Rose's Cantina

I was listening to one of those political shows, Pee and Pee, or Pee Pee, and the talk turned to this month's story about Justin and Sophie, in Vogue magazine. In case you haven't heard, our Prime Minister and his wife appear in smoldering poses in the latest issue, which has caused a shitstorm amongst members of the Pee Pee Gee -- better known as the Parliamentary Press Gallery. "What are you thoughts?" Canada's Jon Lovitz enquired to a veteran wag. "Well, " she sniffed. "It would have been more appropriate if he'd given his first interview to a news organization in Canada." Her colleague, a Francophone reporter, simply shrugged and sported a Cheshire grin. You knew secretly he was getting a boner under the desk at the sight of Sophie stroking Justin with her eyes. It was like a  Fifty Shades of Grey moment, but better. The French reporters get it: Justin doesn't kiss babies, he makes them. Unfortunately, a goodly num...

In today's Globe and Mail , the activist Naomi Wolf describes a business climate that is rife with discrimination based on how people look. She calls this lookism. In a nutshell, Wolf makes the argument that how a person looks affects his or her climb up the ladder -- or not. Why, she asks, must the media riff on Angela Merkel's wrinkly cleavage or Hillary Clinton's cankles? They don't take Newt Gingrich down for his pottiness or mock Ben Bernanke for his weird facial hair. I don't agree. I think lots of people laugh at Gingrich, if only for having such a stupid name. I do agree that there is a double standard. But it's not the double standard that Wolf is talking about. The double standard has to do with smart ugly men, or smugglies. An ugly teenaged boy with a pizza face and no pecular activity whatsoever might get teased. But if he's smart in a book learnin' sense, he will go to university, take advantage of that nerdiness and excel. While gu...

In the end, I should have listened to my mother. And I shouldn't have trusted him, that's for sure. But the person I married, the person my friend Katie now refers to as "the bad man" became my everything, and then I became my nothing. Choosing love over career was a bad decision on my part. Having his children was an even worse one. "But look," said the bad man. "At least you have these beautiful children!" "Yeah," I said. "But I could have had these children with someone who didn't leave me." I was thinking about this conversation reading the New York Times this morning, a feature about women like me who "opted out," then, when their marriages fell apart, wanted to opt back in. I am one of those women, albeit a little older than the ones featured in the article. When I met the bad man, I was having a relatively successful career in Ottawa. Back in the 80s, before mandatory enforced bilingualism, I could ...

When I was a little kid, I grew up on a fruit farm in St. Catharines where I ate my snacks off various trees or plucked them from the ground. Each summer, there were baskets of second grade peaches, cherries and strawberries that my grandfather couldn’t take to the station, the same fruits that I now have to pay six bucks for at the grocery store. In the winter, we ate jarred fruit put up by my granny over the summer. If we wanted another kind of snack, grandpa would climb down the rickety wooden stairs and toss a basket of popcorn – kernels he grew himself – into the furnace and let it fluff up. I rarely got a store bought snack, unless it was a holiday. My mum bought pop, but we were allowed only one can a week, not because she wanted to limit our sugar but because she was poor and couldn’t afford to buy us more than that. It was only when I went to my Auntie Aylwyn’s – every Friday night – that I was able to take advantage of the snacks that modern technology had cr...

For as long as I can remember, I spent Sunday mornings drinking coffee surrounded by newspapers. When I couldn't afford the Sunday New York Times , I would save the Globe and Mail , and savor it. And there was always the Sunday Citizen or the Sunday Sun as a back-up plan. Ever since I was a wee girl learning to read by devouring the  St. Catharines Standard , I loved the smell of newsprint, the way you had to clean yourself up after reading it. And I adored The Star Weekly with its long articles written by real Canadian writers with odd names like Silver Don Cameron. These are bleak days for people like me. The Sunday Citizen is gone and the cost of the Sunday New York Times is prohibitive. I gave up my Citizen subscription when I got a Kindle for Christmas. Kindling was cheaper but it was never the same. You couldn't save the crossword because there was no crossword. You couldn't even pour over the obits to see if you were still alive. The Kindle edit...

Scott and I finally got paid this week so we celebrated Christmas yesterday doling out presents to the family and engaging in a long lunch at Kelsey's where Stefan, my favorite server works. Jay, the bartender, sent me an extra glass of Wolf Blass which, I believe, was one too many. When I got home, I ended up drunk ordering on Amazon.com and mistakenly put two copies of Stephen King's newest book on my credit card instead of one. I can barely order anything online when I'm sober -- I accidentally ordered Weight Watchers online twice -- because I'm too impatient in waiting for the processing. I always think they missed my order the first time. I got on the phone with a nice lady from Amazon who expertly fixed the problem. Truth be told, she did her job too well and deleted both books. So now I have no books and my 22 dollars times two is in limbo on the pay-as-you-go credit card I use for on-line purchases. Today, I will be attempting another transaction with ...

The New York Times today published the following piece. Maybe it's time to revisit whether Gloria Steinem made a difference in the lives of women. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/fashion/in-the-womans-movement-who-will-replace-gloria-steinem.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&seid=auto&smid=tw-nytimes&adxnnlx=1332075717-E8rJuM8N9GqSDw/dicIPEg The very last story I wrote for the Ottawa Journal , before jumping ship to become an entertainment writer for the Ottawa Citizen , was about the first female to become an Ottawa police constable. My assignment was to ride along for an afternoon with this young woman and her burly male partner. The chief cop writer, Dave McKay, was thrilled that he’d been able to land this plum assignment for me; it was rare that ride alongs were permitted and so I was, quite obviously, one privileged little girl scout – and Dave was quick to remind me of that. I was ungrateful. I wanted to write about news, not sexual politics. Even at the te...