Best nose forward
Decant essentially means to pour a liquid from one vessel to another. (Hence the noun “decanter.”) Wine has been decanted, in some form or fashion, throughout the ages. The Romans simply poured wine from a large amphora into a smaller carafe. Up to the 17th century, wine was drawn from a barrel to a stoneware […]
Chubby nation
When it comes to the question “Why are Canadians so fat?”, I know there is more than one reason for the increase in our muffin tops, dunlop bellies, thunder thighs, man boobs, back fat, back boobs, chin wiggles and upper arm jiggles. Quite possibly on the same day we became possessed and enamoured by the […]
Time
In these moments of early summer, of extended passages of daylight and solstice moon, I consider time and its meaning. One recent evening, in the face of ‘heavy weather’, I drove to the bottom of Cold Creek Road in the company of my son Luc Henri. We jumped out of the truck and chased through […]
Death’s store
So, as my punishment for consuming a hot dog, onion rings and an Orange Crush this past weekend, I was a captive audience to a group of people discussing the importance of buying the biggest, spankiest, most bad arse coffin available. The group was so loud it was impossible to hear my brain tell me […]
Centimental
Occasionally—unfortunately, that means right here and now—this column lapses into verse. More prosaic text will reappear next week. When Jimmy and Steven killed off the one cent I thought that a nuisance was stopped But after a while, I wiped off my smile As the penny eventually dropped They’d given no thought to the mess […]
Baseball All-Stars – 2012
Most Major League baseball teams have played half of their regular season games, give or take 81 games. As has been the case for many years, at this point in the season, there is a break called the All-Star Break. Most of the players look for a little respite for a few days. The chosen […]
What’s in a glass?
When last together we we leaving Venice in the 1300s in the company of rogue glassmakers, who risked life and fortune to spread their craft across Europe. They were successful: for the next two centuries, glassware production centers sprang up throughout Europe. Glass production, however, remained a labor-intensive process. In 1676 George Ravenscroft discovered that […]
The Canadian Football League -2012
The Canadian Football League kicked off last weekend in the season openers. This is the year that the league celebrates the 100th anniversary of the Grey Cup, culminating in the big game in Toronto in late November. There will not be frozen tundra, nor great billows of steam pouring off the players. There will be […]
A thing of beauty
It is a history of the egg preceding the chicken. The manufacture of glass began around 4,000 B.C., and we generally accept that winemaking began about a thousand years later. Prior to the invention of the drinking glass, the common drinking vessel was fired clay (pottery). The privileged “lahdee- dah” had to make do with […]
The legend from Deep Gap
If you ever came close to putting a sandal on a foot during the period between, say, 1960 and 1975, chances are you wanted to be a folksinger. And if you wanted to be a folksinger, you wanted to play guitar. And if you wanted to play guitar, you wanted to play like Doc Watson. […]