Rose's Cantina

If you live in Ontario, by now, you will have seen a commercial warning parents to lock up their kids because the government is loosening the monopoly held by The Beer Store on the sale of ales and lagers. Should this go forward, the commercial warns, kids will surely turn into angry mobs, all liquored up. In a dramatization, the commercial shows a shifty-eyed fat fucktard behind the counter chortling as youngsters, obviously too young to purchase hooch, slam down a two-fer and a big bottle of liquor, in anticipation of a night of mayhem, hurling and date rape. The clerk sells to the kids anyway. No I.D. is checked. It's a scene straight out of Superbad. I live next to a convenience store and near a park. I should be afraid for my life and my windows as these hooligans, according to the commercial, will roam the neighborhood, like slobbering zombies, drunk out of their blasted mines. We don't see that now, right? Nope, mostly all we see, to be fair to The ...

There is another use for the SodaStream that Marissa bought me this Christmas. It will reduce, substantially, the overflowing recycle box, that one that fills to the brim with soda water cans each week. The SodaStream should reduce our carbon footprint. With fewer cans, there will also be fewer cardboard boxes to throw out. But the real reason I'm happy is that we may finally manage to thwart Sophie Scissorhands whose primary occupation is shredding paper. She could be the inspiration for the saying "the dog ate my homework". Leave out a box, an LCBO bag or have a thesis lying around and you will find bits of it in the bathroom, under the blanket or simply where it used to be. Leave the Vanity Fair in the can and you will find the head of Amy Adams dismembered in another location. And don't even get me started on toilet paper, her favorite of all. By the time I find a toilet roll, it is more or less cement, made so by Sophie's over-active pug saliva ...

When I was a little kid, my mom and uncles decided to make home made beer in the basement of our farmhouse. They bought a kit and a bunch of bottles and spent an afternoon getting "lit" constructing a DIY still. It was all good fun for the rellies, fun that is until a few weeks later. We were sitting around the kitchen table and heard funny sounds coming from below. Pffft. Pffft. The bottles were exploding. For weeks, our farmhouse smelled like sour mash, an odor I can still remember today. It was almost as bad as the time Gramps decided to make sourkraut under the floor boards. As for the product, let's say it tasted like what I imagine beer would taste like when combined with horse pee. Needless to say, it took years for me to warm to the idea of home brew. I always found home made wine to taste, well, homemade. It was too fruity or nasty, particularly the red wine. Sometimes we drank it as kids to get wasted. We might as well have taken up sniffing glue. ...

It may be ironic only to me, but a gigantic liquor barn opened beside my gym at Trainyards yesterday. Right beside Farm Boy, the healthy eating joint. I parked beside Farm Boy, went to the gym and when I returned to my car, the parking lot was bumper to bumper with folks waiting to get their drink on, mostly old folks, all in cars. It was 9:30 a.m. Being the curious sort, I piled my kale and cucumbers into my beat up Subaru then ventured inside. I wasn't going to buy anything; I just wanted to see what the fuss was all about. People were milling around with the same look I've seen at the casino, eyeballing the 65 varieties of beer in the humungous beer fridge, ogling the 45 varieties of tequila and filling their carts with wine. There were lineups at the cash. At 9:30 a.m. In the middle of it all, I found Andre, the kindly LCBO clerk from my local, who had wangled himself a job at this mecca of libations. He seemed absolutely pixelated. "Any freebies?...

It's the holiday season! Just in time for the Ontario Auditor-General to throw the "Board" of the LCBO under the bus. Ooh, look at the treadmarks! The A-G says the liquor board isn't even trying to keep costs down by trying to squeeze its suppliers to reduce their prices. Instead, the Board is actually telling some suppliers they need to charge more. Why? Because it is, apparently, some sort of code. "It's a tradition," says the Board."(Fighting for better prices) is not the way we do things here at the LCBO." You just have to look at the price of medium-priced wine and spirits. Eighteen bucks for a nice bottle of vino. Thirty bucks for a mid-priced bottle of Scotch. Aren't we being punished enough by paying exhorbitant taxes? Why does the LCBO pay premium prices to suppliers when it can use its monopoly to cut us a break? According to the A-G, it's part of the LCBO's strategy to get us to drink less. So they...