle of miracles - nine months later .... WALDO!
The inevitable fact that some men will play with some men and some women will play with some women will never alter the statistically overwhelming assurance that the human race will continue to procreate.
No matter what your opinion or my opinion on the rights or wrongs of these realities, shtupping will continue apace.
May His Holiness find rest in these troubled times.
